Avoid these 6 common Japanese mistakes!! 🙈

March 30, 2024

Throughout my years of learning & helping others learn Japanese, I've had many opportunities to speak with my fellow learners in Japanese, which is so much fun ^^

While doing so, I've seen a lot of the same "mistakes"* popping up in sentences made by learners (including my own).

We designed NativShark to be a comprehensive system that allows learners to avoid making these very mistakes simply by going through it and experiencing context-appropriate language, but it is nice to bring these types of things into focus every now and then.

So let's do that now

Pick one of these to work on during your next conversation! Then let us know how it went in the NativShark Community ^^

*I put mistakes in quotes there because they're not wrong, per se… but people don't speak that way in real, everyday conversations. (I'll be using "mistakes" this way throughout the newsletter.)

⚠️ か in casual questions

While this is common in media, using a か at the end of a direct casual question has a high risk of being rude.

The only time you are likely to hear this in real life is with certain people who have given up on being polite / rough-sounding guy friends

Most of the time, this is better off avoided ^^

Let's say that you're texting your friend and want to ask them how they feel about festivals in Japan.

You might write:

A text to a friend.

Textbook Casual

あなたはお祭まつりが好すきか。

Do you like festivals?

But wait! There are 4 different common mistakes in the above sentence.

Let's take it one at a time.

The first one is simple thankfully, just don't use か in casual questions ^^ So…

Textbook Casual

あなたはお祭まつりが好すき。

Here's a lesson with more info:

Still, I wouldn't say this to anyone quite yet!

For one thing, it doesn't look like a question anymore ^^;

⚠️ Questions ending in "。"

The majority of learning resources will teach you to end formal questions with a "。" at the end instead of a question mark.

While this can be appropriate for highly, highly formal situations such as academic writing or business emails, you'll be hard-pressed to find a native speaker who uses か like this outside of those types of situations.

People just use question marks for their questions in everyday life.

So as a rule of thumb (99.99% of the time), follow their lead and use a question mark yourself as well

Textbook Casual

あなたはお祭まつりが好すき？

Alright. It's looking better. But I wouldn't say this to anyone yet.

The lesson in the previous section works for this as well as getting exposure to natural sentences while avoiding exposure to unnatural sentences. NativShark teaches language both comprehensively & in context so you shouldn't have to worry about this one. Just show up and press Study Now:

If you don't have an account yet, you can make yours for free here:

⚠️ Too many particles!

We drop は, が, and を all the time when speaking/writing everyday Japanese. This includes writing it as well in situations like texting friends, family, and even people we're just starting to get to know ^^

Textbook Casual

あなたお祭まつり好すき？

Alright, we're almost there. Still needs a bit of work though.

⚠️ Overuse of あなた、君きみ

If you know the speaker's name, which would be true in the case of talking to a friend, you shouldn't say あなた (you) or 君 (you) to them.

Using a Japanese "you" pronoun to someone you know is really rude. It's also rude to do to strangers as well. It's basically always rude. I recommend avoiding these words ^^;

Context fills in who we're talking about, so using "you" is redundant. If we want to specify, we would just say their name instead. If we don't know their name, just ask them! Or find a way to ask them without saying their name or a pronoun, which is usually best ^^

So after all that, we end up with:

Casual

お祭まつり好すき？

And now it sounds like something a native speaker would say in the above situation

⚠️ Overuse of 私わたし, 僕ぼく , and 俺おれ

Let's pretend someone asked you "お祭まつり好すき？".

If you're like me, your answer is a huge yes. So maybe you write:

Textbook Casual

私わたしはお祭まつりが大好だいすきだ！

I love festivals!

But this has a lot of the issues we discussed above! Notably, there are too many particles in this sentence.

After some adjustments, we end up with:

Casual

私わたしお祭まつり大好だいすき！

Note how the だ has also been dropped. While the official term for this is a "copula", we can drop it similar to how we drop particles like を, は, and が.

Us learners tend to overuse all of these, so try experimenting with using them less in your own Japanese! It might feel a bit weird at first, but it's probably more natural ^^

In some contexts, this could be a fine sentence to use. That said, I might recommend making one last adjustment 👀

Drop the 私わたし.

While we could keep it & probably be fine, it's generally good to avoid using pronouns for "I" when possible. And it's much more possible than we're used to, coming from English.

Since context has us covered in this case, let's go ahead and drop it:

Casual

お祭まつり大好だいすき！

Looking pretty good! Almost done.

⚠️ Too much info!

What I love about Japanese is how much you can rely on context.

Since your friend asked you if you like お祭り, you don't need to have it in your response. They already did the work for us there ^^

So we'd end up with…

Casual

大好だいすき！

And now it looks great!

and...

I remember struggling with so many of these points throughout my learning journey. I found it helpful to just pick one thing to focus on, and then do that until I felt like trying something else or it felt more natural.

For example, go into your next conversation trying to never use an "I" pronoun like 私わたし, 僕ぼく, or 俺おれ.

It might be tough at first, and there are indeed some instances where it is better to use it, but you might be surprised by how well a conversation can and does flow without it.

Good luck!

Weekly Japanese practice:

You just landed in Tokyo (Haneda) for your first trip to Japan. The first thing you want to do is drop off your luggage at your hotel in 原宿はらじゅく (Harajuku).

You managed to figure out the monorail line by yourself, but now you're at the terrifying reality known as 品川駅しながわえき (Shinagawa station). You have no idea where you need to go or what train to get on. You find a friendly-looking 駅員えきいんさん (station staff) and ask…

How to respond:

1. Make a Discord account
2. Join the NativShark community by clicking this link
3. Click here to see the channel and post your response!

We're active in there all week! And feel free to ask for help if you want to say something specific. Both myself and other learners will be in there offering advice and help~

Submit prompts you want to see here.

NativShark goodie bag

4 more new Units were added to Phase Three last week~

As always, these Units are filled with vocab with their own unique contexts that help you understand Japanese at a deeper level, any relevant new kanji, and natural conversations called Dialogues at the end.

They also have the following lessons:

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! Hope you found this one helpful~

Happy studies,
Ty & the NativShark team