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In this week’s lesson, we’re going to examine eight Japanese-English false friends. False friends in Japanese are a bit different than false friends in other languages. False friends between English and other European languages are usually a result of a shared origin. An archaic word in an earlier language was adopted by more than one…

This week’s quiz contains twenty-six words that all beginning Japanese language learners should know. Match each Japanese word on the left with its English equivalent on the right. We’ve included romanizations for each of the Japanese words in case you need them. However, we recommend looking at the romanizations only if you’re stumped by the…

Test your Chinese vocabulary with this matching exercise containing twenty-six core Chinese words. Match each Chinese word on the left with its English equivalent on the right. We’ve included Pinyin romanizations for each of the Chinese words in case you need them. However, we recommend looking at the Pinyin only if you’re stumped by the…

In the previous lesson, we learned how to conjugate the present subjective tense of regular verbs. While the present subjunctive of most verbs is formed by dropping the –o from the yo (first person singular) of the present indicative form of a verb and adding the appropriate ending, there are exceptions. This week we’ll look…

The Spanish subjunctive mood is used to express doubt in whether an action will indeed take place. It can also express how a person feels about an action, a wish, intent, or command for a possible state of being, and facts contrary to reality.   Conjugating the Present Subjunctive of Regular Verbs To conjugate the…

In English, comparisons can take two forms: synthetic (smarter, lesser, etc.) and compound (more talented, less interesting, etc.). Spanish, however, has three comparative forms: superior, inferior, and equal.   Superiority To indicate that one adjective, adverb, or noun is superior to another in some way, use the following construction:   Más + adjective/adverb/noun + que…

The trapassato prossimo is the Italian equivalent of the English past perfect tense. Much like in English, the Italian past perfect is used to express an action that had been completed before a second action was also completed. The trapassato prossimo is a compound tense made by combining the imperfetto (imperfect) of either avere (to…

In Spanish, the comparative is used to express the relative value of two things. The superlative, however, makes no direct comparison. Instead, one thing is said to show some extreme, either good or bad, within its particular group. In English, we use expressions such as “the most important person,” “the least expensive car,” “the best…

The trapassato prossimo is the Italian equivalent of the English past perfect tense. Much like in English, the Italian past perfect is used to express an action that had been completed before a second action was also completed. The trapassato prossimo is a compound tense made by combining the imperfetto (imperfect) of either avere (to…

The Italian imperfetto (imperfect) tense can express actions that lasted an indefinite amount of time in the past, habitual actions in the past, or expressions of age, time, and weather in the past. Because of its wide range of uses, the imperfetto appears much more frequently in Italian than the imperfect does in English.  …