In Japanese culture what is not said is often just as important, if not more important than what is said. Aptly enough it’s language helps facilitate this with grammar points like today’s point, “such as”.

Consider the following:

Today I met with an old friend and we went out for a beer, played cards, and he lost his car in a bet.

There are many cases in which you might want to tell somebody what you did for the day, but not say everything. Your friend’s significant other might be so happy to hear that he lost his car. Especially from you. So perhaps it’s best you don’t say it. If asked directly about what you did that day, you are put in-between a rock and hard-spot. Or at least you were until you learned about our new best friend 「たり」
Let’s see if we can use 「たり」to make things a little bit less…exact. Still factual, but less exact.

今日は昔の友達と会って、ビールを飲みに行ったり、トランプをしたりしました。
きょう は　むかし　の　ともだち　と　あって、ビール　を　のみにいったり、トランプしたりしました。
Today I met an old friend and we did things such as going for a beer, and playing cards.

See how much more innocent that sounds? Nothing about losing a car in a 1000:1 or anything and still factually ok.

「たり」is a conjugation of the 「て」form verb. As you probably know, you can use a series of 「て」 form verbs to express a sequence or series of events. I used it above with the verb 会う. I met my old friend and , or other way to thing about it I met my old friend then we went out for drinks.

To get to the 「たり」form simply replace the 「て」with 「たり」 and you have a valid verb. Let’s look at a few examples:

食べる　＝＞　食べて　＝＞　食べたり “such as eating…”
テニスをする ＝＞　テニスをして　＝＞　テニスをしたり “such as playing tennis…”

You get the idea. Very straight forward. What’s more, we could even modify our original sentence and remove any sequential ordering of events.

今日は昔の友達と会ったり、ビールを飲みに行ったり、トランプをしたりしました。
Today I did things such as meeting an old friend, going to drink a beer, and playing cards.

「たり」does take a little bit of practice to get the hang of, but once you can begin saying things less directly which is good step towards more natural sounding Japanese.

Thank you to everyone who purchased Jisho and Jisho Touch for Indie Relief.

I was expecting to raise about $100 dollars but we managed to raise $170 dollars! This has already been donated to Drs. Without Boarders.

Again, many thanks for everyone who participated.

On January 20th, Sugoisoft will be participating in Indie Relief.

What is Indie Relief? Indie Relief is basically a bunch (over 101 as of this writing) indie Mac and iPhone developers banding together to help raise some money Haiti.

All money raised by the purchase software from Sugoisoft Soft will be donated to Doctors Without Boarders. It’s a win, win situation – you get great software and a chance to give to charity.

If you can’t wait and NEED Jisho today but want your purchase to count towards Indie relief, just send me an email at support@sugoisoft.com and I’ll donate the sale.

All upgrades will count as well. So if you’ve been thinking about upgrading to Jisho 4 but haven’t quite yet, now’s the perfect time.

During the summer I co-founded DisposableApps, as a home for iPhone projects that I collaborate on with a friend.

Last week our first colaboration, Pubtunes, finally got accepted to the AppStore.

Pubtunes is a musical guessing game based on the popular Power hour drinking game and is complete with an English-pub style interface to help get you in the mood. It fully integrates with the music on your iPhone or iPod Touch so you can play with your entire music collection or select a custom playlist.

Give it a whirl, let us know what you think.

When I started learning Japanese some of the best advice given to me was to forget textbook Japanese and learn what is actually spoken. I really took that advice to heart. Having only limited access to Japanese natives me at that point, I did the next best thing, watched loads of Japanese dramas.

There was this word that kept on appearing that I didn’t quite get.
じゃん jyan. What is it? What does it mean? じゃん is a contraction for じゃない jyanai. じゃない is often used at the end of a sentence looking for confirmation of something or agreement. kind of like ね ne, but not really.

Like most languages, native speakers of Japanese tend to abbreviate when speaking so they can speak faster. Personal Computer is パーソナルコンピュータ in Japanese and I don’t think I’ve heard it said once. The word I hear and see everywhere is パソコン . Similarly, じゃん is simply the first syllable n　from the first な in じゃない preceded by じゃ.

Let’s try it out.

ビールが好きだけど、飲んでちょっとお酒くさいじゃない？だからあまり飲まない。
ビール　が　すき　だけど　のんで　ちょっと　おさけ　くさい　じゃない？　だから　あまり　のまない。
biiru suki dakedo, nonnde chotto osake kusai jyanai? dakara amari nomanai

I like beer but, when you drink it you smell a little bit like alchool, right? So I don’t drink beer so much.

It’s a straight forward sentence. Let’s use our new found abbreviation knowledge and make it sound a bit more native.

ビールが好きだけど、飲んでちょっとお酒くさいじゃん？だからあまり飲まない。

A Note on Accent
While both じゃない and じゃん mean the same thing their native accent is opposite. When saying じゃない and you are looking for agreement of something you would end with a raised intonation of ない i.e. —↑. Similar to when you ask a question in English.

じゃん on the other hand, as an abbreviation of じゃない follows the same accent when saying じゃない but since it is cut short, so is the accent. That is to say the accent of じゃん　should be completely flat in most case.

You’ll notice when trying to say the example sentence with じゃん、keeping the flat accentin じゃん should make it a bit easier to say. Practice saying it a few times until it comes out smoothly.

With that, you are now one step closer to sounding like a native.