Your Japanese word of the day: "teriyaki".
てりやき
If you've ever been to a Japanese restaurant in the US, then you've at least seen (if not tasted) teriyaki chicken. The word "teriyaki" refers to the sauce and the method of preparation. The kanji literally mean "shiny" and "grilled/broiled." It's "shiny" because the sauce causes the meat or fish to glisten appetizingly.
How do you make teriyaki sauce from scratch? I asked my resident expert (my wife, Hiromi). She said that a common and simple teriyaki sauce consists of equal parts sugar, soy sauce, mirin (a sweet rice wine used for cooking) and water. However, she prefers to switch honey for sugar, avoiding refined sugar.
I personally like teriyaki chicken (and other things teriyaki). But I have to say that Americans who don't know anything about Japanese food other than sushi and teriyaki chicken are really missing out on some great dishes...
Speaking of delicious food, here's a picture of dinner from a couple nights ago. From the top-right and moving clockwise: brown rice (in Japanese, "genmai"), miso soup ("miso shiru"), teriyaki chicken burgers with lots of veggies mixed in, collard greens, and a refreshing steamed turnip and tuna salad. Yum!!
Japanese Grammar Lesson 3: Eating!
To compliment today's word of the day (and the photo), let's work on a few sentences using the verb "to eat"! Before we do that, though, here's a quick review of the previous lesson.
Changing a statement to a question in Japanese is easy! Just take the statement and add the word "ka" to the end. Thus, the answers to last time's homework questions are:
1. "Am I American?" --> "Watashi wa amerikajin desu ka?"
2. "Wan-chan, are you Japanese?" --> "Wan-chan wa nihonjin desu ka?"
Pretty easy, right? But wait... where is the word "anata" (you) in the second sentence? It turns out that in Japanese, although there are several words for the word "you," all with different levels of politeness, the word "you" is not often used. This is true for a couple reasons. First, subjects are often not used at all in sentences. You know the "understood you" in the English language (e.g., "Don't do that!")? It's like that but for all subjects. Therefore, an alternate answer to Question 2 above would be: "Nihonjin desu ka?" Generally, if you are looking at/talking to the person to whom you are posing the question, they'll have no trouble understanding you. In fact, oftentimes objects are also dropped from sentences, leaving the sentence with a lone verb (or adjective). For that reason, Japanese is known as a "high-context" language. More on this later.
A second reason why the word "anata" would not normally be used in sentence #2 is because the word "anata" is generally used either (1) when a woman is speaking to her husband or (2) when speaking very formally; in other words, it can imply a close relationship or a distant one. Therefore, referring to someone you just met as "anata" may come across as rude (if one Japanese person is speaking to another)... But don't worry too much about sounding rude. If all the Japanese you know is what you learned from my blog (and maybe some names of fishes from sushi shops--e.g., maguro, suzuki, or hamachi (my favorite)), then any Japanese person who encounters you making the effort to learn more about the Japanese language and culture would be genuinely happy, and maybe a little amused at your mistakes.
So back to today's lesson of the day: eating. "Eat" is "taberu" -- but we'll have to conjugate it to get it to work in a sentence (right now, it's in "dictionary form" -- kind of like the infinitive form in English). "I am eating teriyaki chicken." translates to "Watashi wa teriyaki chikin wo tabeteimasu." The word "wo" (pronounced 'o') is another particle; this one tells us that "teriyaki chikin" is an object. "Tabeteimasu" is the present continuous (also known as the present progressive) form of "taberu." The opposite of "is eating" in English is "is not eating." In Japanese, we would change "tabeteimasu" to "tabeteimasen". In other words, if you want to say "Wan-chan is not eating dog." You would say: "Wan-chan wa inu wo tabeteimasen."
Your homework:
1. Tell a stranger that you are (or are not) eating cat.
2. Ask someone if they are eating teriyaki chicken.
Good luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment