WEBmikey: Difficult is easy

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Difficult is easy
1.14.2006 11:40 PM \| Link	I think it would be cool to present a different Japanese language concept here each week, because there's always of plenty of things I haven't heard before whenever I meet with Kazki. Explaining them here would be a good tool to help me remember them, but we'll see how diligent I am about typing things up. Anyway, last week we went over a really useful way to say something is "difficult to do" or "easy to do". By coincidence, I also watched this same topic presented in a YesJapan video this week! There are two suffixes you can use, which are nikui (for difficult) and yasui (for easy). These get attached to the end of a verb stem. For example, if you want to say something is difficult or easy to understand, here's how it goes: wakaru (to understand) wakari (verb stem) wakarinikui (difficult to understand) wakariyasui (easy to understand) My simplistic understanding of a verb stem is to conjugate the formal present tense and remove the masu (but I'm sure there are exceptions!). It's interesting to me that yasui is also the word for "inexpensive" by itself, so that will help me remember it. Shiyasui, ne? Labels: life


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