Requesting a dish you like

From your mother-in-law!

Hi again. Niko here.

This week’s prompt

You’re at your Japanese mother-in-law’s house. She made a dish you really liked a few weeks ago, and you want to ask her to make it again, but you’re not sure what it’s called. You do your best to describe it to her.

(If this prompt feels a little overwhelming, you could just pick out one short sentence you might say when requesting or describing the dish.)

＊ You can submit a response in Japanese here. ＊

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Corrections will arrive in your inbox next week.

Last week’s corrections

You’re on your way to your friend’s house. You decide to stop at a convenience store on the way to buy a drink. They might want something, too, so you send them a text.

The submissions this week are a good example of how there are just so many ways to express the same general message.

When I was running this prompt by Rei, I said, “And then you could say something like:

コンビニ寄ってくけど、なんか要る？
コンビニ　よって　く　けど、　なんか　いる？
I’m gonna stop by the convenience store, do you want anything?
Lit. convenience store + stop by + go + けど, + something + need?

…right?”

And she said that was good! However, she doesn’t think many people would use the kanji for 要る [いる // to need] in a text like this, opting for just hiragana instead.

It’s only within the last few years that I finally started doing this thing where you drop the い in いく (go) when it is following another verb in て-form. I noticed Rei and her friends doing it all the time, and we also do it in a lot of NativShark content (when the situation calls for it).

But sometimes knowing something is different than actually remembering to use it, and how to use it properly, right? ^_^

Here’s Satoko with everyone’s feedback: