ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the core material of expressing ease and difficulty which students would expect to encounter in their first year of learning Japanese. The Japanese language distinguishes between these two concepts of ease or difficulty: one employing compound adjectives and the other employing lexical adjectives. If the ease or difficulty is perceived as an intrinsic property of a thing, a person, or a situation, as in the case of the pen that is easy to write with, use a compound adjective consisting of a verb stem and the suffix -nikui or -yasui. The compound adjective is used to describe an item that is felt to possess certain characteristics that interfere with the action denoted by the verb. Conversely, the compound adjective is used when something about an item is felt to facilitate the action denoted by the verb. Grammar points are followed by contextualized examples and exercises which allow students to reinforce and consolidate their learning.
