～か～か: "Or"

Introduction

By now, か is a good ol’ friend, right? We’ve been using it to ask questions for quite a handful of lessons now, but in addition to being a handy-dandy question maker, か has a bunch of other useful abilities. Most of these revolve around unknowns, which isn’t too far off from the theme of question-asking, don’t you think? What do you mean “are you asking this because it’s related to our lesson”?

Which One’s Your Favorite Tho?

Structure:

• 

  Thing 1かThing 2
  Example:
  → 今日きょうは東京とうきょうか京都きょうとに行いきます。
  ”Today I’ll go to either Tokyo or Kyoto.”

Let’s say someone asks you what your favorite ice cream flavor is, and gosh darn it! You just can’t decide. There are too many good ones. You manage to whittle it down to two, but you can’t pick a favorite so you decide to say both. How would we go about doing that in Japanese? Well, か is a good option! Let’s see how it works.