Monthly Archives: November 2014

Happy 1st Birthday Self Taught Japanese!

It’s hard to believe, but I started this blog on WordPress exactly a year ago, on Dec 1, 2013. Although there were some periods where I didn’t write very often, overall I managed 170 posts, which translates to almost one every two days. Given my busy schedule I’m still amazed I found the time to… Read More »

ん and the disappearing Japanese Y(en)

Although this is a textual blog, I can’t help but talk about Japanese pronunciation now and then because it’s such an important element to being fluent. This morning I was listening to a Japanese podcast and had an interesting mini-discovery about the japanese letter ‘ん’ (‘n’), so I thought I would share it with everyone.… Read More »

Japanese drama review: 素敵な選Taxi (suteki na sen-Taxi)

(I’ve made a single question survey regarding Japanese ability – if you are interested please check it out here. Thanks!) As things have been the last few years, I haven’t spent much time watching Japanese dramas, and finding one that is good enough to keep my attention past the first episode is even rarer. “素敵な選Taxi”… Read More »

Counters in Japanese

One thing that can be a bit challenging about learning Japanese is its system for counting items. In this post I’ll go over that and give some related resources. The basic formula for using counters is pretty simple. If you have something you want to count you use a combination of the numeral (いち、に、さん, etc.)… Read More »

Start a Japanese blog the right way – the way a Japanese person would

For those studying a foreign language, you should make it one of your top priorities to practice speaking as much as possible, whether that means making friends with native speakers, speaking to random people over Skype, or talking a conversation skills class. But no matter how good your conversation is, there will a great deal of… Read More »

A few pitfalls when using Japanese

In this article I’d like to discuss a few things to watch out when learning Japanese, most of which were something I struggled with personally. The first is when talking about meeting someone in Japanese. If you aren’t careful, you might first think “I want to see you tonight” and then translate this as “今晩、君を見たい” which… Read More »