While I do enjoy reading Japanese manga (comics) occassionally, I’ve spent a much greater proportion of my time either watching Japanese anime or reading novels. When I was young I wasn’t really into comic books at all, and as a result it takes me extra effort to follow and appreciate them. When I first started… Read More »
In a recent post I discussed how I had seen a phrase “Advilがありますか?” (“Advil ga arimasus ka?”) in a book, and upon further research confirmed it was not a natural usage of the particle “ga”. I had posted to Oshiete Goo and received an excellent response which discussed why it was unnatural. Since then, I’ve… Read More »
The central theme of this blog is self-studying Japanese, which means not only learning a difficult language, but doing it without much (if any) formal classes. Come to think of it, since I graduated over a decade ago I have had very few opportunities to learn in a formal class setting with a professional teacher, not… Read More »
Being a fan of Japanese anime, I rarely watch American cartoons. This is both because I am usually turned off by their, well, cartoony and unrealistic art style, plus the fact that on average the stories are just less interesting to me. I’ll admit to a major bias here, which probably came about because I watched hundreds… Read More »
I have been thinking about it for some time now, but I finally decided to create a twitter account (@selftaughtjapan) to go along with this blog. I wanted to use @selftaughtjapanese but that name was too many characters long ): To be honest, I haven’t really used twitter much, especially in terms of writing tweets,… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, I’ve had all sorts of small revelations about how language works, and these are one of the things that keeps me motivated to learn even more. I remember in my first foreign language class, which happened to be for Spanish, the teacher said that “someone just didn’t sit on a hill… Read More »
From a grammar point of view, Japanese has several aspects that make it easy to learn including only a handful of tenses and relatively simple conjugations (the subject type is not used to determine the verbs conjugation like in some languages). On the other hand, there are a few areas where a student has to put… Read More »
This is the first of a series of articles about expressing various emotions in Japanese. When trying to learn how to talk about happiness in Japanese, it is important to understand that this word has different meanings in English and each of these translates to a different word or phrase. When you want to express the momentary… Read More »
Cool Japan Guide, by Abby Denson, is marketed with the catchy subtitle: “Fun in the land of manga, lucky cats, and ramen”. Despite the fact I am pretty heavily into Japanese culture, I haven’t read a printed book on it in some time, so I was looking forward to reading this book. This 128 page… Read More »
Learning how animal sounds are written and pronounced in a foreign language is something that is not typically taught in textbooks, at least in most of them I’ve used (with the exception a Spanish one I used in high school). To be sure, if you meet someone on the street you are not likely going to need… Read More »