A few weeks ago we moved to Portland, Oregon, with the expectation of being to experience more Japanese culture than where we came from, South Florida. One of the most famous Japanese things in Portland is the Portland Japanese Garden (Japanese: ポートランド日本庭園), and we took a trip there as soon as we had time. Although I had… Read More »
Recently I received a long, interesting comment from scalesoflibra, a reader and fellow blogger on one of my posts about the translation service Gengo. You can see that person’s full comment on the previous link, but I’ll give a brief summary of it here: Gengo charges around 5 cents for a standard level translation job, which means that… Read More »
Recently I saw a post on Japanese Language Stack Exchange about the 〜くある (~ku aru) form of adjectives (ex: 美しくある), and there was no good answer so I did some research. By the time I was ready to post, the question had been deleted, so will make a make a post here with my findings. To review, let’s… Read More »
In this post I’d like to talk about the Japanese word 問題 (mondai), a very useful word which has several meanings. The first meaning, possibly the most common, is “problem” in the sense of something that is not going according to plan. A: 大丈夫ですか？ [Is everything OK?] B: ええ、問題ないです。… Read More »
This is the 2nd assignment for a program I have started in order to help myself and others improve their writing in Japanese. For details about the program, see this post. Also see this post for a list of all assignments. The topic of this writing assignment is to discuss why you started learning Japanese.… Read More »
Recently I came across this interesting post by fellow blogger Moaz Elgabry. For only having studied Japanese a few years, his Japanese writing skill is quite impressive, and I’m curious to see his thoughts on different topics. His post discusses whether the Japanese language really needs to have a grammatical subject and how such a subject should be… Read More »