Monthly Archives: July 2017

Japanese non-past (present/future) tense, “will”, and intention

One of the nice things about the Japanese language is that it has relatively few grammatical tenses, at least compared to languages like English which can get quite messy. Knowing a handful of tenses can get you pretty far, although you do have to memorize the conjugation for each category of verbs. In this post… Read More »

Oregon Monogatari: One year living in Portland, Oregon (with notes on Japanese culture there)

It’s been a little over a year since I’ve moved with my family to Portland, Oregon. It’s no exaggeration to say that one of the main reasons we chose this area because of the relatively large proportion of Japanese people, at least compared to South Florida where we came from. I’ve already written a few articles… Read More »

Expressing bad intentions in Japanese and 「悪気」 (warugi)

When using Japanese in everday life there are some useful expressions you can pick up that are not commonly used in media like books and manga. One such word is 「悪気」 (warugi), which should not be confused with the similar sounding “Waluigi” character from the Mario world. In Dictionary Goo, we see this word described… Read More »

Welcome back, Aikido: My story of returning to the dojo

(Update: my feelings about Ki-Aikido have changed somewhat since I wrote this article, especially how it differs from other styles of Aikido. I will keep this article for historical reasons, but hope to write more on this topic eventually). Over 3 years ago, I posted an article about the Japanese martial art Aikido (合気道) in which… Read More »

Japanese children’s book review: 「とうさんのあしのうえで」 (tousan no ashi no ue de) [At daddy’s feet]

In several past posts I’ve mentioned how children’s books are a great way to help train your reading skills in Japanese, one of the main reasons being you usually don’t have to worry about knowing kanji (or even katakana for that matter) since furigana reading hints will be comprehensively used. While you can run into… Read More »

Variations on a phrase for asking directions when you are lost

Once in awhile I’ll look through the posts on WordPress tagged ‘Japanese’ and when I find those trying to teach Japanese grammar or vocabulary, I have a habit of searching for mistakes and will generally message the post authors when I find them. Often people who are studying Japanese themselves are posting what they have… Read More »

Mobile App Review: Manabi Reader: a nice assistant to help improve your Japanese reading skills

Recently I got a tweet from Alek Ehlke asking me to try out his new iOS app “Manabi Reader”. In case you didn’t know, “Manabi” (学び) comes from the verb “Manabu” (学ぶ) which means “to learn”. While it’s not a very creative name, it’s easy enough to remember. The purpose of this app is quite simple:… Read More »