So far, the translations that I have posted on this blog have mostly focused on portions of books, short stories, or online novels. But when I came across the book “Turn your kids into billionaires by teaching them to code” (子供を億万長者にしたければ、プログラミングの基礎を教えなさい) by Kohji Matsubayashi（松林弘治), I decided I wanted to translate at least a small portion of this… Read More »
Today I’m going to provide a vocabulary list for a topic that I discuss on a daily basis on Japanese: child upbringing. I’ll be focusing on words that are useful for babies through toddlers (roughly ages 0-4), but some of the terms can be used for any age. 子育て (kosodate): child upbringing 育てる (sodateru): to… Read More »
It’s been some time since I’ve written an article about bilingual education, so I thought I would review “The Gifted”, a book published last year. This book is about the Japanese boy genius Sho Okawa, who moved to Canada when he was 5 and was declared as “Gifted” at age 9. Only five years later, Sho… Read More »
One great thing about having kids is you get to see all the cutesy videos made for them. When my son was very young he was into the “Super Simple Learning” videos on Youtube, especially the “Twinkle Twinkle little star” one, which has great visuals and sound. Bringing up my son bilingually Japanese, I also… Read More »
For quite a while I was listening to a science-related Japanese podcast (here), and then after getting a bit tired of that I decided to take a break from podcasts for a few weeks. For my next podcast to use as Japanese listening practice, I went to the NHK podcast site, which generally has episodes… Read More »
Sometime back, I wrote a post about Benesse’s distance program learning for children, in particular their Shimajiro series of books. In my household we have been reading these books fairly often to our young son, and he has really grown to love them in a way that surprised me. On several occasions he will run… Read More »
Although Japanese anime was the first thing that got me really interested in Japanese culture, the more I studied Japanese the more I learned to appreciate other media such as Japanese novels, dramas, and (live action) movies. Having said that, once in awhile I still get in the mood to enjoy some high-quality anime from Japan,… Read More »
I believe that having a child is one of the most rewarding things you can do in life, and for parents where two or more languages are spoken fluently there is always the option of raising the child on more than one language. There are many different approaches to this, but what’s clear is that… Read More »
I’m sure that those of you studying Japanese take advantage of TV dramas and anime to help boost your vocabulary and comprehension, but documentaries are another great resource that is often overlooked. Documentaries typically talk about more real life subject matter, so you’re more likely to learn expressions you can use in real life, unlike… Read More »