When studying your first foreign language, there are many things you have to get accustomed to: new sounds, different characters, and grammar rules, to mention only a few. During this process, the longer you study, the more tricks you pick up to help speed your journey towards fluency. One such trick I’ve learned is to think in terms… 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 »
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 »
Jizue is a Japanese instrumental band originating from the city of Kyoto which combines elements of rock, comtemporary jazz, and other genres. They were formed in 2006 and have released 4 albums between 2010 and 2014. The band consists of the following members, all who have been there from the start except the piano player who… Read More »
In the last week I’ve went through the process of migrating this blog from a standard WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. I’ve been running this blog for several years and have written a couple hundred articles, so I thought it was time to take it to the next level. A self-hosted blog has many advantages,… Read More »
Some of you may have noticed my rate of posts going down the last few months, and one of the reasons for that is I’ve been working on a side project. The project is actually an iPad game, which I recently released on the Apple App Store as a free app. The game is called “Dokusen”, which… Read More »
We live in a day and age where recording aspects of our daily life as numbers, and analyzing that data, has become more and more commonplace. To give a few examples: we measure how many steps we walked, how long we brushed our teeth, how much we drank, how many times we smoked, how long… Read More »
Of all of the activities we do on a daily basis, I feel that the act of communicating with another person using spoken language and a series of back and forth exchanges, what we call “conversation”, holds a very unique place. If you think about all the things involved in this process, and how closely it is… Read More »
One thing that is certain about foreign language study is you have to learn about many different types of things: reading, writing, grammar, conversation, culture, etc. If you are taking a formal language class at a college or similar place, the teacher will guide you to to a proper balance between all these topics through lectures, choice… Read More »
Not sure if anyone has noticed, but I’ve stopped posting for quite some time, having been busy with work and just life in general. I tend to get focus most of my free time and effort on one or two things at a time, and that energy has been sucked up by other tasks lately.… Read More »