If you pick up a Japanese textbook, for example the popular Genki series, you’ll find a chart of “aisatsu” (挨拶). This is a list of formalized expressions that are used in daily life and include things like: こんにちは (konnichi wa) おはようございます (ohayou gozaimasu) こんばんは (konban wa) はじめまして (hajimemashite) いらっしゃいませ (irasshaimase) よろしくお願いします (yoroshiku onegaishimasu) Fortunately… Read More »
Sometime a while ago I wrote an article about confusing Japanese loanwords which originally came from English words, and then a week or so ago I wrote another article about the reverse: a confusing English loanword that came from Japanese. Very recently I learned of another word that falls in this second category, so I… Read More »
Konbucha tea seems to be increasingly popular these days. For example, at one Whole Foods Market grocery store in Portland there is a konbucha bar with a lineup of teas on tap, and there are many types of konbucha drinks for sale in the refrigerated drink section. Coincidentally, when recently reading a magazine I came across an article which… Read More »
This article is part of the series about my July 2018 trip to Japan. Please see the table of contents page for other articles in this series as they are posted. In a previous article about robots I mentioned the Miraikan museum, also known as “The National Museum of Emerging Science & Innovation.” In this… Read More »
This article is part of the series about my July 2018 trip to Japan. Please see the table of contents page for other articles in this series as they are posted. I’ve been interested in robots since my college years (I took a class where we built and programmed robots), and I’m very lucky that… Read More »
This article is part of the series on my July 2018 trip to Japan. Please see the table of contents page for other articles in this series as they are posted. None of us had been to northeast Japan before, so we decided to spend a good portion of this trip in the cities of… Read More »
This article is part of the series on my July 2018 trip to Japan. Please see the table of contents page for other articles in this series as they are posted. While walking through Akihabara we stumbled on the “Square Enix Cafe”, a restaurant that I had never heard of before; but being a Final… Read More »
In my college days, I was really into the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, although in the last decade or two I don’t think I’ve played a single game. One of the fun things about having children is the possibility of exposing your hobbies and interests to them, and if you are lucky they… Read More »
This article is part of the series on my July 2018 trip to Japan. Please see the table of contents page for other articles in this series as they are posted. I was very lucky to be able to have the opportunity to observe first grade elementary class for an entire day in a school… Read More »
On a recent trip to Japan (which I am in the process of reporting on here), I browsed through many bookstores. Because my reading speed in Japanese still hasn’t quite caught up to my English reading speed, rather than actually read a few pages of a book I generally focus on searching for covers and… Read More »