Last year I posted about my training in the Japanese martial art of Aikido (合気道, or sometimes written as 合氣道). There are many styles of Aikido which have many things in common and yet diverge in areas that can be both critical and subtle; for this same reason it can be counterproductive to try and learn… Read More »
While interactions with native Japanese speakers I have occasionally come across the expressions “nimaime” (二枚目) and “sanmaime” (三枚目). It turns out they have somewhat opposite meanings and are easy to confuse, so I thought I would go over their meanings and origins here. As you may know, “mai” (枚) is used as a counting suffix… Read More »
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 »