In the last year or so I’ve had the opportunity to tutor a few young children in Japanese. It’s been a really enjoyable and educational experience, so I wanted to make a list of suggestions for those in a position to teach a foreign language to other children. In my case, the teaching was somewhat… Read More »
This is the 6th assignment of a program I am running to help myself and others practice writing in Japanese. For details, see this post. Also see this post for a list of all assignments. [Update: I have fixed the link here, apologizes for the trouble.] This time the topic will be “僕の住む場所” (boku no sumu basho), which means “Where I… Read More »
When learning words in a foreign language (Japanese or any other), it can be frustrating because some words seem to stick immediately whether others take many iterations. While I think some of this just the unpredictability of our memories, it can be instructive to think about what drives this process and to develop ways to… Read More »
As the year is about over, in this post I’d like to take a step back and talk about a few of the things I did in 2018. First, to give some context: In 2016 I did a little translation work as a side-job at Gengo, the online translation platform, and began to do translations… Read More »
In my college years, I used to read a lot of magazines. But I gradually realized that, while entertaining, they often lack much real content and are seriously bloated by ads. I’ll still peruse them now and then when I am relaxing at a bookstore, but it’s usually just for a few minutes and I… Read More »
When speaking Japanese with native speakers you will often run across colloquial words or phrases that may not be in any dictionary, or at least not be in your average academic textbook. I always treasure these because they have a serendipity that makes them hard to actively search for; you simply have to wait until… Read More »
I’m very pleased to announce my latest book, “Tales of the Disturbed,” has just been released on Amazon. This book contains my translations of several short stories by the classic Japanese author Yoshio Toyoshima (1890-1955), all which are appearing the first time in English. Whereas my other books have all been about science fiction or… Read More »
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 »
Japanese has the interesting characteristic of not just having a lot of loanwords from other languages, but also liberally using these words to create either new English-like words (和製英語), or words that are combination of one or more English words and Japanese words. The word I’d like to highlight this time, mazogee (written マゾゲー in… Read More »
When I couldn’t sleep the other day, I got an idea for a new Japanese vocab list about, well, sleep. Without enough sleep it’s hard to function in daily life, let alone study Japanese effectively. As with my other vocabulary lists, a majority of the words are those I have heard used by native speakers… Read More »