After struggling to find a good job after graduating college, Ryota hits upon the idea to become a high-rise window cleaner, a dangerous job with poor pay. One of the job’s perks is being able to spy into other people’s lives and see moments that would otherwise be unknown to the rest of the world,… Read More »
Watching videos in Japanese on YouTube is one great way to practice your listening skills, as well as a pick up a lot of new words and expressions, although it’s best that you have strong fundamentals of Japanese grammar and core vocabulary before getting too deep into this. Sometimes I like to search in Japanese… Read More »
In the post I’d like to go over a common way of expressing an introductory idea in Japanese. We will begin with a basic form of this, んだけど (n da kedo) and then go over some variations. First, let’s look at a simple example: 僕、ずっと日本語を勉強してるんだけど、まだペラペラじゃない (boku, zutto nihongo wo benkyou shiteru n da kedo, mada… Read More »
My reasons for purchasing Takahiro Ueda’s novel “Nimrod” are pretty typical: I liked the cover, liked the title, plus I liked the vague but significant-sounding marketing description on the obi (paper band used for marketing). Also, the book was relatively short, and (last but not least) the book was a winner of the Akutagawa prize,… Read More »
One of the perks of learning to read Japanese is that there is a huge body of diverse literature going back many hundreds of years. Furthermore, much of this is available to read for free on Aozora Bunko. Once you get comfortable enough reading modern Japanese literature from the last few decades, you may decide… Read More »
The “te” form of verbs, sometimes (confusingly) referred to as the “gerund” form, is a cornerstone of Japanese grammar. Not only are there only a few verb forms in the language, but the “te” form has a variety of uses. In this post I’ll go over the main ones, including one you may not be… Read More »
I recently posed a review of the Japanese novel 天使の卵 (Angel’s Egg) by 村山由佳 (Yuka Murayama). In it, I praised the writing style of the book, although I hadn’t given too much detail in terms of exactly what I liked about it besides saying it was very “literary”. So I’ve decided to give a short… Read More »
Recently I was contacted by the owner of the website BFF Tokyo, and I ended up offering to do a review of his site. The site is relatively new and I will keep that in mind while writing the review. In case you didn’t know, “BFF” stands for “Best Friends Forever”, and while this expression… Read More »
After getting a recommendation for the Japanese fiction novel 天使の卵 (“Angel’s Egg” or “Angel Egg”) by 村山由佳 (Yuka Murayama), I decided to give it a shot. The book turned out to be a very rewarding read, so in this post I’ll review it. This book is about the experiences of the 19-year old male narrator,… Read More »
In my early years studying Japanese I watched a huge number of Japanese dramas, and while this really helped improved my listening and vocabulary skills, it also made me accustomed––or should I say overly sensitive––to the common tropes of this form of media. That, plus the fact I generally try to spend more time in… Read More »