As anyone who has studied a foreign language can attest to, knowing what words to study is one of the more challenging things because there is so many words out there. In this post I’m going to go over the word “ほか”（also written in Kanji as “他” or ”外”) and some of it’s uses. This… Read More »
In my last post, I wrote about how the Japanese word “くるま” (which means “car”) originated from the words ”来る” (to come) and “魔” (devil). While these two words are actual words with the meanings I specified, the truth is that they have nothing to do with the word ”くるま”. After all, my post yesterday was written on April… Read More »
(Disclaimer: this was an April fool’s joke.) I always enjoy researching word origins of Japanese words, since you usually learn a little of history, culture, and it often helps you remember that word or its meanings. In this post I’d like to talk about the origin of the word “くるま” (kuruma) which means “car”, and… Read More »
Recently I posted a review of the book “Teaching methods based on student native language, English edition” by Kazuko Nakagawa, which provided some important insights on mistakes English-speakers typically make when learning Japanese. I wanted to translate at least a short portion of this book to give a feel what the content is like, and also… Read More »
Lately I’ve been making it a point to translate a small portion of each Japanese novel I’ve finished reading, for the purpose of polishing my Japanese to English translation abilities. I’ve already had some success doing translation on the side using Gengo, but much of that work is more everyday/functionali stuff (business emails, etc.) as opposed… Read More »
On a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, we stopped by a Powell’s books to see what they had to offer. Besides having an amazing selection of many types of books, they actually had a section of Japanese books, most if not all which were used books. It was no Kinokuniya, but as you may know… Read More »
The other day I wrote a review of the Japanese novel 下町ロケット (“Downtown Rocket”), where I alluded to something about the usage of polite Japanese in that book. In this post I’d like to talk about that matter in some detail. When reading this novel, I was surprised by several scenes where one person from a company spoke to… Read More »
In this post I’ll be reviewing the Japanese novel “Downtown Rocket” by Jun Ikeido, which was published in 2010 by Shogakukan (小学館). Like I sometimes do with Japanese books, I picked this without doing a great amount of research aforehand, more as a impulse buy when I was in Japan last year. There were two things that drew… Read More »
I’ve been a huge fan of Legos ever since I was a child, and fortunately my son has grown quite found of these great building blocks as well. But it was some surprise when I saw him watching a Lego “Ninjago” cartoon in Japanese. One of the reasons is like “Ninjago” isn’t exactly accurate with respect… Read More »
Forums (also called “message boards” or “question and answer sites”) are one of the great things about the internet since they allow fast, global discussion about nearly any topic you can imagine. Discussions on foreign languages for learners is no exception, and there are many things to ask about: word meanings, grammar, what sounds “natural”, culture, etc.… Read More »