Sometime ago I wrote a post on thinking in a foreign language, which to me is one of the milestones of true fluency. Near the end of that article I briefly mentioned how I sometimes “pre-cache” Japanese phrases in my head before speaking, though I downplayed it at the time, and felt it was more… Read More »
These days I’ve been listening frequently to NHK’s 「社会の見方・私の視点」 (Societal perspective / My point of view), which is a news podcast that talks about a diverse set of topics including government, economics, world politics, business, industry, and many others. Needless to say, the Japanese is extremely high level and there are many words that you would… Read More »
As part of my daily commute I’ve been listening to various Japanese podcasts from NHK’s podcast series Suppin. I usually get into one of them, and listen to it exclusively for a few weeks until I’ve heard every episode. With Gen’s modern Japanese corner, things started out badly because after listening to an episode or two I felt totally… Read More »
One great thing about having kids is you get to see all the cutesy videos made for them. When my son was very young he was into the “Super Simple Learning” videos on Youtube, especially the “Twinkle Twinkle little star” one, which has great visuals and sound. Bringing up my son bilingually Japanese, I also… Read More »
For my short quiz on Japanese particles, there was one question which was not answered correctly nearly half the time. In this article I’d like to go over that problem which appeared as #3 in the quiz. (For those who want to take the quiz before reading the answer and explanation, you can do so here: testmoz.com/449328)… Read More »
Japanese is filled with many slang terms and there are entire dictionaries documenting these, so if you search you can quickly fill up on hundreds of slang words. So I typically don’t focus an entire post on a slang term unless I hear/use it frequently enough to warrant such a treatment. The word 微妙 is… Read More »
Recently I had the opportunity to visit a relative in Arizona who had Dish Satellite TV (http://www.dish.com), and happened to contain a single channel of Japanese broadcast TV. At first I thought that it was cool such a channel could be seen in America, but after all in the age of the internet nearly any… Read More »
It’s hard to believe, but I started this blog on WordPress exactly a year ago, on Dec 1, 2013. Although there were some periods where I didn’t write very often, overall I managed 170 posts, which translates to almost one every two days. Given my busy schedule I’m still amazed I found the time to… Read More »
For those studying a foreign language, you should make it one of your top priorities to practice speaking as much as possible, whether that means making friends with native speakers, speaking to random people over Skype, or talking a conversation skills class. But no matter how good your conversation is, there will a great deal of… Read More »
Sometime back, I wrote a post about Benesse’s distance program learning for children, in particular their Shimajiro series of books. In my household we have been reading these books fairly often to our young son, and he has really grown to love them in a way that surprised me. On several occasions he will run… Read More »