We recently went to Oregon to visit some friends and decided to check out a special school we had recently discovered: Richmond Elementary School (which I’ll abbreviate here as RES). Richmond, for those of you not familiar with the area, is a neighborhood of Portland in the southeast part of the city. Japanese immersion programs… Read More »
Today I’m going to provide a vocabulary list for a topic that I discuss on a daily basis on Japanese: child upbringing. I’ll be focusing on words that are useful for babies through toddlers (roughly ages 0-4), but some of the terms can be used for any age. 子育て (kosodate): child upbringing 育てる (sodateru): to… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
You probably have heard that humans have a certain ‘window’ of time, where once we get past a certain age it’s much more difficult to learn a second, or third language. While this is still an area of science where there is many unknowns (like how long this window is), you’ve probably noticed that people… Read More »
For me, one of the attractions of studying and becoming fluent in a foreign language is the concept of thinking in a language other than my native tongue. I’m not talking about just speaking in a foreign language without first forming the thoughts in one’s native language, but also the ability to follow a chain… Read More »
For those of us raising a child bilingual Japanese/English child, it can be difficult to find appropriate teaching materials, especially if you live outside of an area with a large Japanese population like California and New York. Fortunately, these are a few excellent distance learning (通信教育）programs designed for young learners in mind. Benesse’s “Child Challenge”… Read More »
For those Japanese learners who understand a good amount of Kanji, grammar constructs, and vocabulary, your options for study materials are drastically increased. Thats because you can use sites and books that native speakers would use. I’ll introduce a few of my favorite resources in this post. １）教えてgoo (http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/) This site is extremely valuable for… Read More »