As part of the process of immersing myself in Japanese without actually leaving in Japan, I take advantage of pretty much any media I can get my hands on and usually to try to decipher at least a phrase or so (or longer if I have the time). Today I happened to be drinking a… Read More »
困る and 助かる are two Japanese verbs which are used fairly commonly in everyday speech, and though their meaning is conceptually simple sometimes it can be a little tricky to translate into English. 困る (komaru), simply put, signifies being put into a bad situation. The dictionary says “Be in trouble”, “Be in a fix”, or… Read More »
I think I’ve touched on this point in another blog post some time back, but it’s such an important thing I decided to revisit it. When studying a foreign language, it’s natural to have a bias towards listening/reading over speaking/writing. This is not only because the latter is generally much more difficult, but because if you aren’t… 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 »
Although this is a textual blog, I can’t help but talk about Japanese pronunciation now and then because it’s such an important element to being fluent. This morning I was listening to a Japanese podcast and had an interesting mini-discovery about the japanese letter ‘ん’ (‘n’), so I thought I would share it with everyone.… Read More »
(I’ve made a single question survey regarding Japanese ability – if you are interested please check it out here. Thanks!) As things have been the last few years, I haven’t spent much time watching Japanese dramas, and finding one that is good enough to keep my attention past the first episode is even rarer. “素敵な選Taxi”… 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 »
One thing that makes learning a foreign language satisfying is when you learn something that can be applied to many different areas – effectively multiplying the productivity of your study efforts. One such area is prefixes and suffixes, where knowledge of a certain word helps you guess the meaning of new words. When studying Japanese… 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 »
In a previous blog post I discussed how the element of necessity makes the brain more active in the learning process, increasing retention and understanding of foreign language. One little trick I discovered is that if you are planning on giving a summary to someone about some media you are consuming (article, podcast, movie, etc.)… Read More »