Twitter is a form of social media that took me some time to figure out, although I guess I still have a lot to learn, both as a consumer and generator of content. While I still debate the usefulness of reading random thoughts of famous people, there’s no doubt that getting a real-time stream of… Read More »
As part of raising my son bilingual Japanese, over the last few years I’ve spent a great deal of time reading him Japanese children’s books. I always recommend children’s books to people learning Japanese because typically no kanji knowledge is required, there is a so much culture to absorb, and they are just plain fun.… Read More »
(Note: this list is primarily about Japanese study resources, but near the bottom I’ve added some entries that are related to Japan or sites that I frequent.) Japandev: a neat search engine for finding tech jobs in Japan. https://japan-dev.com/ Kanshudo: An awesome site that helps with reading practice, learning kanji, and other things. Has many… Read More »
A little over a week ago, I decided to start a companion Podcast for this blog, covering many of the same topics: studying Japanese on your own, anime reviews, etc. I managed to record eight episodes in eight days, though it was a bit challenge since recording plus editing took roughly between 45 minutes and… Read More »
If you follow this blog you probably know that one of the main motivators for me to get serious about learning Japanese was because I am a big fan of the author Haruki Murakami and had a strong desire to read his novels in their original, untranslated, Japanese. When I meet people for the first time, the topic of… Read More »
Who doesn’t love trains, especially children? Even if you don’t love them, living in Japan (or other big cities) pretty much forces them to use them, so this list of train-related words is sure to be of use. 電車 (densha): train [this word is written with the Kanji for “electricity” and “car”, and thus… Read More »
In a recent post I announced I would be starting a new program on my blog called “Japanese Writing Lab” that aims to motivate people to practice writing in Japanese, provides feedback on their writing, and allows them to see posts of other Japanese learners. This article represents the first writing assignment of that program. For this… Read More »
In this post I’d like to discuss the Japanese podcast “僕と、嫁さんと、息子と、ゲームと” which I’ve been listening to almost every day during my commutes to work lately. (By the way, if you aren’t using podcasts to help supplement your Japanese studies, you’re missing out! You can see a few other of my podcast reviews here) This podcast, translated as “My… Read More »
Nobody loves being sick, but there is nothing worse than being sick except being sick where you can’t express how you feel to those around you. This vocabulary list is about words related to not feeling well, and about getting better (the doctor, etc.) Many of them I have used myself in the real world.… Read More »
In Japanese there are a few expressions which are close equivalents to English “never”, and in this post I’ll go over a few. If you want to express the concept of “never” in Japanese, you can keep things simple and just use the negative form of a verb. Literally, this is close to “~will not”.… Read More »