(jump right to the book scanner here) Since I was young I have always found Japanese culture interesting, but in my late highschool / early college years two things particularly motivated me to start learning Japanese seriously: anime and Japanese literature. Understanding anime without subtitles is a challenge, to be sure, but worst case you… Read More »
Earlier this year I spent around 10 days in Japan, which I wrote about in detail here. While I tried to give much information about what I saw and felt, there are some general topics that didn’t fit into that series, and I wanted to write about separately. This article is about my thoughts about… Read More »
When I was young, listening to music was a huge part of my life, including listening to the radio every day and a variety of CDs. But as time went on, I stopped mostly doing both of those, though I still listen to music on YouTube once in a while. Being into Japanese culture, you… Read More »
For a few months I’ve been working on Japanese Vocab Maker, a tool that began as a way to extract vocabulary words from a variety of sources, but has grown to encompass a variety of learning tools. One of the most difficult parts of Japanese to master is the pronunciation, which is not just because… Read More »
xOften when some cultural word or idea crosses country boundaries, the word evolves or changes in some way. This is a natural thing, but having said that, these words can create misunderstandings about a word or phrase’s original meaning. In this post I want to talk about the word “Ikigai”, a word that has been… Read More »
For the majority of my life, I learned things three ways: via a formal school with well-defined criteria (elementary school, etc.), private teacher (flute), and no-rules freeform (fiction writing, etc.). Each of these has a different learning style, but what is defined as “right” or “correct” is fairly well-defined. For example, in subjects like math… Read More »
A few months ago I heard someone on YouTube raving about how great the jazz-themed anime movie Blue Giant was, so when I came across it on Netflix I couldn’t help but give it a watch. The film is about Dai, a teenager who loves playing jazz on the Tenor Saxophone, and his dream to… Read More »
I’m happy to annouce a free browser extension that shows definitions for Japanese words when watching anime or Crunchyroll.
I recently was able to take a trip to Japan which was great from a cultural learning perspective, but also great linguistically since I was able to speak with some natives and learn some new phrases. In this article I want to go over 〜と言いたいところだけど [~to iitai tokoro da kedo], which is a phrase I… Read More »
If you’ve been following this blog, you probably noticed I have been working on a tool to help with learning Japanese vocabulary, a key part of learning this difficult language. It’s called Japanese Vocab Maker, and supports building vocab lists from a variety of sources including web sites, files, images, copy/paste text, and even YouTube… Read More »