If you’ve been following this blog, you probably noticed I have been working on a tool to help with learning Japanese vocab, a key part of learning this difficult language. It’s called Japanese Vocab Maker, and currently supports building vocab lists from a variety of sources including web sites, files, single words, and even YouTube… Read More »
The 1995 Japanese animated movie Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊) was a groundbreaking work that set the standards for anime quality in many areas, and helped to create a new generation of anime-lovers––which I was and still am a solid part of. I could easily write a few pages about how amazing this movie was… Read More »
Learning slang terms in a foreign language is fun, yet challenging since slang words used casually often employ definitions that have been modified or evolved from textbook or dictionary definitions. In this post I’d like to talk about “egui” (えぐい)which is a word whose meanings have certainly evolved over time. Grammatically, “egui” is a typical… Read More »
Learning a foreign language often means you want to consume as much content as possible that is designed for native speakers, and except for actually going to Japan when learning Japanese often the next best thing is to watch videos made in Japanese. Fortunately, in this day and age we have countless videos to watch,… Read More »
Particles are a core part of the Japanese language, and the “ka” particle is one of the most important particles (along with “ga”, “wa”, “ni”, “de” and “o”). Like most particles, “ka” has more than one use, and there is even one or two unexpected uses. So in this article I want to go over… Read More »
Learning a language involves memorizing countless words, but as a language learner the best strategy is to learn words that are commonly used, as well as words that have a simple, easy-to-understand meaning and can be leveraged in a variety of situations. I think “tabun” is a good word that fits these categories so I… Read More »
For a few weeks now I’ve been working on a website called Japanese Vocab Maker whose primary feature was creating a vocabulary list of Japanese words from a variety of sources: files (pdf, txt, mp3), web sites, or simply paste that is copied and pasted in by the user. To that I added the ability… Read More »
My review of dealing with the company Kanji Hanko that provides custom Japnese stamps for a variety of purposes.
(You can jump right to the film here) For whatever reason, I tend to be an all-or-nothing person, especially regarding interests and hobbies. For example, my obsession with Japanese has been going on for a few decades strong now, with no sign of letting up. A few years ago I started up Japanese calligraphy, and… Read More »
Japanese has many ways of expressing politeness including special verb forms and special variants of nouns. There are also different grammatical constructions that show an action was done for the purpose of another, which also connects to the idea of politeness and can even express gratitude. One of such constructions is using the verb “ageru”… Read More »