Thoughts on Reading Kanji
When you can't read or write kanji, the idea of being able to recognize hundreds or thousands of the symbols ...
When you can't read or write kanji, the idea of being able to recognize hundreds or thousands of the symbols ...
Our new warehouse construction is nearly done, and we hope to be able to move in soon. To help us ...
Rain, rain, rain: this has been the wettest summer I can recall in Japan, and we've had wet weather off ...
What kind of juice would you like, cola or tea? The Japanese sometimes take liberties with words when they import ...
J-List's home prefecture of Gunma isn't as famous as Kyoto or Nara, but it can hold its own when it ...
If you want to live in Japan, there are certain skills you'll need to acquire. For example, you should be ...
Each language is special, with its own set of interesting features. Romance languages, for example, have nouns that come in ...
It's known that the Japanese eat with chopsticks with almost every meal, deftly picking up even the tiniest morsels of ...
My wife is hooked on Kandora, short for Kankoku dorama or South Korean soap operas, and it seems every time ...
It's funny how so many of the foods eaten by the Japanese on a daily basis aren't very Japanese at ...
One interesting concept I learned about soon after coming to Japan was jiko shokai, which just means "self introduction" but ...
They're known as Takeshima in Japan, Dokdo in Korea, and internationally as the Lincourt Rocks: two ridiculously small volcanic islands ...
I get rather a lot of questions from readers interested in working in Japan as a teacher, and I do ...
One Japanese word I like a lot is kokoro, which can be a little difficult to translate into English, which ...
I have a rather strange problem: I don't know my own kids. Or rather, I know the half that speaks ...
I write a lot about how one of the challenging aspects of leaning Japanese is getting in tune with what ...
Imagine if 25% of all Americans lived around the Washington DC area? It would be pretty crowded, and not very ...
It never fails: you're going about our business in Japan, when suddenly you come face to face with some really ...
Speaking of graves, Japan is in the middle of Obon (pronounced "oh, bone!"), a three-day Buddhist holiday to remember the ...
Languages are interesting because each one has its own unique features. For example, double negatives like "I didn't see nothing" ...
When is a graveyard likely to be filled with tourists snapping pictures? When it's a gaijin bochi, or "foreigners' graveyard," ...
Being an expat in another country involves making certain compromises you'd never consider at home. In Japan, it means giving ...
One of the stranger aspects of Japan's kanji-based writing system is the way many people lose some ability to write ...
Before you left for work today, did you hang your bed out of the window to dry in the sun? ...