January 10th, 2010 was a holiday in Japan, Seijin no hi, 成人の日. Better known as “Coming of Age Day” in English, Seijin no hi is a day in Japan to celebrate all of those individuals who turn between April 1st of the previous year and March 31st of the current year. Interestingly enough, these very […]
I recently conducted an interview with Amanda Taylor of whoa-im-in-japan.com. I got word that she would be moving to Japan on January 10th, 2011. The tenth is a special day for me, because that’s the exact same date that I moved Japan (I came January 10th, 2008). Amanda’s training is actually happening around the same […]
Visiting forums about the Japanese language, or any language for that matter, can provide some great insight into people’s presumptions about learning languages. There is always one common tiff as to whether an adult who starts learning English can ever truly be fluent. There is that age-old adage you have to start learning a language […]
There was an article last week a while back about teaching salaries in Japan that I wanted to revisit. Reason being that there was a part of that article that I didn’t address: Is it expensive to live in Japan? Well, to answer this question you have to consider a number of different factors, just […]
Okay, this isn’t going to be a very long post, but I definitely think it’s an important. Knowing basic colors are as important as being able to count in a language, it’s one of those basics that you would easily take for granted in your native language. Unfortunately, though, Japanese isn’t my native tongue. I […]
I wanted to do a short post about an item that is quite common in Japanese culture, the bento. A bento, べんとう(弁当), is the word for a Japanese lunchbox. There are two main images that the word “bento” conjures up in my mind. When I think of a bento, I’m reminded of the ready-made meals […]
(updating…) Hopefully, you’ve had chance to look at Let’s Practice Writing Your Kana (Part 1) Hiragana. Let’s move on to kataka, also an important part of the Japanese writing system. For me, learning katakana was a bit more challenging than hiragana because there were so more characters that resemble one another, especially tsu & shi, […]