EDUCATION

In Episode 2 of Collabo-Ramen, Brian and I go to Tokyo Ramen Street and check out the つけ麺 at 六厘舎: Collabo-Ramen – 六厘舎 Rokurinsha from Daniel Morales on Vimeo. Check out Brian’s pictures and watch Episode 1 of Collabo-Ramen if you haven’t already.

As I’ve written before, I’m not a big believer in good pronunciation = fluency or excellent command of dialect = fluency, but I have come to realize that learning dialects gives you more variations to help reinforce your understanding of 標準語 patterns. And it’s also nice to know what people on TV are saying. One [...]

Apologies for the delay with this post. I meant to put up a summary of the comments on this post earlier but have been really busy the past two weeks. Well, I should start by admitting my mistake. What I was hearing was ゆった, as many of you mentioned, and not いうった – no one says [...]

Japan is an expensive country, and Tokyo is an especially expensive city. It costs a lot of money to do just about anything here with very few exceptions. One of these exceptions is the Tokyo International Forum. My college roommate Dave came to visit Tokyo three years ago, and he brought a hipster guidebook with [...]

The second most important project manager word is 納期 (のうき). This shares the first character with 納品, but is in the order ADJECTIVE + NOUN, I think. I believe that you could draw out the compound to something like 納める期 or 納める期間, in which case the verb acts as an adjective. So literally “delivery period.” The [...]

Check me out at Japan Pulse again, this time writing about baumkuchen. I told my roommate I was writing about バウム, and she was like, バウムクーヘン? That was a なるほど moment for me because I had been saying it バウムクーチェン in my mind. I should really know better, especially since I learned the correct pronunciation [...]

Starbucks has released its 2010 Sakura mug. There’s a bit more indigo and purple than last year. Pretty nice cup!

I have my debut post online over at Japan Pulse, The Japan Times’ blog about trends in Japan. I take a close look at the decidedly uncool compound 社畜 (しゃちく). Ironically, I am counting down the days until I 不社畜化 myself. Comments here are closed. Head over to Japan Pulse for discussion.

Interesting discussion about farts happening on my Google Buzz import of this post. When I wrote my rules for kanji compounds, I knew that the VERB + DIRECT OBJECT was in the Chinese order, but I didn’t know much more than that. Roy from Mutantfrog pointed out that some Japanese words are in this order [...]

One of the central themes of this blog is my lack of Japanese knowledge and how I’ve overcome it – how I’ve learned from mistakes, different study strategies I’ve used to improve, things I wish I had known. Well, I still have a lot of unanswered questions, so I thought that I’d let you guys [...]