Daily flash card reviews have a way of reinforcing the same language over and over into your head. This is good. It’s how you remember. But sometimes this can have the side effect of certain words being your “go to” words when trying to express yourself. While there is nothing wrong with saying 食べる, おいしい, and すごい at every possible moment, you may want to … Continue reading →
You’ve moved on from English and are in full-force J-J mode. While things aren’t easy, you know what you have to do. It’s just a matter of staying the course. You find a Japanese word you don’t know, you look it up in Japanese. If it’s not in the dictionary, you use other search methods, but you’ll eventually find your answers. There is an interesting … Continue reading →
About a year and a half into my studying, I started meeting with a volunteer teacher (in training) to practice Japanese conversation at the local international center in Chiba. She was young, energetic, and quite far from the standard Japanese teacher image. We mostly just talked for 2 hours a week, and I would bring in whatever burning questions I had or things I absolutely needed … Continue reading →
I used to meet people who would tell me something I thought was odd at the time. “Sometimes I like to just randomly read through the dictionary.” Whattt? A dictionary? For fun? I fully respect a dictionary for the powerful resource it is and would have been lost without it. But the thought of sitting down one night when I wanted to relax, lighting a … Continue reading →
Numbers…. numbers… so much fun to be had. So much counting to be done. So much searching for how to count those numbers. When you count something in Japanese, a “counter” is added to the end of the number, which is determined based on what type of object it is. The result? A hundred objects, a hundred counters. And you must know them all. While you would probably … Continue reading →
Names. Reading them sounds easy, and something that would come instantly. Yet they take a long time to master. Not only is it hard to remember the vast amount of Japanese names, many take unique readings on common kanji, or use rarer kanji you’ve never seen, and combine in ways destined to confuse you. So you come across a name you can’t read. What next? The … Continue reading →
Online dictionaries are great. Easy to use, ever expanding vocabulary, and a wide range to choose from to meet your needs. However they don’t have everything. Language is too fast for them to keep up, and a lot of language just never makes their way into them. So what do you do when you get the dreaded “no results found” in your dictionary of choice? … Continue reading →
I discovered Japanese Level Up early in my studies and was impatient to start the J-J process. But once I finally had the requisite 1000 J-E cards, I found that my trees weren’t ending anywhere near within the 40 card large-but-manageable example and I scrapped some that seemed like they’d just never end. After switching to an elementary school dictionary and some perseverance and experimentation … Continue reading →
