Reading a mountain of novels is what takes your Japanese from good to great. But finding material that has a nice balance between what interests you and what you can understand isn’t always the easiest endeavor. What’s worse is that it can become costly at an intermediate or advanced stage, when you want to try out a lot of novels to see what works best … Continue reading →
You want to dive into manga as soon as possible. It’s the next logical step after learning the basics, and it is a great place to enter reading real Japanese material. Where do you start? No matter where you go, you can’t escape the recommendation to try out Yotsuba. The reasons are always the same: it is simply written, easy to understand, has normal daily … Continue reading →
Just when you thought it was safe to read Japanese books while constantly looking up words you don’t know. It’s time to break the habit, and make sure you spend the time to actually have fun reading Japanese books. … Continue reading →
Japanese writing can seem overwhelming at times. You are dealing with 3 writing systems, one of which has detailed intricacies that seem beyond what the human eye was meant to absorb. But you deal with it. Over 125 million people deal with it daily. You start off with words and sentences. They are simple and grow more complex. But Japanese learner life isn’t linear. You … Continue reading →
“You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Your current English-set phone is your shore. Your Japanese-only phone that awaits is your ocean. You get it. You’ve thought about this before. You know it’s time. You have to change your phone language setting to Japanese. This always sounds like a good idea, but is it really that … Continue reading →
You reading Japanese? Great. You want to read faster? Of course you do. Who doesn’t want to gain more enjoyment and knowledge for less time required. Learning to read fast requires the same technique in all languages, but sometimes we have these techniques so ingrained into our native language, we forget how we learned to read at a faster pace. Well I’m here to remind … Continue reading →
Thanks to the internet, we don’t have to be in Japan to immerse ourselves in the language. From all the entertainment at our fingertips to making friends from Japan online, we have the abilitiy to create a little Japan of our own to learn and grow from. The only thing that stands in our way are all those little distractions out there chipping away at … Continue reading →
Everyone loves easy. A simple sentence to tell a simple point. Once you see the dreaded Japanese comma 、your head starts to spin. With each subsequent comma, your head spins that much faster until the period. Where does the sentence start and end? Who is saying what? What is the subject, object, and the point? One Jalup user put it well: I’m not sure how to … Continue reading →
