The other day, one of the little elementary kids I watch (for my job) offered me something from her snack box. It was a packet of dry (かんそう) natto. I’d heard about dry natto before, but had never had it. Now, let me stop here and say this: if you don’t know what natto is, [...]
Ah, tenmusu, one of my favorites. Basically, tenmusu is a little piece of tempura (天ぷら) snuggled away in a miniaturized nori-covered rice ball (おむすび). It is most famous in Nagoya, but available all over Japan. Its popularity could be attributed to the fact that it’s a perfectly-balanced snack, with carbohydrates from the rice, protein from [...]
In almost every aspect of Japanese language, culture, fashion, sushi, trains, robots (well, at least the first two), you’ll find that there are multiple levels of politeness. I’ve heard different numbers, ranging from a generalized three levels to a very specific and terrifying nine. It all depends on whether you know the other person well, [...]
You TOO can learn Japanese from anime in only 5 minutes a day! WRONG. If you think you can learn Japanese from anime, you have been sorely misguided. Perhaps it is a genetic defect. Perhaps your parents drank a lot before you were born. Maybe you’ve been disillusioned by anime conventions. Or it could be [...]
When learning kanji, a lot of books and teachers expect you to memorize stroke order solely through practice and repetition (does the image remind anybody of their kanji book?). I’m definitely, all about repetition, but what they don’t tell you is that there is actually a way to write kanji in the correct stroke order [...]
Hot hitting Ichiro Suzuki has hit over .300 every year he’s played in America. Likewise, Japan’s suicide rate has hit 30,000 every year for the last nine years. Time to stop it with the baseball analogies. 32,155 (according to the Mainichi Daily News) people committed suicide in Japan in 2006, a 1.2 percent decrease from [...]
The title says it all, welcome to tofugu.com, a proud replacement for English Koichiben, which soon will be fully integrated into this site (resistance is futile). Why change, you ask? Well, I’ve been reading this book about branding (great book, if you’re interested let me know and I’ll tell you what it is). In that [...]
