At one point or another in learning anything, we will frequently reach a plateau in our ability. This intermediate plateau, or “okay plateau” is where many people tend to get the most discouraged with their studies and believe it to be too much work to conquer this level. This plateau is probably the most important [...]
Every Sunday we gather the week’s weird Japanese news and present it to you in our Sunday News column. It might not always be hard-hitting, but we hope that it still informs and entertains you. Enjoy! [Header image source.]
Although there have been some pretty big chimpanzees in American show-business, I don’t think I can ever remember one that had a bulldog for a best friend. Nor one that looked so good in overalls. For today’s Saturday timewaster, I’d like to share with you my favorite chimpanzee of all time. He lives in a [...]
It’s no secret that Japan and Hawaii have a special relationship. There are a ton of people with Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii, it’s common vacation destination for many Japanese (my Japanese relatives took their honeymoon in Hawaii), and there’s lots of Japanese elements in Hawaiian culture. Spam musubi, anybody? But Japan’s impact on Hawaii [...]
We’ve been moderately quiet about the kanji learning site WaniKani. Since it’s getting close to private alpha time (if you get the 30 Day Ebook there’s a link in there for previously said private alpha) I wanted to shed some details on the project that Viet’s been so hard at work on all these months. [...]
What is “beautiful?” Depends who you ask! Beauty is a very subjective thing, and its definition changes wildly depending on who you ask. What’s ugly and hideous to one person is attractive and sexy to the next. There’s no better example of this than the Japanese yaeba phenomenon. Some people in Japan think that a [...]
You know that homeless guy standing on the corner yelling angrily at his invisible friend about nuclear kitten proliferation in the USSR? That’s who I want you to become (the crazy one, not the completely sane invisible one). Learning Japanese is about the consistent things you can do every day (that’s exactly why I wrote [...]
