When it comes to Japanese, I still have a long ways to go and a lot to learn. But, I’ve had lots of time to learn about learning, make mistakes, and apply plenty of learning theories of my own. Looking back now to when I was a wee lil’ lad, so naive and innocent (and [...]
Last week, the New York Times published a story called “The Myth of Japan’s Failure” about how people (especially in the West) tend to view Japan’s economy. Even though Japan has the third largest economy in the world, Japan somehow is still the laughingstock of the business pages. I thought that the article did a [...]
I am a man of simpler tastes. For me, the top posts I’ve chosen weren’t necessarily filled with informative content or of culturally importance. Nope. No siree! The one’s I’ve chosen were the ones that made me laugh, the ones we had fun making, or the ones that set important milestones in Tofugu’s history. My [...]
Although I’ve been a long-time reader of Tofugu (since ‘07, I think?), this was my first year getting to write and work for Tofugu. It’s been a lot of fun writing and reading so many posts this year, especially because 2011 had more Tofugu posts than any other year ever. These 5 posts were my [...]
2011 was a great year for Tofugu (I mean, I’m here now, right?) and there have been a lot of good posts and a lot of good videos. Here I have singled out five of my absolute favorites from the year. If you haven’t already read these, you most definitely should. They are great and [...]
All the regular writers at Tofugu are writing about their favorite posts of 2011, so these are my favorites (koichi). These aren’t necessarily the most popular posts (in fact, none of them were much more than average by the popularity metric), but these are the posts I’m most proud of / the ones that entertained [...]
Do you know what is probably the number one thing keeping people (and possibly you) from learning Japanese? Fear. Cold, dank, heart stopping, FEAR. Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it’s at least an underlying whispering thing that erodes your courage with time. In this post, I’m going to talk about this fear, [...]
To fling poo, or not to fling poo. That is the question. In previous “Obvious” posts, we’ve gone over both the idea of achieving and noticing more epiphanies (because all people need to have X number of epiphanies to level up your Japanese) as well as striving for confusion (because people who are confused are [...]
The news of Steve Jobs’ passing hit everyone here at Tofugu like a brick. We were silent for a while, feeling very shocked. There’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said by the news, blogs, and so on. So, hopefully this post doesn’t come off as too weird, too. For some reason I [...]
When it comes to students rating teachers in a classroom, one of the most common things students look at is clarity. “Did I understand what this teacher was teaching me?” “Was the teacher clear in what they’re teaching?” Now, sometimes this is probably a good thing. I’ve had some terrible teachers and a lot of [...]
