Japanese text on the web is a lot like politics and sausage – it’s a messy process that nobody should ever have to see. But in the time I’ve been working at Tofugu, I’ve had to bear witness to some horrible, horrible things. Let me pull back the curtain for a bit and show the [...]
A year ago today, the fourth-largest earthquake in recorded history hit Japan, followed by a series of tsunami and nuclear meltdowns. I vividly remember watching the disaster unfold over a live video stream, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. It felt like I was watching footage from a disaster movie. A lot has [...]
Over on Mutantfrog Travelogue, a post went up earlier this week called “My Japanese sucks and always will.” The post talks about how the author, somebody who’s a long-time student of Japanese, passed the JLPT 1, and has worked and lived in Japan for several years, still doesn’t feel like his Japanese is good enough. [...]
Japanese can be a tough language to get into. Not because it’s a hard language to learn, necessarily, but because there are a bunch of mental barriers and misconceptions. Koichi’s talked a bit about this before, but there’s a bit of an elephant in the room: Japanese has a reputation for being hard to learn. [...]
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 [...]
