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. [...]
Ahhh, today’s blog post isn’t so much of a post, but an announcement of a new addition to our Guide library. It could easily be its own post, but we felt it is more appropriate to segregate it into a guide. About a month ago, we announced our intentions in developing How-To guides to help aid you, our [...]
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 [...]
Most languages have different ways of writing letters and characters. In English, there’s not only printed script, but cursive, and a million different fonts and variants thereof, and people are constantly churning out new and different ways of expressing the English language. Japanese is no different. There are tons and tons of ways to write [...]
Japan has had many different names in its time. We in America are lucky. We just have “America,” “The United States,” and “The United States Of America.” I don’t think we’ve really been called much else, at least not as an entire nation. Japan, on the other hand, has been called so many different things, [...]
When you’re sitting there writing or typing something, you may take for granted the little things… little things like periods, commas, and quotation marks. That’s cool – they only hold together everything a sentence holds dear. If you didn’t have these little things, this “punctuation” if you will, the fabric of sentence time would tear [...]
![Actionable Ways To Make Japanese Obvious To You [Obvious]](http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/themes/whitelight/functions/thumb.php?src=wp-content/uploads/2011/11/light2.jpg&w=960&h=200&zc=1&q=90)
In this series of “obvious” posts, we’ve gone over several things. First, we talked about epiphanies and how to get them. Then we went over confusion, and why it’s such a good thing. Lastly, we looked at conscious competence to show you why you’re having trouble (as well as the four stages one goes through [...]
“Don’t look now, but there’s some weirdo behind us taking a picture.” Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. A few weeks ago, I was reading The Most Human Human, a book about artificial intelligence, linguistics and chatbots. One of the most interesting things I learned from this book was how difficult it is to [...]
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, [...]
Your best friend and worst enemy. We’ve all been guilty of using online translators at one time or another. Maybe you were just translating some Japanese you found online, or trying to figure out what that Jpop song just said. Or maybe you were using online translators to finish your Japanese homework. (Don’t worry, I [...]
