What if you could spend the next thirty days honing the way you learn Japanese and as a result shave thirty years off your Japanese studies? Would you do it? I for one wouldn’t want you to look like this by the time you’re fluent. He didn’t know how to study Japanese very well… That’s [...]
A lot of people have this misconception that you have to be smart to tackle big undertakings like learning Japanese, or anything else for that matter. The idea seems to be that if you’re not smart enough to be immediately good at something, then it will be an uphill battle the whole way. But surprisingly, [...]
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 [...]
