(Click here to jump right to the tool) In designing and shipping features for my new learning site Japanese Vocab Maker, I’ve realized that the popularity of a feature doesn’t necessarily correlate to how “cool” I think a feature is, or how much time it takes me to develop. Rather, I’ve noticed a trend where… Read More »
Pronunciation in Japanese has two elements: the sounds themselves (vowel/contant) and the intonations on each mora (a mora is basically a syllable). The former is relatively easy to learn, though there are some things that may give you difficulty like the “fu” sound, the “ra” row (ra,ri,ru,re,ro) and the “o” vowel. However, once you learn… Read More »
A few weeks ago I posted a series of articles detailing my travels in Japan this year, and I bought a DJI OSMO Pocket 3 and took it with with me almost everywhere we went. I recorded over three hours of video on this trip and, as promised I am sharing my compilation of the… Read More »
On a recent mini-trip to Eugene, Oregon, we enjoyed time at a few natural parks (including a rose garden), and had some delicious coffee at a place called Alchemy, which happened to have a nice assortment of board games. Although a few of the places we wanted to visit ended up being closed that day… Read More »
(jump right to the book scanner here) Since I was young I have always found Japanese culture interesting, but in my late highschool / early college years two things particularly motivated me to start learning Japanese seriously: anime and Japanese literature. Understanding anime without subtitles is a challenge, to be sure, but worst case you… Read More »
Earlier this year I spent around 10 days in Japan, which I wrote about in detail here. While I tried to give much information about what I saw and felt, there are some general topics that didn’t fit into that series, and I wanted to write about separately. This article is about my thoughts about… Read More »
When I was young, listening to music was a huge part of my life, including listening to the radio every day and a variety of CDs. But as time went on, I stopped mostly doing both of those, though I still listen to music on YouTube once in a while. Being into Japanese culture, you… Read More »
For a few months I’ve been working on Japanese Vocab Maker, a tool that began as a way to extract vocabulary words from a variety of sources, but has grown to encompass a variety of learning tools. One of the most difficult parts of Japanese to master is the pronunciation, which is not just because… Read More »
xOften when some cultural word or idea crosses country boundaries, the word evolves or changes in some way. This is a natural thing, but having said that, these words can create misunderstandings about a word or phrase’s original meaning. In this post I want to talk about the word “Ikigai”, a word that has been… Read More »
For the majority of my life, I learned things three ways: via a formal school with well-defined criteria (elementary school, etc.), private teacher (flute), and no-rules freeform (fiction writing, etc.). Each of these has a different learning style, but what is defined as “right” or “correct” is fairly well-defined. For example, in subjects like math… Read More »