American Gaijin
-
Sadness
When you’re gone, how can I even try to go on SOS – ABBA When I was young, my parents, myself, and my sibling were travelling to a city on the western side of Michigan. I remember driving down I-94, and they had the radio on. A jazz version of a song came on, with…
-
Chibi Maruko-Chan Goes to a Tropical Island
Last night I watched an episode of Chibi Maruko-Chan (English dubbed, unforunately). In this episode, Maruko’s ojii-san wins a trip to a tropical island, but can’t go. Maruko, in her own initimitable way, manages to finagle her way into going. On the way, she has some really fun adventures and makes a new friend. In…
-
Normalcy
In the cult I grew up in, throughout my childhood, there were some very strict expectations about how one was to behave. One was always to behave in an “upright” manner – to be honest, the ideas of tatemae and honne are not really all that foreign to me, as I lived that as a…
-
So I watched some Anime…
I have some extra time on my hands at the moment, so I decided that I was going to try some anime. The first one I watched was “Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid”. It was well animated. It was funny at times. And it was kind of dumb. I didn’t watch any further than the first…
-
Tips and Tricks for Japanese Learners
Over the past ouple of years, I’ve learned a few things about Japanese that are not obvious to people just starting out in Japanese. Let me try to summarize them here. Maybe I’ve said some of these before, but I’ll just repeat here if so, I guess it bears repeating. Okurigana Okurigana are those hiragana…
-
Sometimes I’m Wrong
I like to say that I’m never really wrong – as my decisions and opinions are nearly always right based upon the information I have. But sometimes I don’t have enough information, so as I get more information, my opinions can change. That kind of makes my previous ones wrong. I don’t really mind all…
-
Life
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but there is a thought that, if I pursue it with any seriousness at all, can lead to insanity. In fact, as I pursue the thought, I can feel just the barest tendrils of insanity taking hod and I have to pull away from that thought.…
-
Entirely Removing Third-Person Pronouns
I mentioned a while ago that I was going to attempt to remove third person pronouns from my everyday language as much as possible. There are several reasons for this. The first is that Japanese and other languages get along just fine without using them as an ordinary part of speech. I mean, they do…
-
Mikan
Today, if this post goes how I think it will, we’re going to start with mandarin oranges and little Japanese children, and end up with deep philosophy. Last night, I couldn’t sleep well, and the song “Mikan” by Morning Musume popped into my head. So I looked it up. Mikan turns out to mean, basically,…
-
Japanese Rail
After writing a post absolutely excoriating certain aspects of Japanese culture (and rightly so), maybe this is a good time to post about something I really love about Japan. One of my favorite things to do of late, especially as I’ve been a little ill lately, is to watch YouTube videos of the Japanese rail…