American Gaijin
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My Thoughts on Japanese Culture
Ever since I began learning about Japan and its culture, I’ve been of decidedly mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, they are particularly imaginative when it comes to existing means of artistic expression – they come up with things that we in the west would never even dream of, and the world is…
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Steps Toward Fluency
One of the things I continually harp on this blog is the fact that you can’t rush Japanese. It’s too big. No matter how much you memorize, or how much you cram down your mind and then forget, you’re not going to get much closer to fluency with the language. I think there are two…
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What I Hate About Most Online “Learn Japanese” Sites
I’ve been using Wanikani lately I’ve gotten to level 5, and it’s actually a little frustrating. You have to get the radicals/kanji/vocabulary right a specific number of times, spaced out over months, before they consider the item “burned”, and you don’t have to see it again. And they dole out the lessons sparingly. You can’t…
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Loanwords
One thing I find fascinating is that a large fraction of the Japanese language is made up of loanwords, I’ve heard about ten percent of their language being of English origin. But they take our words and adapt them to their syllabic structure, making them Japanese words. Most English speakers wouldn’t even understand them. There’s…
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Two Years In
I don’t remember the exact day that I decided to study Japanese, but I think I’m approaching the two year anniversary at some point in the next couple of months. It’s been a lot of ups and a lot of downs, a lot of “I don’t know if I can do this” and a lot…
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Two More Months Later…
Man, has this been a difficult blog to keep up. My feelings about Japanese and Japan have oscillated over the past few months that I’ve gone from enthusiastic to “what’s the friggin’ point”, sometimes in the space of a few seconds. I still don’t really know what my block is, but I remain with the theory…
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Three Months Later…
Posts like these are hard to write, because I never quite now how they’re quite going to turn out, and I never quite know how much of my soul I’m going to bare in the process. About three months or so ago, I had a medical crisis that caused me to pretty much drop off…
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Is Japanese a Waste of Time?
A couple of days ago, I got a pretty sweet invitation. It’s the opportunity to go to Japan in a year or so, with a group. The chance also possibly (depending on the ticket lottery) involves the chance to see the 2020 Olympics. It is pretty much the chance of a lifetime. I would have…