I have a serious post in the works, but this one is fun, I hope. Today I went around my current town of Austin, Texas, looking for interesting Japanese things. I found a store called FIT Japanese Store over on Lamar, in the ChinaTown shopping center. It had a pretty
The one thing that my semi-immersion into Japanese culture has taught me is that they are, truly, foreign to me. This is not a bad thing, but it’s solidifying my theory that in order to understand a language, one must first make an effort to understand the culture that the language
Ever since I started learning Japanese, I’ve made it a personal goal to try to understand idol culture, because I feel that in doing so maybe I can understand a little more about what makes the larger Japanese culture tick. I want to discuss two idols: Kusumi Koharu and Minegishi
When learning a new language, one of the first things that almost everyone does is one of two things: Compare it to your native language Suggest improvements Now is Japanese a very efficient language? Not really. The kanji are elegant, but obviously it is a steep barrier to entry. And
Ogawa Makoto is a former Morning Musume idol, who took a couple of years off of performing to go to New Zealand to learn English. She recounted her experience in words similar to this (and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember them entirely): I went to New Zealand to learn
In computer science, there is a concept called bootstrapping. It applies primarily at two points: The first is when you start a computer up, and the second is when you write a new language. It refers to “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps”. When you begin writing another language,
Perhaps one of the most challenging things about learning Japanese is that it does not have an alphabet – but it appears to have an alphabet. So we, as English speakers, try to overlay what we know about alphabets onto Japanese, and then it simply doesn’t work. Japanese, instead, has syllabaries –
I’ve tried several different approaches to learning Japanese. Some work better than others. The first thing I looked at was duolingo. I then trashed that very quickly, as I didn’t think it would do well at teaching me what I wanted to know. I looked at Rosetta Stone and tried it
In my ever widening exploration of Japanese popular culture, I have run into a few groups in the style of Morning Musume. AKB48 and its sisters, etc. One thing I particularly liked about Morning Musume was, in its golden days, the way the girls all seemed like sisters. I realize
Who am I? I am a 40-mumble-mumble year old computer engineer from Texas. I am single and have a cat. My hobbies include annoying said cat, playing piano, and studying philosophy and theology (I’m a stand-up philosopher!) Politically, my views are generally none of your business, but I’ll promise you