Articles on learning Japanese, culture, and media reviews (manga, novels, etc.) [EMAIL CONTACT: selftaughtjapanese -at- gmail.com]
In a recent post I talked about a tool that I wrote that allows looking up usage frequency for Japanese words and phrases, in other words how often words are used in practice. This is something I find important because there are countless words in Japanese but if you try and memorize every word you… Read More »
The other day I tried the ramen at Kayo Ramen, a restaurant that is relatively new to the Cedar Hills shopping center in Beaverton, Oregon (near Portland). I’m quite picky and after a quick glance of what appeared to be zero asian people working there, I admit my expectations were low, but nevertheless I still… Read More »
(I train and help teach a style of Aikido called “Ki Aikido”, more formally “Shinshin Touitsu Aikido” 心身統一合氣道, that has a strong emphasis on applying lessons learned on the mat in real life. If you want to get a summary about this style of martial art before going through this article, check out this page.)… Read More »
One of my favorite Japanese authors to translate is Juza Unno (海野十三）a figure known as a major influence to modern Japanese science fiction (he even wrote the first modern dystopian story). Having been trained in areas such as electronics himself, Juza Unno’s quirky stories often include cutting-edge technological ideas, such as a video phone, a… Read More »
I've written a tool that shows the popularity for a word or phrase across 3 data sources (web, forums, classical literature), as well as a list of multi-year trends across these data sets. This allows mining information about words to help understand their context that may be difficult to acquire other places.
Generally speaking there are two types of meanings one can ascribe to a phrase or sentence: the literal one (using basic textbook/dictionary meanings and grammar rules) as well as the non-literal one, the latter being a catch all category for various “hidden” things in the words and how they are commonly used. This article is… Read More »
Despite having studied Japanese for over 20 years I still try to continue learning, which is one of the reasons I subscribe to some Japanese teaching channels on X that I flip through once in a while. One slang phrase that came up the other day was それな [sore na], which literally means “that”, but… Read More »
Japanese classic literature can be a bit difficult to break into because of many differences between modern Japanese and Japanese from over half a century ago. Fortunately, there are many books out there to help you out, as well as an amazing resource called Aozora Bunko (青空文庫), which contains full listings of over ten thousand… Read More »
Around two weeks ago I saw the first episode of the new Netflix drama “Human Vapor” (in Japanese ガス人間, which is literally “gas human”), and was so excited by the first episode that I wrote a quick summary of it here. I’m glad to say I continued watching, and despite some ups and downs, overall… Read More »
A great thing about languages is that many things you experience have a context, so even if you don’t know all the words and grammar involved, you can figure it out. For example, if you told someone you would be a trillionaire someday, they might tell you: Just from the tone of their voice, in… Read More »