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Friday, April 17, 2009. 1:27 pm. I started by adding a few new vocab words to my japtemp card deck, words I learned this morning from my girlfriend, one of which is too slangy to even be in the dictionary I love slang! Japtemp is now at: 5 scheduled, 4 unlearned. I went through the [...]

Here are the Japanese sound effects for animals. These are the cries animals make. In Japan, it’s common to speak of an animal’s “voice”– koe (声). Some of these, such as the turtle, merely convey the animal’s “mood”, since obviously turtles don’t actually make any noise! I got these from my girlfriend, who speaks Tokyo [...]

Tues, Apr 14, 12:21 AM. It’s technically April 14, but it still counts as April 13. Lately I’ve been feeling really good, which means I need less sleep. I’ve started going to the gym every day again, which is very difficult since I’m really busy lately. Speaking of which, today was busy as heck. And [...]

I recently made a breakthrough in study habits which allowed me to start adding new kanji cards to my Mnemosyne deck at last. See, the past few months (since December), my main deck’s been clogged with failed cards, so if I added new stuff there it’d just get even worse. Yeah, the failed stack has [...]

Now that I’ve switched to the Satellite Method of Spaced Repetition (explained in detail in my article, Using Multiple SRS Decks), I’ve finally broken a long kanji drought and have started learning new kanji (Chinese characters) again. In order to learn the Chinese characters most effectively, I’ve learned how imaginative memory works. And now that [...]

Japanese is what’s called an SOV-language. That stands for Subject-Object-Verb, and it means that in a standard Japanese sentence, the subject comes first, followed by the object, followed by the verb. For example, 猫は魚を食べる “cat fish eat”, which means “cats eat fish”. Actually, SOV is part of a broader language classification system (English is SVO [...]

A false cognate of a word is a word in another language with similar form and meaning, but which is not actually related etymologically. In other words, the similarity is pure coincidence. The “false” part is to distinguish it from a cognate, which is just an etymologically related word, and which (if we go by [...]

Romaji (also sometimes called Romanji) is the writing of Japanese words in Roman script, i.e., the same script as English, Spanish, French, German and so on. You already know plenty of examples of romaji, words like “ninja”, “dojo”, “sushi”. In these examples, romaji is necessary because Japanese words are being borrowed into English. In a [...]

As English speakers, we already know quite a few Japanese Vocabulary Words, without even realizing we know them. Japanese is a language where words get put together to form new words. We know a lot of compound words, and you can break those compound words down into their smaller pieces to get a whole ton [...]

For a moment, forget all about language classrooms and textbooks and teachers. How does a person naturally learn a language? By exposure, exposure, exposure. We learn language by being immersed in the culture where it is spoken. We hear millions of sentences spoken, and each time, our subconscious mind associates something to the sentence. The [...]