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Holidays get deadly with Death Note
Life continues to be hectic and updates to this blog will be sparse probably till the end of this year. I had wanted to write a post with a comprehensive review of the Death Note comic book series with...
View ArticleFun stuff for the bored
If your workplace is practically empty like mine, here’s a funny video to lighten up your Chinese studies, that is if you’re studying Chinese at all. China’s Andy Rooney Has Some Funny Opinions About...
View ArticleHere ya go, another resource for y’all
Oops! This was published by accident before I was even halfway done! If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’ll already know that I’m a major advocate of primary materials. This includes reading actual...
View ArticleBeing realistic with your schedule
Wow, I haven’t posted in a while. This post is about schedule management. I’ve had many personal projects I’ve wanted to do. The latest is my private Japanese lessons, which, in my opinion are going...
View ArticleJapanese TV
Here’s a funny blog post about Japanese TV: http://www.gaijinsmash.net/archives/drivel_in_a_box_1.phtml Looks like Japanese TV has remained pretty much the same since I’ve been there. I actually like...
View ArticleMemorable Moments in Language Acquisition
When you aren’t sure what language a conversation was in. Oddly enough, you can recall it in both. When you have a dream in your target language. When you no longer remember what the language sounded...
View ArticleTwitter…
Twitterを使ってみた。でも、使う意味がいまいちわからん。ブログはもう持っているし。 この投稿は、１４０文字以内だよ。だから何だ？どうでもいいじゃないか？
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ibiblio, you rock!
I didn’t notice this until today but the guide to Japanese grammar is featured on the front page of ibiblio! It has brought in about a 100 visitors a week for the past few weeks or about 0.5% of...
View ArticleGoogle Wave
I got an account on Google Wave, which is still in limited preview. I watched the video and I get that it would be a nice tool for online and real-time collaboration. Problem is I don’t really have...
View ArticleSoul Eater
I’ve been watching Soul Eater on youtube the past few days. It’s pretty good and great for keeping up your Japanese. (The subtitled version of course!) But they stopped uploading new episodes in a...
View ArticleDigital Divide
I’ve dealt with a mix of many different types of technologies in the process of building up this site: firebug, ssh/sftp, perl, HTML, DOM, css, javascript, Drupal, XeLaTeX, PHP, MySQL, akismet, and...
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Tae Kim’s random tech news
I tried the new version of Chrome yesterday (see review). The Japanese font still looked crappy. However, I found out that if you change Chrome to the Japanese version, it magically fixes itself....
View ArticleIn my inbox
I got the following email the other day. I thought it was interesting for a number of reasons and instead of replying, decided to share here instead. Hi, You make a good grammar guide, but sadly few...
View ArticleMe, myself, and I
Does anybody else find there’s no good male word for “I”? 「私」 is too formal except for work (which I no longer do in Japanese). I was comfortable with 「俺」 for a while but now I’m too old and Mr....
View ArticleLearning Japanese via anime/manga
There’s a fairly large thread about the merits (or lack thereof) of learning Japanese via anime on my main grammar guide page which I deleted primarily to keep the page clean (and it’s also off-topic)....
View ArticleConverting to a pay site
Not me but it seems more and more language sites are converting to a paid subscription model: Smart.fm, RTK, ChinesePod, JapanesePod101, etc. As a user, it kind of bummer since I don’t feel like...
View ArticleMore SEO stuff
Just for curiosity’s sake, I searched “learn Japanese blog” on Google and my old blog which hasn’t been updated in well over a year turned up near the top of the search results. On the other hand, this...
View ArticleMy facebook page
I was bored so I created a Facebook account (talk about being late to the party!). I have no idea what I’m going to do with it so it’s blank right now. http://www.facebook.com/taekimjapanese...
View ArticleMy facebook group
Merry Christmas! And what better way to spend it then playing around with facebook! I’ve now created a facebook group to connect with other Japanese learners. My facebook group for learning Japanese...
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Can one raise a quadrilingual child?
Can one raise a quadrilingual child in a predominantly English environment? I’d like my daughter to learn Japanese because I like it, Korean because she’s 3/4 Korean, and Mandarin because I just found...
View ArticleSound more Japanese with interjections
When I tutor Japanese, I try to correct non-Japanese interjections whenever possible, the most common one being “umm”. Even the most skilled speakers including native speakers sometimes need to fill...
View ArticleThe VOCALOID phenomenon
There was a story a while back on NPR covering the live concerts with virtual characters, which is pretty interesting but I didn’t realize how cool Vocaloid really is until recently. It has basically...
View ArticlePersonality change by language?
Have you ever felt like your personality changes slightly depending on what language you speak? For example, in Japanese, I feel like I’m a little bit more polite. For example, I might say “shit” or...
View ArticleDon’t README
This post is about how you shouldn’t be reading this post. Still here? Tsk tsk. Lately, I’ve been wrestling with the ratio of how much English vs Japanese to use in my guide. The more Japanese I can...
View ArticleSome crazy stuff is brewing…
It’s hard to imagine but as a kid, the internet didn’t really exist for us common folk. We still had to write letters the old-fashioned way and played with sticks and rocks for entertainment (slight...
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