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Chapter 5 of Fight Club is another scene from the testicular cancer support group. At the start of the scene Thomas, one of the members, is telling the group how his ex-wife had her first child (with her new husband). In English, we usually say that a woman “has” a baby and that […]

I mentioned a few days ago that I finished my first Japanese manga, Doraemon. Normally when I read something in Japanese, I input some sentences into my SRS. I didn’t do this with Doraemon. I was 500+ cards behind in my SRS and I wasn’t ready for more. Well, now my […]

I finished my first Japanese comic (manga) last week. Most Japanese learners jump into manga pretty early, but I didn’t because comics aren’t that interesting to me. Everyone says they are good study aids though, so I finally gave in and bought the first book of Doraemon. To be honest, I wanted […]

Last chapter I talked about mumbled Japanese and how it is difficult to pick up with an untrained ear. This time I’m going to look at another sticking point for me: katakana loan words.
Katakana Loan Words
When Japanese borrows words from other languages, naturally it changes those words to fit the Japanese sound system. […]

Last chapter I talked about some of the interesting differences I found between the English and Japanese versions of Fight Club. This time I’m going to do more of the same. I mentioned before that watching Fight Club in Japanese was difficult for me because my listening comprehension skills are poor. That’s […]

I announced in the inaugural Project Mayhem post that I would be studying Fight Club, in Japanese, in order to work on my embarrassingly insufficient Japanese listening skills. Japanese Fight Club is pretty difficult for my level. I’d estimate that 50% of the vocabulary that I ran into in the first 3 scenes […]

The Japanese dictionary order is a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, wa, n.
I’ve been studying Japanese for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned the above dictionary order for the Japanese syllabary. The main reason for this is that I mostly use an electronic dictionary to look […]

A few posts ago I mentioned that I had a new project to target my deficient Japanese listening comprehension skills. I stated that I was going to watch one of my favorite movies one scene at a time, over and over again, in dubbed Japanese. I ended the post with the first line […]