Other articles


  1. The Opposites Game

    About a week ago I played an opposites game in a mixed group with native speakers. It's a game where participants form a circle and ask their neighbour to name an antonym for a word. Americans go heavy on adjectives at first: takai-yasui, semai-hiroi, and so on. Japanese endeavour to …

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  2. BRR (Badass Raw Reader) Evolution

    I had "大阪万博", conventionally known as "Osaka World Fair", for about three years, unread. Then, I picked it up a few days ago, and surprise! I can read it well enough to enjoy it {for the curious, it's a compendum of tributes by famous manga artists, and …

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  3. Guide to katakana ri, so, n

    When Kate of Sketchbook mentioned being unable to distinguish ri, so, and n, I thought she was playing to stereotype. Today, however, Steven admitted to mixing them in Ken's comments. But it's simple, in the same way distinguishing Sumire and Ami was simple.

    The process takes up to two steps …

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  4. Supermarket Nipponism No.2

    The series of Precure candy came to a close, but never fear: the American food industry is infiltrated by weaboos. While the candy was sold by a store that may be described as "ethnic" (e.g. selling Heinz beans), this specimen came from an honest supermarket:

    What do you think …

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  5. Japanese and self-studying

    Apropos Chikorita hitting the rough road towards self-improvement, the other day I was rewatching Ai yori Aoshi 01. For years, one thing about it bothered me: when Kaoru refers to Aoi's broken strap, he says: "Harao ga...". It's quite clear, but there's no such word.


    And so, years passed, and …

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  6. Appreciate Miku Hatsune

    My new Jeep comes with MP3 CD but no USB or SD, so I went back to burning CDs (it's a purposefuly crude vehicle: no power windows, for one). Doing that, I misunderstood how the -path-list option of genisoimage worked, and thus created an ISO where all tracks were shuffled …

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  7. 2DT on Hanamaru

    2D Teleidoscope:

    Then just the other day, I was assisting an English class when I saw the teacher draw an interesting picture next to an important grammatical point: The drawing was a spiral, with a sort of fluffy petal pattern surrounding it. It looked so terribly familiar, but where on …

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  8. Real pencil boards

    About a year after I bought a full-page Horo pencil board by MediaWorks, I got a chance to use it in anger. It turned out pretty amazing.

    Previously, I used the "mini" boards that used to come with first-print R1 DVDs (in particular, Geneon's Kamichu in R1 had them, and …

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