There was somewhat recent Guardian article  that got a lot of Facebook love about a month ago. It was essentially the rehashed news report of an annual survey about Japan's sex habits, to put it bluntly. The Guardian did a little more leg work with it ..

Lately, I've gotten more and more annoyed at doing vocabulary drills. A lot of this has to do with it getting tremendously boring to do the same thing over and over. But, also because of being at a higher level, it is easy to get two words that have simil

Japan is known for its cities. If you ask someone to imagine Japan, one of the first things that probably comes up is the scramble walk in Shubuya, where hundreds if not thousands of people cross the street every time all the lights turn red. Or you proba

After the July test, I've been moving toward more natural study methods and keeping my nose out of drill books. I started doing some reading of PHP, a small magazine with short essays that have relatively short essays that have relatively simple themes. I

It doesn't get much mainstream press these days, but Japan has a bit of a debt problem. The national debt will be an estimated 245% of the GDP, which seems simply unfathomable. In order to pay such a debt off, Japan spends something like 23% of its budget

After the test results last month, I've started to rework my studying a little more to get ready for the December test. At this point, I feel like I know the skills I need. I just need to over-learn everything so it's automatic. I feel like that is really

Your typical full name in Japan is made up of 4 kanji – 2 kanji for a first name or given name and 2 kanji for the last name or surname. There are somewhere around 600 or so extra kanji that are used just for names, but names also use common kanji like

Last month, I said I was going to start reading Kazoku Geemu, but I got sidetracked for technical reasons. Apparently, you need a kindle device, or kindle for Android to read the eBook version (Kindle of iOS doesn't work). I don't happen to have either a

Tokyo and Osaka are two massive clusters of people living fairly close to each other. Tokyo is ranked as the largest metropolitan area by population in the world with about 32 million people, whereas the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto area is ranked as the 9th large...

One of my original goals when I first decided to study a little harder and take my Japanese to the N1 level was to become a translator. I'm currently teaching English now, and I enjoy it, but translation has always seemed more fun for me because it is lik