I am not doing much to actively study Japanese lately, but there is something that I do every day since February: writing a page in Japanese in マイブック. マイブック is a sort of agenda that looks exactly like a book. It is published by 新潮文庫 every year. It uses the same format, paper and characteristics..

I have been much into stationery lately, and while I was looking for information to sustain my newly born passion, I discovered a most interesting site: ほぼ日刊イトイ新聞, or ほぼ日 for short. This online magazine was created by Shigesato ITOI on June 6th, 1998, and celebrated its 20th anniversary some days ago. As they say on..

I am currently reading two challenging books that are not fiction 「在日」by 姜尚中 (カン・サンジュン) and 「朝鮮の開国と日清戦争」by 渡辺装機 (わたなべそうき). While reading these difficult books, I visualised myself trying to hold on to some kind of imaginary comprehension line. To me, this comprehension line is the point where you go from darkness to light. It is also..

May has been without a doubt a month of drawing and journaling. These two activities have found their place in my daily schedule by replacing what used to be an ineffective "Japanese study." For months now, I have been thinking about how to continue learning Japanese without taking classes nor preparing for the JLPT. I..

I started writing a monthly review last month, and I find it very beneficial. This month, too, I will look into what I have done and not done. Anki I guess that we all experience ups and downs with our SRS, Anki or other... I have been experiencing a total breakdown during the whole month of..

It is hard to believe, but on Wednesday (April 18th) this blog will be one-year-old! 😄 To celebrate, I want to write a post about how blogging helped me to learn Japanese. Positive energy First of all, I love my blog because it is mine, and I am sure that we all feel the same...

Today, I would like to talk about the Japanese books I bought or received and couldn't read because they were too difficult for me. When I first wanted to read books in Japanese, I bought mangas. The problem is that with exception from One Piece and Case closed that I love, I don't much enjoy reading..

I was not very productive this weekend concerning both Japanese and English. I haven't even read much. This made me reflect on the reasons why I sometimes feel demotivated, and I tried to find ways to snap out of it. Japanese is hard I start with this because I think that it is a red..

In October of last year, I started a bullet journal for the first time. It was dedicated to studying Japanese. I promised that I would come back some months after to see if this method worked for me or not. Though I am not strictly bullet journalling anymore, it did immensely improve the way I..

Onomatopoeia is probably one of the fun and recreative aspects of the Japanese language, and I have always been assuming that most Japanese learners remember and use these cute words effortlessly. The problem Now, I don't think that I have a childhood trauma relative to onomatopoeia (but who knows?), but the truth is that I..

Emotions can influence the way we learn a language. Positive emotions and motivation go together, but it took me a long time to realise it. Being aware of how we attach particular emotions to our target language is the first step to building a better long-term motivation. I consider that learning a language is an activity closely..