This week, I mostly read magazines! I bought the autumn edition of the 趣味の文具箱 and a magazine called Sapio. 趣味の文具箱 This magazine is all about fountain pens and ink. The issue 47 is called 『万年筆インクの知りたいこと』and is all about ink. You will find in it interesting charts and analysis, as well as the new colours available..
Book Review: 『未来のミライ』by Mamoru Hosoda
I bought the novelisation of the film 『未来のミライ』by director Mamoru Hosoda to try the collection Tsubasa of the publisher Kadokawa. Tsubasa is a collection of books for children with full furigana and a wide range of genres classified in different levels of difficulty. 『未来のミライ』, which is novelised by Mamoru Hosoda himself, belongs to the level "小学上級から"...
Korean resources to learn Japanese: how to download audio files
A discussion I had recently in the comments of this blog made me think I should write more about the Korean publisher Darakwon. Darakwon publishes a lot of textbooks to learn foreign languages (including Korean as a foreign language), and Japanese is, with English and Chinese, one of the main languages studied in Korea. I..
Japanese Immersion: October week 2
I have been a little sick this week and haven't done much for my Japanese. First of all, I was a little disappointed, when I watched the 5th episode of the drama 『シグナル 長期未解決事件捜査班』, to find it very difficult to understand. I thought I had made progress, and it is discouraging to realise that I..
Book review: 『流星の絆』by Keigo Higashino
I would like to congratulate myself on having read a +600 pages book in Japanese! As it was a book by Keigo Higashino, it was not a challenging read. I consider his books to be among the easiest books I have read in Japanese so far: a writing style that I think is easy to..
Focus of the week: listening exercise
Why I find it so hard to improve my listening I am used to roughly dividing listening practice into two different activities: Passive immersion: just let an audio run in your target language, you don't have to pay special attention to it or try to understand what it says. Active study: work on a short..
Japanese Immersion: October week 1
Watching a drama, at last! I finally found a drama I like: the Japanese remake of the Korean drama "Signal": 『シグナル 長期未解決事件捜査班』. It is about a police investigation team specialised on old unsolved cases. A walkie-talkie allows one of the members of the team to communicate with one of the detectives from the past, who is..
Currently reading: 『こころ』by 夏目漱石
I have always considered that reading Soseki in Japanese would be one of the greatest achievement of this whole Japanese journey. Since I heard from a Japanese that reading Soseki was hard for Japanese too, I thought I would keep it for "when I am fluent" or something like that. [caption id="attachment_13046" align="alignright" width="194"] 『こころ』by..
Monthly review: September 2018
Monthly review: September I have tried a new thing this month, which is to define some monthly goals and publish them on my homepage. The goals I have chosen for September were: And now, it is time to see how far I went! First of all Anki! My usual practice is to save in my..
Japanese immersion: September week 4
To be exact, this post should be entitled Japanese non-immersion because the week was a complete disaster. I have been busy with other things and could not even hold to my weekly challenge (it was listening and repeating lines of Isao TAKAHATA's film Only Yesterday). As for immersion, there was almost none, apart from some..
Currently reading: 『日本語びいき』by 清水由美
Once again, I find myself reading several books at the same time! I could not resist this book's title and cover: [caption id="attachment_13017" align="alignleft" width="272"] 『日本語びいき』by 清水由美, illustrated by ヨシタケシンスケ, 中公文庫[/caption] 『日本語びいき』 is written by a Japanese teacher who teaches Japanese to foreigners. From what she writes in her forewords, I guess that there was/is..
Impersonation and language learning
Today's post is about speaking, which is rare on my blog! What triggered it is this video I found on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zgqcQ6Z9Mtw It was a commercial, and for once, I didn't skip it after 5 seconds. This Korean guy learns English by doing impersonations of Sherlock Holmes from the series by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. I always..