Today I flew back to New York (more specifically, Newark). Before I left Amsterdam, I enjoyed my first full-body scan. The flight was amazing. I got an aisle seat, plus an empty seat next to me, and I worked the…
This is the last day of German, and in honor of it, I am going to come clean about my dictionary addiction. It is pretty obvious by now that I am addicted to Pimsleur, but I haven’t yet confessed…
I am sick with a cold, so Japanese did not start off too energetically. To launch my first day, I did about 50 minutes of Pimsleur Japanese lessons. It went okay, but I am not highly functional. Rosetta Stone for…
I have a cold. Colds are not good for language skills, including in your native tongue. Today I got out my Rosetta Stone disks and tried to install the software. I promptly got trapped in software-bug hell, in an endless…
I find myself automatically making a mental checklist of what seems hard, and what seems easy—or at least less hard—about learning Japanese. First the hard things. One is that you have a lot of courtesy-related language stuff to…
The beginnings of unfamiliar languages with different writing systems and sounds are always a little tough. Sushi Hana Part of the problem in this case is that I am still feeling under the weather. My brain is stupid with this…
Today I learned that my initial euphoria over Japanese verbs was misguided. There I was this afternoon, sitting in a café, casually reading along in the same grammar book I have alluded to previously (Master the Basics: Japanese), when I…
I have just learned that itsu is “when” in Japanese. One of the things I love about this project is how different these simple little concepts look and sound in different languages. I mean, itsu and “when” are…
My German test results are in! The highest score you can get is 12. I got an 11 on the oral exam (“nearly fluent”) and a 10 on the writing exam (“advanced plus”). That may sound pretty good, but I was hoping for…
Today as I was reading through the vocabulary list in the back of the grammar book I am using, Master the Basics: Japanese, I noticed that certain nouns in English were listed with two different Japanese equivalents, one…
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