Practicing my Japanese writing skills at Café Margot this morning, I heard two very different languages. Site of Today’s Language Encounters One emerged from the mouth of a maybe 30-something woman who parked herself long-term at a table without…
One of my earliest childhood memories is of writing the alphabet. The English one, I mean. I can see myself sitting on the floor at the edge of a sunny living room, I think with wall-to-wall carpeting and glass doors,…
Although I have been studying plenty, I feel guilty over my lack of Japanese-related New York City field trips. My main reasons for being remiss about investigating Japanese cultural and language centers around town: It won’t stop snowing here. …
I must admit, the Japanese characters are not flying into my head as rapidly as I would like. Yesterday, to expedite the absorption of kana by my recalcitrant brain, I made a mnemonic device to help me remember the…
Today I had a Japanese-writing breakthrough. There are 92 basic kana characters, and I have been writing them over and over, but I have still been having trouble remembering a number of them. Most days when I wake up I practice…
Today I wrote my first vertical word. In Japanese you can write horizontally left to right, as in English—but you can also write vertically, moving top to bottom, right to left! Crazy, right? My First Vertical Word …
Remember “The Blob”? It was a horror movie from the 1950s, starring Steve McQueen, in which a red slimy blob from outer space kept eating people and growing bigger and then eating even more people. I saw it as a…
I just got back from an expedition to 1073 Avenue of the Americas, home of Kinokuniya, an enormous three-level Japanese bookstore. Kinokuniya, As Seen From the Street Although it is in a very central location in the middle of town (“…
The past 24 hours have been really good ones for Japanese. I confess that over the past two months, I have been struggling with spoken Japanese, finding the Pimsleur lessons hard to conquer, redoing them often, sometimes preferring to skip the…
A reference to this language project will appear in the book review section of this weekend’s New York Times, in an essay called “Dreaming in English” by Michael Erard. Mr. Erard writes a great deal about language and…
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