JLPT Boot Camp – The Ultimate Study Guide to passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test — The Ultimate Study Guide to Passing the JLPT in Less Time and With Less Pain.

JLPT BC 110 | Girigiri Seefu – Just made it

April 3, 2013

Back in January I made a fool-hearty challenge to learn 550 kanji in about 3 months. I’ve been using iKanji for all my kanji studying. It is a very nice looking and simple kanji studying app for iOS devices. I’ve been tirelessly drilling myself with it. Sometimes spending a good 30 minutes or so, trying [...]

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Which level of the JLPT should I take?

March 30, 2013

How do you know you are ‘ready’ to take a certain level of the test? I get this question a lot in emails, and it is a tough question to answer quickly because, as you might have guessed, it all depends. I know registration for the July test is soon for a lot of regions, [...]

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Using a Japanese OS to Learn Japanese

March 23, 2013

We’ve all heard the best way to learn any language (or any skill) is through totally immersion. The idea is to surround yourself with the language in every possible way with music, books, your Internet reading. The principle behind this is that your brain is only capable of comprehending one language at a time. And [...]

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JLPT BC 109 | Japan isn’t so Small After All

March 20, 2013

Japan gets a lot of flack for being a small and crowded place, but is it really that small? It all depends on your perspective of things. Yes, by land size, it is pretty small, roughly the size of California. But it definitely has a lot more variety than the Golden State. When I first [...]

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Stop Acting Like an Adult

March 16, 2013

For those of you who don’t know, my daughter was born last year, and is now more than a year old; old enough to start the process of learning about the world. As good parents (trying to be at least), we’ve been trying to teach her everything we can. But, I think she has been [...]

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JLPT N5 Grammar – Japanese Particles amari, shika, and dake (あまり、しか、だけ)

March 13, 2013

For the JLPT N5 test, you really need to know the difference between the key particles of the language. As matter of fact, you’ll see some of these particles on the higher levels of the test as well. This month we are going to look at amari, shika, and dake: For more videos like this [...]

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What every JLPTer should Know about Willpower

March 9, 2013

Willpower is not usually addressed that much when it comes to learning. It is just kind of assumed you are interested and that you are going to still be interested in learning something. You might not want to even think of it as that much of a factor in your studies, but it’s there lurking [...]

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JLPT BC 108 | Living a Little

March 6, 2013

Last month, I talked about the need to do some pruning here and there. I put that advice to action and ignored some of the words I had been studying on Memrise that I either knew pretty well, didn’t see really helping me in the future, or I could recognize from context. This has reduced [...]

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What Smartphones have to Do with Language Learning

March 2, 2013

If you have been into a cell phone store in the last 2 years or so, you have probably seen the numerous smartphones that you can choose from. These days you basically have two choices an Android phone or an iPhone. Yes, I know there are other choices, but let’s just imagine two for now [...]

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Learning Japanese is Hard, but you are not Alone (Infographic)

February 23, 2013

Japanese is a pretty interesting language. Not only does it have 4 different writing systems that it uses. It is also made more difficult by the fact that the sentence order is not the same as that of English and a lot of other languages. It is rated as on of the most difficult languages [...]

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JLPT BC 107 | Love in Japan

February 20, 2013

I know I missed Valentine’s day by a week, but it is still the ‘love’ season right? I thought I’d cover love in Japan for this cultural episode this month. It is something that not a lot of people talk about, but I’m sure a few wonder about before they move here. What is love, [...]

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Mythbusting: A Japanese Girlfriend is the Best Teacher?

February 16, 2013

A few years ago, we got a new teacher at our school and one of his first questions of many was “If I got a Japanese girlfriend, she could teach me Japanese right?” He was half-joking, half-serious about it of course. But, it is a bit of a common myth all the same. The general [...]

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