JLPT Level 1 (without studying!) Impressions

Or, why everyone needs to chill out about this test.
Last Sunday, December 6th, some 200,000 non-native Japanese speakers took the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) to show off their Japanese skillz, hoping to impress potential employers, schools, or just for their own personal amusement. This year, I took Level 1 (the hardest of the [...]

Slow Dance

Get ready for one of the most awkward moments you’ve ever seen in your life:

Slow Dance is a 2005 drama, classic romance, with a great cast, amazing dialogue, and a few major flaws.
Flaw #1: The first episode.
It’s just boring. I smile at all the wildly famous, awesome actors that appear, but no [...]

Use the Mac OSX built-in Japanese Dictionary!

This is perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of Mac OSX (10.5 or later) that any Japanese student should know about: the Dictionary app, inside your Applications folder, has a built-in Japanese Dictionary.
Koichi over at Tofugu just wrote an article about Why you should use a Mac to study Japanese, but I think [...]

Lament of the Cell Phone

This is officially my new favorite thing ever. It’s an old flash animation, but I actually hadn’t seen this one before it was posted a couple of days ago at http://www.blizzardboy.net/ It’s from the point of view of a dude really lonely because NO ONE EVER CALLS HIM. T_T

Here’s a super rough [...]