Last week someone wrote to me and mentioned chai, by which she meant "living" in Hebrew. I grew up in a Jewish environmen...
Traveling through Norway in 2008, I absorbed just a few Norwegian terms from menus. When I encountered this ad on the side of a building in Oslo, I felt excited to be able to recognize the words fo...
A quiz of sorts: do you have any idea what the following word might mean?
孵化
Look carefully at the components of 孵! I'...
Someone wrote to me last week and mentioned the non-Joyo 鼠 (ねずみ: mouse). I'll enlarge it so that you have a prayer of seeing it:
The following word looks quite simple, but that's not the case!
一分
It has three yomi and three meanings. Do you kno...
In the past, when Japanese men proposed marriage, they used an abalone as a betrothal gift! How would you like to receive such a fishy offering?! Here's the word for that present:
...
It seems like lots of us have experienced crazy weather lately, including tornadoes and quasi-typhoons. Where I live, we keep oscillating between turtleneck weather and shorts weather, with the occ...
The March newsletter just came out, and as I have announced there, f...
Because kanji appeals to people around the world, there's a good chance you're not from the United States. If that's the case, you may not know how crazy things have become here politic...
I told you last week that I had an uplifting talk with Len Brackett. A hero of mine, he lived in Japan for seven years, learning t...
Just about the only downside to all my kanji writing is that I have little human contact these days. I do find tremendous amounts of stimulation when I immerse myself in each character, but there...
A Facebook friend posted that he has gone running for 425 days straight, logging in a whopping 4,463 miles. In response, his Japanese friend wrote this comment:
素晴らしい継...
Nearly every time I start writing a kanji essay, I feel stuck, and I see no way out. I'm armed with a collection of compounds to cover, several of them fascinating in their own right. But when...
Last weekend my husband and I had a houseguest, an American who has lived in rural Japan for 20 years (in a valley filled with monkeys!).
I barely knew an...
Knowing that Jack Halpern is a whiz with a unicycle, I was amused to find this listing in his ...
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