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:
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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 a...
Knowing that Jack Halpern is a whiz with a unicycle, I was amused to find this listing in his ...
I've just posted essay 1513 on 双 (pair), which will have you seeing double, given its focus on two-of-a-kind things. Here's...
In my last JOK Notebook entry I presented 樹雨 (きさめ: precipitation resulting...
A friend sent an email that contained a lovely word:
雨宿り (あまやどり: taking shelter from rain)...
I was lucky enough to come upon this wonderful term:
手沢本 (しゅたくぼん: favorite book (worn from much handling)) h...
Sometimes everything comes together. Take, for example, some text I came across recently. While writing essay 1214 on 剣 (sword; double-edged sword), I consulted Yahoo's J...
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