Victory Manual

Sakai Junko’s essay 電車の中で若者に注意 got me to thinking about “generation gaps” as “foreign culture”.
In the essay, Ms. Sakai rants about a few episodes where young people should have been admonished for their inconsiderate behavior. In one example, she highlights two young men riding a bullet train watching TV on a cell phone sans headphones. [...]

The audacity of hope a foreigner trying to apply for a credit card in Japan, whose hope is ultimately shattered by a rejection letter!
I want to buy a house in Japan; maybe not tomorrow, but someday. In order to buy a house I need credit. It can’t be any credit, though. No [...]

Here’s a rather ironic example sentence that I came across in the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar:
私は日本語が話せるどころか、一度も勉強したことがありません。
Translation:
I am far from being able to speak Japanese; I haven’t studied it at all.
That’s a pretty complicated sentence for an absolute beginner with no experience studying the language to be saying in Japanese. It reminded me of [...]

This is a thought that just occured to me, but it seems that an increase in crime has a direct correlation with materialism in society. People want stuff, and to get stuff you need cash.
With an increasingly short attention span, thanks to the influence of things like music videos where any given scene is [...]

Curiosity lead me to hunt down some numbers for my personal interest in mining statistics.
Considering a liberal estimate of 14 million Jews world-wide, and a world population of 6,707,035,007 as of July 1st, 2008, that means the world is only .2% Jewish. Out of the 574 Nobel Prize Laureates, 160 are Jews, meaning that [...]

Calling Will of NihongoJouzu.com. Will of NihongoJouzu.com to the white courtesy telephone.
What happened to NihongoJouzu.com? It just disappeared!
I just thought I should point that out, since I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere in the “Japan blogosphere”. Admittedly, my exposure to the Japanese blogging world is very narrow.
***Update***
It seems that it was just [...]

I continue to realize the existence of problems in English the more I study Japanese.
Of course, I’m sure everyone already knows the problem with the sentence, “The boy watched the girl looking through the telescope.” Was the boy using a telescope to watch the girl? Or was the boy watching a girl who [...]

In Japanese, いる expresses that an animate object exists. This does not include trees and shrubbery, as they do not move of their own volition (except treants).
ある expresses the existence of an inanimate object. Things like boxes, cars, and books ある.
But what about the AI robots of the future?

For lack of anything really interesting to write about at the minute, I’ll write 8 factoids about myself since it has been demanded of me by Deas. I should warn you, though, that on the Japanese magnitude scale of “interesting” I register at “not very”. Most people don’t read these things, anyways.
1. [...]

My wife and I went out to see Charlie Wilson’s War after dinner last night for our wedding anniversary. When we watch movies in English together at home, we usually have Korean subtitles on for her, and the result is that when I describe the scene I watched in English with the same scene [...]