Victory Manual

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of my pet peeves is when options to change languages in programs are only listed in the language that the program is currently set to. So, for example, if you were currently in Japanese mode and attempting to change it to English, here’s the menu you are presented with:
日本語
中国語
韓国語
英語
イタリア語
フランス語
If you don’t understand Japanese, [...]

I thought I’d share with all of you other Japanese language learners out there a(nother) novel way of studying, this time with the Japanese version of Wikiquote.
It couldn’t be more straightforward, really. You just look up the name of one of your favorite writers, and there you have some of their best works translated [...]

After writing up a post about translating humor, specifically focusing on Darjeeling Limited in Japanese, I searched for the official movie site in Japanese and was happy to find that there was a trailer with Japanese subtitles. I’d like to document the English script and Japanese subtitles below, with a brief comparison following.
[Francis] [...]

Two weeks ago, I read on a friend’s mixi journal a post about his favorite Woody Allen films, and he noted one point of concern over the accuracy of his Jewish humor comprehension. Let me tell you that this friend is a very competent English speaker, but, even so, he still has worries about [...]

When does incorrect grammar become correct? It’s obviously not an announcement made on the evening news. I guess it just slowly permeates through society until it reaches the gigantic, barricaded textbook walls, and adamantly bashes at the gates until they finally barge.
I started thinking about this again lately as I’ve been lightly reading/studying [...]

My personal favorite site in Japanese is 教えて！goo, an open forum for questions on a wide range of topics. (I enjoy reading the 国語 forum)
Another goo site that I like is the インターネット調査 - goo リサーチ site, which features the results from a variety of surveys.
What Japanese sites (in Japanese) do some of you [...]

I was listening to some Elliott Smith and I was trying to think how I would explain the contents of the song to my wife in Japanese. I actually came up with a new study method in the process! What I was doing was just listening to all of my favorite Elliott Smith [...]