Japanese Step by Step: Book Review

When I first started learning Japanese I decided to put together a core collection of books that I thought would cover me pretty well. One of the first books I picked up was Japanese Step by Step: An Innovative Approach to Speaking and Reading Japanese.

The book came highly recommended from Amazon, so I was pretty sure it would be a winner. When the book arrived I started into it immediately. Since then I’ve started and restarted the book several times, never making it past 92.

Here’s why…
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How to say “Goodbye” in Japanese

No one likes to say goodbye, but did you know there are different ways to say goodbye in Japanese depending on when you’re planning on seeing a person again and who the person is?

Here are a few proper ways to say farewell in Japanese without sounding like a newbie or needlessly offending anyone.
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Things We Learnt from our Last Trip to Japan

Whenever you fly into a foreign destination you typically have to learn things in a hurry. This is especially true when you can’t read or understand a word of the language.

Here are 5 quick things we learnt from our two week trip to Japan with hopes that they might save you a few headaches.
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Learning Japanese – An Opinion

Now I am not by any means an expert on learning languages, nor in learning Japanese in particular. But I have tried to learn some languages and am currently trying to learn Japanese so what the heck, here’s my opinion =)
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Japan Trip – Updates

Well it didn’t take us long to to book the trip to Japan. Once I found out we had Flight Centre here in Canada now, I went over and tossed them my tentative travel plans to price out. It turned out not to be such a bad price.

However, it looks like to get the best deal and fly on a top airline, we’re going to end up flying almost around the world.
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1,945 Kanji in 10 Minutes

Have you ever wanted to see all the 1,945 recommended kanji for reading Japanese? Well…now you can in just over 10 minutes.

Thanks to Kiraianet for the link. Also check out Japan Today for news on what 196 new kanji were added to the jouyou kanji list bringing the total up to 2,136 official kanji characters.

Cute Things From Japan-Cute²

One of the cutest things I have found from Japan is KomaNeko.

You can check it out here. The cutest stop action movies you have ever seen. And such a sweet character.

Another adorable and popular thing is amigurumi.

There are so many sweet things you can crochet.

But! What if you combined these too cute, kawaii things. It’s cuteness to the max, and you can make it yourself!
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Japan Roundup

It’s time for another Japan roundup featuring all that’s new and wacky from Japan!

Among other things, we’ll take a close up look at the samurai sword and take a peek at one crazy Kung Fu bear.
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Buying a Cell Phone in Japan

Well, it’s official. We just booked our tickets for our two month stay in Japan next year!

It’s all pretty exciting, but it also means we’ll have to be doing a lot of research for such a long visit.

Since I can work remotely for all of my clients, I can pretty much survive with a laptop and an Internet connection. But staying in touch with a local cell phone is a bigger problem.
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Remembering The Kanji – Revisited

I wrote previously about my concerns with the Heisig method of learning Kanji. In particular the reasons for learning so difficult and obscure kanji.

It been a few months since we started Remembering the Kanji and happy to say that I’m convinced in the method now more than ever.
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