Genki Japan Blog はじめまして。

Like Nerdy Goodness: Trials, Tribulations, and Musings of a Nerd before it, Genki will be adding a 'categories' page to it. Again, I'm too lazy to go adding a bunch of code, so I'm just going to put up links to my old posts here. Gadgets Wii U? Japanese Invent Spider Man Robot Sauce-Dispensing Chopsticks Culture Valentine's Day in Japan The Secret to Living as Long as the Japanese News Easiest Way to Help Quake Victims Ever! Stupid People on the Internet and Disaster .PDF Massive 8.9 Earthquake in Japan More News About North Korea N. Korean Missle Launch and the Big Brother of Japan British Man Attempts to Defraud a Japanese Bank Obama Masks Invoke Huge Sales in Japan J-Pop Makes a New Year's Resolution? Language Learning Tools The Best Flashcard Program Ever: Anki Gakuu JapanesePod101.com Reading in Japanese All Japanese All the Time TextFugu: A Second Look LingQ Textfugu Japanese-Online Japanese Video Tapes Genki vs. Pimsleur Pimsleur Japanese Japanese the Ma...

I'm doing things a bit different with this review because I'm lazy right now, not to mention a bit preoccupied with other matters. Anyway, I stumbled accross an old review I'd written for my high school's "newspaper" reviewing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time not long after it came out. I figured, how neat would it be (and lazy and time saving) to format it into a Friday Review article and post in on my blog. That way people can see what my original thoughts on the game were, and believe me, they haven't changed that much. Without further ado, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Plot Overview: Does the plot change much? Ganon wants to take over Hyrule, again, but this time he has to find the three chosen ones who carry the Triforce symbol on the back of their hands, kind of like in the second game, The Adventure of Link . This game takes some of the best elements from the previous games and forms a more complicated plot than we’re used to seeing. T...

It's a holiday, and I'm taking a break from an article I've been working on for my other blogs in order to have some fun. It's Valentine's Day, and I thought I'd let everyone know how it works in Japan, because it's not like it is here in America. Firstly, only women give chocolates in Japan. Traditionally speaking, women were supposed to be shy and all around not very good at communicating their feelings, thus Valentine's Day was a perfect way to help them out. Women give out chocolates on Valentine's Day not only to their friends and lover, but also to pretty much any man they know. When the giving of chocolate is obligatory, as is the case when a woman gives chocolates to her boss, coworker, etc., it is called giri-choko (ぎりーちょこ). This means that if you're visiting Japan and a girl you may kind of sort of know gives you some chocolate, don't think it means your advances have worked! She might just feel obligated to do so. The Japanese feel...

My favorite Harvest Moon game is still probably A Wonderful Life , but since this is the new game, I figure I should review it first. It lives up to my expectations, and is a great addition to the series. There were a few disappointments, but the game’s rewards outweigh them. Now, without further ado, time to review. Plot Overview: Most Harvest Moon games are relatively plot less. One of my biggest pet peeves with this series is that after A Wonderful Life , the developers began trying to complicate their games a bit more by introducing a being known as the Harvest Goddess, and also by tossing in the Harvest Sprites, which were featured in A Wonderful Life , although they really didn’t affect the game. I love the games for their simplicity – just trying to carve a life out of a scrap of land and living amongst some of the most simple-but-pleasant townsfolk you’ll meet. The plot for this game in particular is that you’re traveling to an island, Waffle Island, to be exact (all th...

So, you think you can just go and learn basic Japanese without all those boring textbooks? You think you can just use manga? While I wouldn't recommend this book as your sole text book, I do endorse it as being a great book to familiarize yourself with casual, spoken Japanese. I'm sure another textbook comes to your mind: Japanese in Mangaland . The big difference between this book and that book is that this one uses real manga. It takes the actual manga, and then uses it to build lessons regarding reading, grammar, and other basic skills. I've heard that the manga featured in the other book is actually made up. I also found a few small errors in the Mangaland book. It slowly builds up on complex sentence structures, covering things most formal texts leave out, and it's fairly easy to remember what you've read. My biggest disappointment with this book is that it only covers basic skills. It should really come out with more volumes, like Japanese in Mangaland does,...