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This Blog Has Now Moved!

It's official, Tanoshii Nihongo is officially the new site. This site will probably cease to update now, so please go to the new site.

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Review for Rosetta Stone

I told you I wasn’t gone for good! Today I’m going to be mostly bashing Rosetta Stone’s language learning software. This review goes for Rosetta Stone whether you’re learning Japanese or any other language that this software purports to teach. It purports to teach because Rosetta Stone is particularly bad at teaching anything, except how to look at pictures and repeat words. It’s aimed mostly for travelers, but doesn’t really get you conversing, and it’s expensive to boot. Really, there’s only a couple things it does well, but this isn’t enough to make up for all the failing this software does. If anyone from Rosetta Stone actually reads this, please use the criticism to improve your software! You probably already know that Rosetta Stone teaches you language easily, right? I mean, that’s what the advertisements always tell us! What Rosetta Stone tells us and what it actually does are like night and day, but if you really don’t know much about Rosetta Stone, here’s what allegedl

Review for LingQ - Redone!

I really wanted to do a review for LingQ , and I wound up doing a long and crazy post about things that didn't have much to do with LingQ. As such, I am redoing this post in hopes of better clarifying what LingQ is and how well it works. For starters, anyone even remotely familiar with Steve Kauffman will know that he's a huge supporter of what is normally called the input method. That basically means that you learn a language simply through exposure to it. No grammar drills, just listening, reading, and anything else you can think of that will expose you to the language. As such, that is exactly what LingQ strives to do. The most frustrating thing about learning an Asian language through the input method, in my opinion, is that if you're reading a book or a non-editable pdf, if you come across a kanji you're not sure how to read, you can't just type it into a dictionary. That frustrates me a lot! That's why LingQ is so good about that. You just hover your mou

Valentine's Day in Japan!

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