Welcome to How to Japonese! Last week I was racked by the sudden fear of a(n unlikely) Blogsome crash, which would leave me with nothing but Word backups of my data, so I went out and got hosting and a domain. Unfortunately the standard spelling of “How to Japanese” is already registered by someone selling a somewhat fishy-looking “CD-ROM”. [Christ, when was the last time you said “CD-ROM” out loud? The person running that site is clearly way old! I especially love the “Tanoshin de kudasai” on this page. ] The only thing I could think up on short notice was to substitute one vowel. Meh. At least the current spelling emphasizes the “po” aspects of the site – I’m not making any cash off this. At least not yet.

Aside from basic layout changes, most everything about the site should be the same. The one thing I’ve added is a twitter badge in the sidebar (under Insta-Hows) for the new How to Japonese twitter account (which is @howtojapanese, with an ‘a’…made it before buying the domain). I plan to post random language info as well as up-to-the-pint information about my drinking plans so that anyone can come and drink along.

今後ともよろしくお願いします！

I’m off this week showing some family and friends around Japan. I thought I’d have time to write, and I actually have prepared some posts, but I want to wait and check them over again before they go up, and there are two small kids that are in the group I’m showing around – I should be getting paid for this (oh wait, I am!). How to Japanese will continue as regularly scheduled next week. Look forward to next week (especially Wednesday).

While I managed to hike 10 kilometers of the actual Great Wall, I was unable to overcome the Great Firewall of China, and therefore unable to update How to Japanese over the past week. As an apology, I’ll try to do a post a day for this week starting shortly after this post.

A few quick notes:

– Barring grievous bodily injury, this blog will be a 月火水 affair.

– I’m importing this blog into facebook, so I may take the freedom to cross-post comments that are helpful. The url if you’re interested and reading on facebook is https://howtojaponese.com .

– This blog grew out of two articles I wrote for the FUJET newsletter. I re-published these articles as the first four entries, hence all the mentioning of "monthly" and homework and whatnot.

– Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to read about. 

I dedicate this blog to two people.

The first is my 6th grade Spanish teacher, Senorita Quimbay. When I started 6th grade I couldn’t speak a word, and she drilled Spanish into my brain. I loved the class. I loved copying my test mistakes twice to earn points. I loved conjugating Spanish verbs. I loved filling in the blanks in our textbook. She was the ruler by which I measured all future language teachers, and only a handful ever equaled her.

The other person is the 12-year-old me who miraculously absorbed Spanish. He always did Spanish homework first. If there was a vocabulary word he didn’t know on a test, he could sit there and, by concentrating, force the word to materialize. Maybe he never really learned to speak it that well, but he did love learning it.

I wish I could’ve started studying Japanese when I was 12, but unfortunately it had to wait until I was 19. By that time my brain had already partially calcified and become unable to learn Japanese to the extent that I could have learned Spanish. No longer able to quickly memorize lists of words or force vocab to appear, I am reduced to hard work and clever thinking. This blog is my thoughts on the Japanese language and learning Japanese.