Poll Shaving!!! In Japan!!!

Okay, so my friend's brother has a plan to go to Tokyo and work there for a year...but the thing is, he hasn't set up a place to stay or a job. And he's already bought his plane ticket. The guy doesn't know any Japanese and has never lived outside his parent's house. He thinks it's going to be easy to just walk into a foreign country and get a job ( Read more... )

Rikaichan is an absolutely fantastic Firefox add-on for reading Japanese websites. Once it's installed, you can just hover your mouse over Japanese text and it'll pop up a translation/explanation.

To install: you need to download at least two files, the main extension and a Japanese-English dictionary (or French, German, or Russian). You should ( Read more... )

Today I walked with one of my kindergarten classes to a shrine and then to a ramen place for lunch. Had this conversation on the way ( Read more... )

I always have lots of stuff I want to post about, but I never get around to it.

Thoughts on the Avatar Season 3 premier, aka an excuse to talk about Aang and Zuko

Season 3 premier = soooooo gooooooood. Lots of plot development (Avatar always moves the plot forward quickly) and lots of character development too. Katara's anger at her father seemed ( Read more... )

Natsumi: Do you believe in Santa Claus ( Read more... )

Event info kindly dug out of the Comiket catalogue for me by ( Read more... )

WHO'S GOING TO THE PREFECTURAL SPEECH CONTEST BABY? HELL YEAH!!!

*ahem*

All across Japan, junior high school students compete in English speech contests around this time of year. I helped coach three students from my school for the contest, and at today's district competition THEY ALL GOT PRIZES YO!!

So, let's talking English speech contest.

There ( Read more... )

Hullo! I'm going to be away from LJ for most of August due to forseen circumstances. Namely, I'm going to be doing a crapload of travelling with mah homies (ie. my brothers and occasionally friends ( Read more... )

So my adult students and I were talking about fugu, the infamous pufferfish that can kill you if you eat the wrong bits. The internal organs are chock-full of poison. One of my students had something interesting to say about that:

Female farmer: Hm, the poison is from the ransou.
Me: Huh?
Male doctor: (checks e-dictionary) Ovary.
Me: Oh, so only female ( Read more... )