hmmn

Some of the thoughts that went into the name: kai (umi) — both Naoko and I grew up on islands, surrounded by the sea. Naoko crossed an ocean once to meet me, and kept crossing it to pursue me. We fell in love, and crossed the same ocean together to start our life and family [...]

I haven’t commented much on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (or Nihongo nouryouku shiken) I took last December, which is ironic, considering that my preparation for it caused me to temporarily put this site on hiatus last Fall. And truth be told, although it was only a scant two months ago that I was one [...]

This kanji, kaeru, meaning return, was recently selected as the “Kanji of the Year” for 2002 by over 60,000 voters in a “Sign of the Times” poll sponsored by the Japan Kanji Proficiency Testing Foundation. The reasons for its top ranking in the survey are obvious to anyone living in Japan, as surely 2002 will [...]

A few of my (early) New Year’s resolutions focus on my Japanese studies. Of these, one in particular I’ve been getting a head start on recently: my writing. It has been bothering me for some time that while my reading of Japanese has improved tremendously over the past few months (in good part because I’ve [...]

It may seem a crazy notion that living in Japan I feel the need to further surround myself with things Japanese, but this is the situation I feel I’m now in. Having had to seriously apply myself to learning Japanese these last couple of weeks, I now am slowly starting to feel things come together [...]

Yesterday I had my first lesson in the 3-month Japanese course I’m taking, and all in all I came away with positive impressions about the school and class, and very excited about my prospects for progressing further in my never-ending (it seems) study of this language. I chose this particular school in part because it [...]