Please take a look via his website - it's a feast for your senses.
The most gorgeous video has been compiled and produce by Scott Gold showing different elements of life in Japan during the month of January. Simply titled "January in Japan", Scott has beautifully shot footage that captures the emotion, atmosphere and beauty of people and places to be discovered particularly during the month of January.
Please take a look via his website - it's a feast for your senses.
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Sushi - one of the most quintessential Japanese cuisine dishes to be found. It can be fancy and it can be home-made and simple. Not only is the sushi itself clean, healthy and fresh, but the accompanying wasabi, soy sauce and other condiments have health benefits you may be unaware of. Have a read here about some reasons why eating sushi is good for you. Part of the fun of discovering a new culture is the joy that is listening to new and sometimes very quirky music and music videos. My students know that one of the ways I learned Japanese was to completely immerse myself into Pop Music. I would find music I liked to listen to and play it over and over again. At the same time I would find the lyrics and try to read along at the same time as the singer. This is not easy to do when you cannot read many kanji, but the more you listen to a song, the more you recognise what sounds are coming next, and before long, you can read through the lyrics and make very good guesses about what the kanji readings are. Together with a good dictionary, it is not that difficult to translate the lyrics. After that, you will be singing along in real time, and even more exciting, treating your friends to a full Japanese song at a karaoke box! This is one such group that might challenge what it is you understand Japanese music to be. For sure, when you start learning about Japanese culture you might be curious about what consists of typical Japanese music. You might have some ideas of how you imagine the music will sound, or the artists appear. But something you will discover is there are so many different types of music, just like the music you and your friends listen to. That is part of the fun of discovering this music - some comes as a complete surprise and some sounds as if it could have come straight from your local radio. Here is a group you may or may not have heard of .... I'm curious to hear what you think about them! You may or may not know much about daily life in a Japanese High School, but the word is there are a lot of regulations and restrictions to what students can do and how they can behave in and around the school. Some restrictions are simple cultural expectations, like taking your outside shoes off and putting on うわばき (uwabaki) - special indoor shoes while in the school building. Others like opening the windows in the winter time to improve ventilation seem ridiculous considering students are trying to stay warm. You might be right in thinking school life, and the after school additional entrance exam preparation studies that many students undergo, add undue stress on school students lives. But these students have found interesting ways in keeping entertained, expressing their individuality and enjoying life in their school years. Which pics to you like the best?? News reports that some 19 people have so far lost their lives as the result of the excessive snowfalls in Tokyo over the last week. Fresh vegetables and other foods are becoming a little scarce with supplies unable to get into areas of the city. But residents are trying not to focus on the negative side too much. Recent heavy snowfalls in Tokyo and surrounds have brought out the more creative side of residents with some of the most interesting snow sculptures and creatures being made on the Tokyo streets. The Japan Times newspaper has featured some of the more popular social media photos sent in or posted by locals trying to go about their day to day routine, hindered by the massive snowfalls. One of the most beloved past-times of the Japanese people is just around the corner. As a welcome break from the blustering cold winter experienced this year, the magical season of sakura (さくら) or hanami (はなみ) will officially signal the end of winter and the arrival of spring. In the link attached is a Japanese website (in Japanese) that outlines the schedule for the blooms of sakura, or Japanese cherry blossoms, as it moves from the south to the north of the country. Starting in Okinawa in the tropical seas, the trees will bloom gradually throughout the nation moving up daily through Kyushu, into the middle of Honshu and then onto the more mild climate of the northern island of Hokkaido. Take a look at the website and see if you can use your kanji reading skills to identify the city names, and the expected date of bloom. Remember, dates are in American format, that is, month first, then day. Counting in English is pretty easy. Counting objects, cars, people, living, non-living, books, machines - is all much the same in English. Not so with Japanese, did you know? One of the biggest challenges with Japanese is coming across the use of counters. Counters are to Japanese what collective nouns are to English. They can be hard to remember, a little old-fashioned and leave you wondering.... why?In Japanese, depending on what kind of object it is you are counting, you have to qualify it with a counter, that is a word that describes or groups the objects into a category. For example, five people, eight machines, three long thing objects, six small living things, etc. Well, they are simply explained away as a feature of the language, like our gaggle of geese, a clowder of cats, a flock of seagulls. However, Japanese do use their quirky counters a little more than we use our collective nouns. Take a look at how Tofugu's Koichi explains in his wonderful fashion, all of the different counters in Japanese. In reading one of my favourite Japanese language learning and culture websites, this most recent article came up about the methods of learning kanji. Remember, kanji are the "pictorial" characters that originated in China and were brought to Japan hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Serious learners of Japanese argue there are many ways to learn kanji and not all of them are successful or even slightly perfect. What is most interesting about this article is not so much Koichi's suggested methods, but the comments below about all the different methods others have used to improve their kanji comprehension, retention and recall abilities. I would suggest having a read and then taking a look at these comments as some of the suggestions really are very helpful. What method do you find works for you? Share your ideas in the comments. Japan is buzzing with the news that Yuzuri Hanyu, a 19 year old native of the north-eastern city of Sendai and home to the recent tsunami devastation, has become their first ever male athlete to win an Olympic Gold medal for figure-skating at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia. This comes after he broke the world record in the lead up to his final round. Watch this clip as he receives thanks from the people of Japan who have been eagerly watching his progress from home. Hanyu Yuzuri-san, おめでとうございます!
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The image above is Copyright to Andy Gray, Japanwindow.com, 2005
Used with permission, 2014 Shin Senseiis a teacher of Japanese for secondary students. She studied at The University of Melbourne majoring in Japanese language and has lived, worked and studied in Japan. In Australia, she has also worked in private industry as an executive assistant and translator before becoming a teacher. Archives
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