Category: Japan

Danny Choo loves Japan. Born in England, he has come to Japan recently, and with incredible energy, posts regularly about Japan in his blog. A great way for our students to see what foreigners think of Japan.

Icons in your email, or SMS, or mobile mail, can indicate your emotions much more quickly than words. With programmable phones these days, you can set longer ones to memory and recall them with a few keystrokes. Here is a bunch of these emoticons, or kao-mohi (face-icons) with a quick English translation. These are not necessarily popular right now, but you can vote on them (thus tne name eVOTicon).

Lisa Katayama is a successful young writer for tech magazines like Wired. In her blog she shows interesting sides of Japan with unusual products. If I ever need something interesting to discuss in class, I can usually find it here in a matter of seconds. She also has a book out.

I constantly tell my students they should use their dictionaries as little as possible. They are ultimately frustrating. Far better to find material that students feel is comfortable, where they know about 95% of the words, so they don’t have to use the dictionary, and can still guess the meanings of the other 5% of the words.

But when one is surfing the web, at times, you need quick access to a dictionary because the web is not like a graded reader. The best I’ve found is Rikai translator.