How to Ease the Transition into Foreign-Language Audiobooks

About a year ago I started using Japanese audiobooks as listening practice, and I kind of accidentally stumbled onto a way to make this easier by automatically splitting them into repeatable chunks!

Japanese Let’s Play (実況プレイ) Video Recommendations

For those who do not know, let’s play is the English term for a video where a person plays a video game while commenting, the corresponding Japanese term is 実況プレイ (jikkyou purei, literally “live play”).

As I mentioned earlier, I enjoy watching let’s play videos in the languages I’m learning. In fact, with any language I’ve started, I’ve almost immediately looked up such videos in that language!

As a result, I’ve collected quite a long list of them since I started studying, including a lot of small channels that it took me quite some time to find. Thus I thought I would share my favorites here so that others can benefit as well.

I Noticed That Jonas Goes to Italy in the French Dub of Dark

My current routine is that I watch about half an hour every day of a show in French, but currently I’m sticking to shows I’ve already watched and know the general story of, since I’m not really confident enough in my French just yet. This way it won’t be a problem even if I miss out on some crucial piece of information.

As a result, while ago I decided to watch the French dub of the German Netflix show Dark.

Japanese Names in Chinese and Chinese Names in Japanese

As you may know, Japanese and Chinese both use Chinese characters in their writing. As such, names in both languages are written in much the same way.

I therefore find it a bit interesting how each of the two languages have different approaches to reading names written in the other.

Why Am I So Bad With Numbers In Japanese?

Numbers in Japanese are in theory very simple. You’ve got your words for one to ten, then words for one hundred and one thousand. There are no special words for the numbers from 11 to 20 even.

To make larger numbers, these are then combined in a rather straightforward fashion: 205 is “two hundred five”. 16 is “ten six”, 54 is “five ten four”, 2521 is “two thousand five hundred two ten one”.

Much to My Surprise, the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Is Really Good! (Until It Wasn’t)

I’ve been vaguely aware for quite a while that one of my favoritest games ever, Final Fantasy 7 for the original Playstation, was being remade for the Playstation 4 and my reaction to this has been somewhere between indifference and mild annoyance.

Why and How Did I Start Learning Japanese Anyway?

OK, to get this new-fangled bloggy thing of the ground, I thought a reasonable place to start might be some background information on why I’m doing this in the first place.

I guess it’ll get super self-indulgent, but I’m assuming that’s how these things typically go, so…

Hello, The Internet!

Seeing as I enjoy talking about about myself in general, and my projects obsessions in particular, it has been suggested to me that a blog might be a good outlet for that!