My 12 moments of anime for 2013

Credit to linked pixiv user

As I’ve been doing since 2009, I’m once again participating in the anime blogsphere’s “12 Moments of Anime” project where we post our personal twelve biggest anime-related moments of the year throughout the month of December. As always due to lack of time, I’ll be posting my 12 moments all on one post here…

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Watching anime raw

Credit to linked pixiv user

In past posts I’ve talked about the subtitle quality in anime we watch, as well as anime dubs, but I never specifically wrote about watching anime in its “pure” form – raw in Japanese without any subtitles. However a recent post by froggykun got me thinking about the what, why, and when of my viewing of raw anime…

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My continued adventures in Japanese self-study

After taking my last formal Japanese class in mid-2009, I’ve only had self-study to rely on in keeping up my study of the language. Starting in 2010, after graduating college, returning from my second trip to Japan, and getting settled in my then-new job at the YMCA, I decided to have my own periodic Japanese self-study sessions so I won’t forget the things I’ve learned and also so I could continue to learn more of the language, albeit at a slower rate than I did when I was taking actual classes. And surprisingly, my passion for the language has allowed me to keep up the motivation for those study sessions since, though the rate did fluctuate. I recently fell behind on my studies due to the long hours at my new job, but the other day I decided to finally make up for lost time and spent all day hitting the books and flashcards…and much to my surprise, I didn’t forget that much =D So today I want to share how I conduct my Japanese self-study sessions, which may perhaps be helpful to those of you who are also learning the language…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 6: Counting and Demonstrative Forms

This is going to be the final post in my Fundamentals of Japanese series. I’m using it to discuss the two last grammar points I feel are important for a basic understanding of the language, but couldn’t fit into the other parts…

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The importance of subtitle quality

A recent post by @fkeroge talked about how subtitle quality can vary between official subtitles and fansubs, with the official ones not always being the most accurate. But ultimately, the only way one can get the original experience of watching an anime how it was intended, is to learn Japanese and watch it raw. Obviously this isn’t an option for a lot of people, so I’d like to explore the topic of subtitle quality further…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 5: Speech Levels

In Part 5 of my Fundamentals of Japanese series, I’ll be covering the characteristics of the language’s different levels of speech…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 4: Verbs and Adjectives

In Part 3 I discussed the very basics of Japanese grammar with particles and the “to be” verb です(desu). Today I’ll be moving up to the next step in grammar fundamentals with the conjugation of Japanese verbs and adjectives…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 3: Particles

Now that I’ve covered the Japanese syllabary and writing systems, in this section I’ll be going over the basics of Japanese sentences. To me, the most fundamental parts of Japanese grammar are particles and the “to be” verb, です(desu), which is what I’ll be discussing here in Part 3…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 2: Reading

Here’s Part 2 of my ongoing Fundamentals of Japanese post series. In Part 1 I went over how to pronounce Japanese and read it using English letters (romaji). Now I’m going to discuss how it’s read using the three Japanese alphabets…

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Fundamentals of Japanese – Part 1: Pronunciation

Welcome to the first installment in a series of posts I’m going to be writing about the fundamentals of the Japanese language. Part 1 will be an introduction to the post series as well as covering an aspect of the language I feel is the very first step one should start with when learning it – pronunciation…

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