The GITS Blog

Here's a cool Flash game called "Verbatim" that tests your ability to read obscure kanji compounds and English words (I did best at that).
After the time is up, it creates a mecha-robot for you. The more you got right, the cooler your robo.

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to create a Japanese-language website. I waited until November, but I managed to get one up by year's end.
Here it is:
BetterTechEnglish.com
My goal for the site is to give pointers on technical-English writing to Japanese native speakers, while creating a presence that will help me attract Japanese [...]

Back in the 1980s and 90s, stand-alone word processors were all the rage in Japan. It was before PCs found widespread adoption in Japan, and because of the large character set of the Japanese language, it took years of training to be able to "type" Japanese on a mechanical device. I fondly remember a word [...]

If you write Japanese, you'll be familiar with using a front-end-processor (FEP) to input Japanese text. On Windows, this is typically the IME.
IME lets you choose between various "input methods": direct input (normal keyboard typing), hiragana (which can be converted to kanji as needed), katakana, and so on. With the exception of direct input, you [...]

I recently bought the book いいまちがい (Japanese Made Funny), a bilingual collection of funny errors made by foreigners speaking Japanese.
One of my favorites was a guy who wanted a hamburger with no ketchup or other condiments. He calls up his Japanese friend, and asks him how to say "plain" in Japanese. The friend tells him [...]

This is probably going to give me away as a hopeless language geek (I'd been hiding it so well until now, too!), but I find it fascinating when language speakers borrow a word from another language, and due to insufficient understanding of the loaning language misinterpret it — but in a way that makes sense.
Let [...]