During a course on classical Japanese (kobun 古文) last semester, we were introduced to a particularly well-known Heian-era poem titled Iroha – famous for using all characters of the Japanese syllabary exactly once. Attributed to Kūkai (founder of the Japanese Esoteric sect of Buddhism), the layered meaning of the poem (and the fact we had to be able to recite it for my exam) struck a chord with... Continue →

私は先週、ブリュッセルで行われた日本語のスピーチコンテストに参加して、「ベルギー・日本友好１５０周年」のために歴史的なスピーチを発表する機会をいただきました。すると、参加者の他者が非常に高いレベルにあったし、質疑応答もやや恥ずかしくなっても、何とか第三位に入賞しました。このブログのエントリーは私が書いたスピーチの原稿です。 スピーチ... Continue →

For this year’s Japanese Speech Contest in Brussels, I had the pleasure to prepare and hold a speech in honor of Belgium and Japan’s 150th year of mutual friendship. Despite some hickups and an incredibly high level amongst the other candidates (meeting all these excellent Japanese learners was both an extremely humbling experience as well as a perfect motivation booster for the coming years)... Continue →

This weekend the NHK Culture Center and the Embassy of Japan in Belgium organized the 30th edition of the Japan Cultural Festival, held in Antwerp in celebration of 150 years of friendship between our two nations. Together with a few classmates and upper class students I had the honor and pleasure of joining this event’s staff of interpreter volunteers, spending my last 3 days assisting two... Continue →

Last year, I cooperated with several other students at my music academy to write the music for a small local musical called “Dating - a musical for the highly educated” (a supposedly ironic, yet pretentious title I’m less than fond of, honestly). Being slightly unsatisfied with the end-result of my own compositions, I’ve since started rearranging them. I intend to describe the process in this... Continue →

Note: currently on hold due my upcoming exams. Priorities! In order to up my Japanese pronunciation and become more fluent in Japanese text recitation, I’ve tried getting acquainted with vlogging in Japanese. I’ll (hopefully) publish weekly videos of myself narrating a newly posted news article published on one of the mainstream Japanese newspaper websites, using a classic streaming-style... Continue →

I have recently started studying Korean as part of the minor I took up at my university. While browsing the internet for helpful resources I found that, like us, a remarkable amount of students of the Korean language have knowledge of Japanese and/or study both simultaneously. As anyone browsing my blog might have guessed, I’m pretty fond of using Anki for assisting in vocab acquisition, and... Continue →

2021 Update As of September 30, 2020, Sanseido stopped their web dictionary service. This tutorial is thus rendered obsolete. Kokugo Jiten Online seems like a good alternative. I’ll look into updating the Sanseido add-on to use the above instead. You’ve been studying Japanese for a while now and reached a level of Japanese adequate enough to understand (simple) texts. Drilling new vocabulary... Continue →

With the academic school year rapidly approaching, we decided on a short last-minute trip abroad and booked tickets to Romania. We spent spent a week,traveling through the historic region of Transylvania, commonly associated with vampire folklore, and situated between the imposing Carpathian mountains. A rich history, ranging from a feudal agricultural culture to a post-war communist regime... Continue →

So you’ve followed my previous tutorial and set up this wonderful environment for creating vocabulary cards with audio and furigana based on all kinds of Japanese text you find online. Yet, while studying your new set, you feel this nagging feeling deep down inside… There’s something missing, still… “Hm, could it be…?”, you ponder quietly. Yes. You need Japanese example sentences for providing... Continue →