As much as you might enjoy reviewing your SRS flashcards, watching foreign movies, reading your foreign language books, or whatever you do to learn Chinese and/or Japanese (or any language for that matter), you can’t learn it all on your own. You need some friends to help you. In theory you could learn everything on your own, I think, but you’re just making life harder for yourself that way. R...

It’s said that there are about 50,000 kanji in existence. Thank god we only need to know a thousand or two of those! Does that make you feel any better? Probably not. Learning the kanji is the hardest part about Japanese. I think it’s even more difficult than learning them for Chinese since Japanese places multiple pronunciations on each character. It’s like twice or three times ...

“Nanjing! Nanjing!”, also known as “City of Life and Death”, is a new Chinese film by director Lu Chuan depicting the battle of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This battle is commonly referred to as “The Rape of Nanking” or the “Nanking Massacre”. Synopsis City of Life and Death takes place in 1937, during the height of the Second Sino-...

This is the first of many book reviews I’ll do in the My Zousho series. Zousho (蔵書、ぞうしょ) means library or book collection. I’m going to take you through every book in my library that I’ve used to learn Japanese. I think these books will give you some good ideas and direction for learning. If you follow my path for learning Japanese you will definitely learn a lot in a short...

If you’re trying to learn Chinese then I can’t stress enough how you should be using ChinesePod. Whenever someone first asks me how to learn Chinese I tell them to start there. I started learning Chinese with their podcast lessons in June of 2006 and I still use them on a daily basis. In my opinion, it’s the BEST resource you will find for learning Chinese. ChinesePod is part o...

Here are two more great tools to help you learn Japanese. As long as you use Firefox as your internet browser, you will find these tools to be really handy and convenient. They’ll help you save time and create a more passive learning experience. The first tool is Rikaichan. Rikaichan is a firefox add-on that translates Japanese to English. Just hover the mouse on top of a word, and a popup a...

One of the best Chinese movies I’ve seen lately, Warriors of Heaven and Earth, offers a unique story of adventure through the Gobi desert that will keep you entertained for it’s whole two hour duration. It’s full of great scenes taken in the deserts of Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China, and is action packed with realistic battle scenes. No wire-fu in this movie. The movie is se...