When I started learning Japanese some of the best advice given to me was to forget textbook Japanese and learn what is actually spoken. I really took that advice to heart. Having only limited access to Japanese natives me at that point, I did the next best thing, watched loads of Japanese dramas.
There was [...]

In Jisho 4, I spent a considerable amount of time in polish mode. In software development they say that the final 20% of an application takes 80% of the work. I can attest to that.
Something I like, but I’m not sure if it’s immediately obvious, is a shortcut for combining two lists in Jisho [...]

The first time I came to Japan, I had been studying Japanese for less than a year. I couldn’t speak at all and only knew the more polite verb endings (ですます体 desumasu-tai).
I wanted to go out with some fellow students and I was trying to tell my host family that if I miss the last [...]

While most of the time when speaking Japanese you should try to be humble and polite, to ignore the importance of the other extreme (arguing) would be short-sighted. Unfortunately knowing how to argue with somebody in a foreign language is a required skill.
One thing that pushes many foreigner’s buttons in Japan is when (as [...]

I mentioned Jisho 4 in passing a few posts ago. Beyond that I hadn’t said anything about it publicly. I’ve been working on it since August, with spare moment I had.
With Jisho 4 I wanted to do things right, so I went back to the drawing board and created an entirely new user experience. [...]

When I first started working in Japan, I worried about how to request customers do something – without being rude. For example, let’s say I needed some images from them before I can continue working on their site. In English I might say something like:
I need you to upload the image so I can continue [...]

With the JLPT coming up on Sunday, now is the time to get in some last minute cramming of Japanese grammar.
One of the Japanese grammar points that I like a lot is “the more you X the X you you will become…”. I like it for the simple reason that I find it fun [...]

Source Code Management. It’s one of those things that as a developer you know you are supposed to do it. The benefits are huge, allowing you to keep track of changes and revert your code to an earlier state if you break something. You can also keep the repository on a server somewhere so it [...]

Jisho Touch 1.5 is alive and well on the AppStore. It took a lot longer to get it approved and resubmitted but it’s finally there.
I’m working on another point release of Jisho (for Mac) fixing a few bugs and updating the database. Be on the lookout sometime this next week.

Since I’ve been back in Japan I’ve found myself using Jisho Touch a lot more than I was during the states. Something that I had become an annoyance was being unable to bookmark words. The problem came in trying to figure out the right, intuitive way to do it.
Some of the solutions I had seen [...]