Author: insidethatjapanesebook

NHK radio journal’s “シリーズ戦争を考える”: War orphan ～ 小倉勇さん

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This week, the NHK radio journal has started a series to commemorate the end of the war. I listened to the first episode and, as usual, was totally unable to follow what was being said. I understood enough to know that a man in his 80’s (whose name is M. Ogura) was talking about his experience of American air raids. As I really wanted to hear his story, I listened to the episode several times and was finally able to understand enough to follow the narrative. When the NHK announcer speaks, I can follow, but sadly, I can’t understand well what M. Ogura says. But, as I really would like to be able to comprehend everything, I feel motivated to keep studying. This episode is called 終戦が地獄の始まりだった～戦争孤児・小倉勇さん and was launched for the commemoration of the end World War II in Asia, on August 15th. This episode is about 小倉勇さん（おぐら・いさむ）who is now 85 years-old, and is telling for the first time his experience of the war. Even if I listened to the interview/reportage several times, I still …

I don’t make any progress 😕

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When learning a foreign language, it is easy to get demotivated and give up, especially when one is self-studying. One of the most common causes of demotivation is the belief that we don’t make any progress. I think that there are two reasons why language learners can have this feeling: if you don’t study, you are not making measurable progress if progress means “getting closer to an unreachable goal”, the journey will last forever. These are some ideas to stay motivated when you feel like you are treading water. First of all: are you studying? Before lamenting that your Japanese is not improving and so on, ask yourself if you are really studying. Sometimes, I think “I am fed up with studying because I don’t make any progress anyway”, when the truth is, that I am not making progress because I am not studying. I wish that I could become fluent by just watching films and reading books but, even if it does help improving one’s reading and listening skills, it’s not enough to take …

How to add an audiobook (mp3) to your iBooks library

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I said some days ago, that I wanted to buy an audiobook in Japanese and have it available on my phone to listen to it often. Well, I bought an audiobook on the site febe.jp, which is a site that sells Japanese audiobooks. I bought 世界から猫が消えたなら and I am very satisfied with it. The narrator speaks in a clear voice, other characters’ voices are made by different actors and the overall quality is really good. I will certainly make a review of it in some time. But then, I encountered a problem: I could not listen to this audiobook on my iPhone. It took me some time to figure out how to do it, so I thought it might help other people too if I explained the procedure. When you buy an audiobook on the site febe.jp, you can download it in mp3, which is a good thing because you can easily listen to it on any music player. If you are using iTunes, just import the file into your iTunes library and you can listen …