クルミの日本語 exploring Japanese

いらっしゃいませ

I'm an American learning Japanese for fun, but working hard to improve. This section of my site is a collection of articles on language, culture, kanji and other topics in Japanese.

There are no tutorials or graded reading here; it's just a collection of stuff. The skill level is whatever mine was at the time of writing—ranging from beginner to lower intermediate. I don't use romaji but will usually provide furiganaふりがな (which you can show or hide: see the menubar). Sometimes I'll define terms in detail; at other times, I'll assume you know it or can look it up.

The seeds for this site were sown in 2015, when I started taking and publishing notes for our weekly conversation group. We used to be able to store those at the Meetup site; however, Meetup has phased out their storage. I'm migrating those PDF docs here, and am adding new material.

I passed the JLPT N3 in late 2017, so there's much more work to do. (N1 is the most difficult level, and N5 the easiest.) See the Tools and Links page for some tricks that have worked for me.