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This week I managed to tangle myself up in confusion on several occasions, so I thought I'd share the wealth with you! 

What do you think these words could mean?

My life lately has been about translation quagmires!

Last week, two JOK documents coincidentally included 悔. I had great trouble making sense of this kanji because my proofreaders said...

I'm sure you know about the younger sibling syndrome. We, the little sisters and brothers, are the ones who wore hand-me-downs for a dozen years or more. We're the ones whose parents took j...

I love wordplay in Japanese. The problem is that I never know it when I see it. So it was that when my friend Keiko Murate asked me to help with English wording for a design project, her wordplay w...

I've been hanging out with Japanese couples. Last week I had an extremely stimulating, intellectual talk over tea with my newest proofreader and her husband.

Thursday I had lunch in the...

Here's a test of your associative powers! Match the following:

It's been sweltering here, the kind of heat that makes you regret having to wear clothes. Fortunately, the fog rolled in this afternoon, bringing relief but also confusion. The temperature drop...

It started Sunday night when the garage door broke, trapping my car inside. There was no choice but to wait around all Monday for a repair guy. I did, and he fixed the problem quite competentl...

For months yoga has been about pregnancy. Since May I've been watching my teacher's belly expand. At first, I kept staring at a tiny curve in her abdomen and wondering, "Is she? She ha...

Let's start with a quiz. Match the kanji compounds to the definitions:

Let's start with a quiz. What do you think the following term could mean?

病巣 (びょうそう)     illness + nes...

Let's start with a quiz, but not the usual fanciful kind in which you needn't know anything beforehand. This is the opposite; it's about what I very much need to know. I'm talking a...

There are times when life just cracks you open, aren't there? 

I usually feel almost like a robot, but not in a bad sense at all. Rather, I love that I'm highly regulated and c...