All Blog Posts, Learn Japanese

FFLC – Minna no Nihongo Vocabulary and Kanji Through Stories Vocab Words Memrise Courses

So, I really like duplicating information into different formats. One of my favorite duplications is taking text from a book (especially lists, but sometimes chunks of information as long as it is broken up into fairly small groups and is very interesting information that deserves to be classified and organized) and typing into digital lists and different forms of study. One of my favorite websites to publish my digital lists of information onto is memrise.com which is a site with a wonderful program to review and study and learn such digital lists. Memrise is specially created for the purpose of studying languages. I have made many different courses on Memrise to help me study Japanese, you can see all of my courses here. But I mostly wanted to write this article to share my newest courses with my fellow classmates at FFLC.

First, I would like to share my course with all of the vocabulary words for みんんなのにほんごI. They are categorized by chapter, so you can easily ignore all other words and focus on learning and reviewing only the vocabulary words for the particular chapter you want to focus on. You simply have to go to each individual chapter page and click the ignore button and select the all box and scroll to the bottom and save.

Once you are done reviewing a certain chapter and want to move onto the next chapter, you can ignore all of the vocab in the previous chapter and unselect (or select none to ignore) on the next chapter and save after selecting/deselecting words from each chapter. Once you have learned a word, you will never have to relearn it unless you want to and you clear the data you have accumulated for each individual course. So you can ignore words and once you unignore them it will be like you never ignored them in the first place. Also, if there is one word or a couple words that you still want to focus on learning and remembering, you can choose to unignore (not ignore) any words you wish and you will continue to review them every time you choose to review words you have learned.

Secondly, I am working on typing up all of the Kanji vocabulary words from Kanji Through Stories. I have one course with the Kanji as the main focus that can be used to study the meaning of the kanji as well as pair the hiragana with the correct kanji. I also made another course to practice the correct spelling of each kanji vocabulary word by being able to type the correct pronunciation.

Please contribute a Meme if you think of a good way to help yourself and others remember a Japanese vocabulary word. You can even create Mems with videos to help you remember a word with a certain video. Simply type: embed:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SZaryV1PLo followed by any text you wish to see below the video. Here are some examples of some Memes I have created.

Asahi Food Balance Up Cream Flavored Granola Sandwiches Healthy Breakfast Snack Alternative

All Blog Posts, Food and Sake

The Poptart Alternative in Japan

Living in Japan we have discovered Asahi Food Balance Up Cream biscuit sandwiches that resemble the flavors of Poptarts in America. I like them so much, I decided to write a post about the different flavors and what I believe they taste like. They come in a package with two separately sealed packages with two small puffed cream filled granola biscuit sandwiches. They are probably 1″ x 2″ x.25″ big. Asahi Food sells just the granola as well, but Japan really seems to like cream puffed foods. Even peanut butter here (aside from a jar of Skippy peanut butter) is actually just really whipped peanut cream, it is kind of gross especially if you have grown to love the dense texture and flavor of peanut butter. Anyways, I’ve seen the Poptart like granola sandwiches in 10 different flavors, but I keep on finding new flavors. So far I’ve seen: a Fruits and Granola, Cream Cheese, Maple Nuts & Granola, Blueberry, Chocolate, Strawberry, Mocha, ココナッツアーモンド (Coconut Almond), Sesame & Soybeans and Granola, and Brown Rice Bran Sweet Potato flavored biscuit sandwiches.

The Fruits and Granola Japanese sandwich snack tastes like a lemon cream sandwich cookie.

PS: I tried to find these for sale on Amazon for you to try however I believe it’s a multi-pack. We’ll operating a import store here in the future. Look for in the upper right menu area.

The Cream Cheese flavored Japanese granola cracker puffed creme sandwiches taste like cheese sandwich crackers.

The Japanese Maple Nuts & Granola snack tastes similar to the Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Pop Tarts.

The blueberry creme puffed granola cracker sandwich tastes like a blueberry flavored Poptart, simple as that.

The Chocolate Asahi Food Balance Up Cream granola biscuit sandwiches are similar to double fudge Pop Tarts.

The strawberry flavored, pink colored cream puff Asahi Foods granola sandwich is very popular. So popular that most stores can’t keep it in stock and it is usually found at very popular locations. I found some at a medicine store located in the Yoshizuka station. This reminds me of the strawberry milkshake pop tart ^_^ and not because it is meant to be like a pop tart because if it reminded me of ANYTHING else, I would say that instead, but it just so happens that it reminds me of the strawberry pop tart.

The Mocha flavored biscuit sandwiches were actually quite flavorless in my opinion. I couldn’t quite pick up on anything it could have tasted like because I couldn’t really pick up on any flavor at all ^^ Could be a good thing? ^^

The ココナッツアーモンド (Coconut Almond) is really good as long as you like the taste and flavor of coconut. It reminds me of something, it truely does, I just can’t quite pin it down exactly at the moment.

While at the medicine shop at Yoshizuka station, I also saw the sesame & soybeans flavor and the sweet potato flavored asahi snacks which I have never seen anywhere else before. The sweet potato flavored snack actually kind of tasted like Cracker Jack caramel popcorn, but it also had somewhat a cheese cracker sandwich flavor as well.

And the sesame & soybean-flavored granola sandwich snack which sounds the worst, actually is my favorite ^^ it tastes like a peanut butter cracker sandwich snack ^^ it tastes more like peanut butter than the nasty puffed peanut butter sandwich I tried, and it tastes more like peanut butter than if they used the nasty peanut cream shit.

All Blog Posts, Japanese Culture, Pro's and Con's of Japan, Spiritual

Nanzoin Temple Fukuoka – Largest Bronze Statue of Reclining Buddha

Nanzoin Temple and Buddha Statue

Today my wife and I went to Nanzoin temple here in Fukuoka, we rode the train to Yoshizuka and then took a train that went past Yusa to a train stop that I couldn’t properly pronounce very well, all I knew was that it had the kanji for previous at the end of it (Mae), but the area is called Sasaguri. I found out that this large span of small shrines all intertwined each other to make a very large temple compound. The pictures we took were of a lot of tiny very detailed statues, some REALLY big statues and of course the grand prize of them all, the reclining Buddha statue. (update) A few people debate on if it really is the biggest bronze statue in the world, but it comes down to no one else being able to find a bigger one to trump the current master piece (If anyone has any proof otherwise please share it). This statue was built back in 1995 and supposedly the temple has a good connect with Myanmar and some kind of organization there help fund this statue. There are 3 different states of a Buddha statue, standing, sitting and reclining. The sitting is the most popular to show the Buddha meditating, but the reclining is the state of “death” in a way, it’s preparation for entering nirvana or nehan in Japanese.

While we were at the compound we entered into a cave that had a really low ceiling walking into it, no one would come in because there was chanting coming from inside, but we braved it any how and found an older lady chanting and going about her ritual/meditation, she waved us in and attempted to tell us what to do to properly pray/meditate to the shrine inside. So we did, and it was interesting to see her continue on, then get up and leave. We saw here a couple other places around the shrine doing the same thing to practically ever shrine that the temple had (which was a lot). We then also did some hiking up into the mountain which passed the temple grounds and came to a road, there were loan shrines littered throughout the area and on the side of the road, we also stumbled across a well hidden Shinto shrine which was an interesting find. Through these walk we ran into (saw) two different tanuki, which was rather fun to see being I’ve heard they’re very skittish creatures and it’s a sign of good fortune to see them.

-Nihon Scope

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