Anyone who studies Japanese for even a short time knows there is a huge number of loanwords, and there seems to be more being coined every day. While they come from a bunch of world languages, yappari many are from English. This is both a blessing and a curse. If the word sounds like its… Read More »
In the post I’d like to go over a common way of expressing an introductory idea in Japanese. We will begin with a basic form of this, んだけど (n da kedo) and then go over some variations. First, let’s look at a simple example: 僕、ずっと日本語を勉強してるんだけど、まだペラペラじゃない (boku, zutto nihongo wo benkyou shiteru n da kedo, mada… Read More »
Despite the many prose translations I’ve done, I’ve never attempted to translate an entire poem from Japanese to English before. That’s partially because I generally don’t read poetry that often (in either Japanese or English), and hence am even less comfortable trying to translate it. Another reason is that generally I’m pretty picky about what… Read More »
As if I didn’t have enough hobbies, recently I started learning to play the violin. Knowing me, you might not be surprised to find that I’m doing it self-taught, at least for the time being. While I have had basic conversations about violin and music related topics, I realized that there are some terms I… Read More »
This it the ninth chapter of a novel I am translating and publishing on this blog. See this post for the first chapter and more details about the novel. I want to thank the author, Yuki Hoshizaki (星崎ゆうき) for giving me permission to translate and publish this chapter here, as well as Yeti san (from… Read More »
The other day I wrote a post about how one of the science fiction stories I translated was published on a site that deals with various historically-relevant pieces of literature and other historical information. But it turns out that the main focus of that website is actually a radio station which streams historically relevant content… Read More »
One of the perks of learning to read Japanese is that there is a huge body of diverse literature going back many hundreds of years. Furthermore, much of this is available to read for free on Aozora Bunko. Once you get comfortable enough reading modern Japanese literature from the last few decades, you may decide… Read More »
This it the eighth chapter of a novel I am translating and publishing on this blog. See this post for the first chapter and more details about the novel. I want to thank the author, Yuki Hoshizaki (星崎ゆうき) for giving me permission to translate and publish this chapter here, as well as Yeti san (from… Read More »
In this article I’d like to go over the Japanese word “katte”, which is almost always written in kanji as 勝手. It’s a pretty common word and you’ll likely hear it once in a while in spoken Japanese, with perhaps a bit less usage in written Japanese (excluding dialogue lines which are essential spoken language).… Read More »
This it the seventh chapter of a novel I am translating and publishing on this blog. See this post for the first chapter and more details about the novel. I want to thank the author, Yuki Hoshizaki (星崎ゆうき) for giving me permission to translate and publish this chapter here, as well as Yeti san (from… Read More »