In this post, I’d like to focus on the word 相談 (そうだん / soudan) for two reasons: it’s high frequency in business-level Japanese and the fact it doesn’t have a great single-world (one-size-fits-all) translation in English. I’d like to begin the explanation by giving the Japanese definition of the word from Dictionary Goo, followed by… Read More »
Libraries are great places, not just because of the wonderful books you can discover there, but also because of the wonderful movies that are just waiting to be discovered. I recently came across “Welcome to the Space Show” (宇宙ショーへようこそ), an anime movie made in 2010 by a studio I had never heard of (A-1 Pictures),… Read More »
I’m always surprised by the diversity of language and how vocabulary words tend to group into what I call “domains”. For example, many terms you read in an economic newspaper are not likely to pop up in everyday conversation, and slang words you hear on the street are not too likely be used in a… Read More »
Whereas many of this blog’s posts are about Japanese words that I use myself in daily life, in this article I’d like to talk about a word that I had some difficulty understanding and the research I did related to that. The word is 実務 (jitsumu) and I saw it used in the name of… Read More »
The other day I happened to check my yearly views for 2018 and was surprised by the number: a little over 500,000. It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about blogging and statistics so I in this article I would like to talk about what helped me get this amount of traffic. Keep… Read More »
I’m sure many people are working full time for a company that they don’t own any part of, getting paid on a periodic rate based on a set contract. And I’m also willing to bet that a good portion of those people wish they could go independent and become their own boss, choosing what and… Read More »
In this post I’d like to talk about nothing. No, I’m not trying to be nostalgic about the hit comedy show Seinfield from the 90s––I’m trying to describe the Japanese word “mu” (often written in kanji as 無), which essentially means “nothing”. Unlike many of the words I talk about in this blog, the word… Read More »
As you’ve probably already discovered, Japanese has a huge number of loanwords, especially from English––and that number seems to be increasing fast. Fortunately, a majority of these can be guessed from context if you can manage to match them up to their original word by sound. But some of them are hard to guess because… Read More »
Recently I announced the release of my latest ebook, “Tales of the Disturbed”, a collection of short stories I have translated from the classic Japanese author Yoshio Toyoshima (豊島与志雄). As part of the editing process I was reading parts of the stories out loud, and after doing this for a while I realized that it… Read More »
Recently the creator of the new website ReadNihon, designed to help you learn grammar and vocabulary by reading Japanese text, contacted me and requested I check out his site and write a review, and I agreed. Having created my own set of web tools to assist with learning Japanese (Language on Track, still in beta),… Read More »