It’s pretty commonly known that Japanese takes many loanwords from other languages, especially English. (I’ve written in detail about this before here) These range from obvious ones like オレンジ (the color ‘orange’), some that are bit tricky like セーター (sweater), and there are even combination words like the famous カラオケ (‘karaoke’ which is a combo… Read More »
This is the English translation of the second part of the first story (“Stargazer”) of the series of short stories titled “Final Days of Summer” (残夏) by Masaki Hashiba (ハシバ柾). I’ve gotten permission from the author to translate and put these on my blog, and he is very excited about his work being translated to English. As always, since… Read More »
After doing a great deal of searching through a few sites including カクヨム (review) and 小説家になろう (review) I found a great series of short stories called “Final Days of Summer” (残夏) by Masaki Hashiba (ハシバ柾). While it is still a work in progress, I feel that the stories that have been finished are great enough on their… Read More »
Sometime last year I wrote a review of the site “syosetu.com” (小説家になろう) which is a nice place to get your fill of free (and legal) Japanese novels and short stories. Since then, I have been a pretty heavy user of the site, reading portions of a great many stories, and writing emails to handful of authors to get… Read More »
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a Japanese vocabulary list, so I thought I would make one about mathematics and numbers (数学用語). I’ve purposefully left shapes out of this list and may make another list later just focusing on those. (Interesting fact: In the 2015 PISA average scores, Japan scored #5 in math and #2 in… Read More »
It’s been a little over a year since I started doing Japanese to English translations and posting them on this blog (I started around December 2015). Initially it was just an experiment, but I ended up translating a little bit of a bunch of works (and a larger portion of a few works) in order to… Read More »
This is Chapter 5 of the novel “Welcome to the Raindance Cafe” by Yama Yamasaki (山崎山). I’ve talked to the author and gotten his permission to translate and put it on my blog. The story’s original table of contents and summary can be seen in Japanese here. You can see the original Chapter 5 in Japanese here. I’ve… Read More »
It’s amazing how you can study a foreign language for so long, yet somehow overlook what seem like basic things. The other day I was reading a book about Japan written for elementary school children which talked about Japan’s history and culture. On one of the first few pages, it said that the Japanese call their country… Read More »
Gabriel from Koipun.com has come to me with an interview request which I gladly agreed to do. He asked a good set of questions that touched on many important areas for people learning Japanese. While a fraction of the stuff I talk about has been mentioned on this blog in some form or another, I… Read More »
Dictionary Goo: My favorite Japanese dictionary. http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ Japanese Stack Exchange: A great place to have difficult Japanese questions answered, especially grammar related. http://japanese.stackexchange.com Reddit Learn Japanese: A good place to ask questions about Japanese and learn about resources. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/ Oshiete Goo: Knowledge sharing site (Japanese only). Great place to see polite, intellectual Japanese. http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp Reajer: bilingual readers… Read More »