This is the 7th chapter of the fantasy novel “The Rainlands” (雨の国) by Haruka Asahi (朝陽遥) which I am translating from Japanese with the author’s permission. It is about a man’s journey to a mysterious land where he has a moral conflict with their indigenous customs. While I had taken a break from this series for a… Read More »
It’s only recently that I’ve been spending more time using Twitter, both posting links for some of my articles as well as reading those made by others. I’m sure many people will agree that Twitter is a great way to eat up your time, but from what I’ve seen it is, more often than not,… Read More »
Recently I reviewed the Japanese novel “Honey Bees and Distant Thunder” (蜜蜂と遠雷) by Riku Onda (恩田 陸). In this post I decided to translate the short intro of the book as an exercise to improve my translation skills. This excerpt has some really good imagery and translating it was both a joy and a challenge.… Read More »
As part of raising my son bilingual Japanese, over the last few years I’ve spent a great deal of time reading him Japanese children’s books. I always recommend children’s books to people learning Japanese because typically no kanji knowledge is required, there is a so much culture to absorb, and they are just plain fun.… Read More »
Because of how long it takes me to read Japanese novels, I’m generally very picky about what I commit to. But once I start reading a book I almost never give up, regardless of how tough things get. When I heard that music was a central theme of “Honey Bees and Distant Thunder” (蜜蜂と遠雷) and… Read More »
One of the nice things about the Japanese language is that it has relatively few grammatical tenses, at least compared to languages like English which can get quite messy. Knowing a handful of tenses can get you pretty far, although you do have to memorize the conjugation for each category of verbs. In this post… Read More »
It’s been a little over a year since I’ve moved with my family to Portland, Oregon. It’s no exaggeration to say that one of the main reasons we chose this area because of the relatively large proportion of Japanese people, at least compared to South Florida where we came from. I’ve already written a few articles… Read More »
When using Japanese in everday life there are some useful expressions you can pick up that are not commonly used in media like books and manga. One such word is 「悪気」 (warugi), which should not be confused with the similar sounding “Waluigi” character from the Mario world. In Dictionary Goo, we see this word described… Read More »
Over 3 years ago, I posted an article about the Japanese martial art Aikido (合気道) in which I noted that I was taking a break from training. I also mentioned that I was waiting until my son was old enough to be able to train. Last year, my family and I moved to Portland, Oregon, and… Read More »
In several past posts I’ve mentioned how children’s books are a great way to help train your reading skills in Japanese, one of the main reasons being you usually don’t have to worry about knowing kanji (or even katakana for that matter) since furigana reading hints will be comprehensively used. While you can run into… Read More »