Tag Archives: linguistics

Japanese Novel Translation: 『そして、星の輝く夜がくる』(And thus, the starry night fell upon them) by 真山仁 (Mayama Jin) [First chapter]

Recently, I reviewed Jin Mayama’s book “そして、星の輝く夜がくる” which I thoroughly enjoyed and consider it one of the best Japanese novels I’ve read. As I’m always looking to improve my translation skills, especially for novels, I decided on translating just a few pages of it. In short, the novel is about a teacher who volunteers to help… Read More »

Japanese Writing Lab #3: How do you study Japanese?

This is the 3nd assignment for a program I have started in order to help myself and others improve their writing in Japanese. For details about the program, see this post. Also see this post for a list of all assignments. For the first few topics I am keeping to things which are pretty easy to write about, so… Read More »

The “〜くある” (~ku aru) form for Japanese adjectives

Recently I saw a post on Japanese Language Stack Exchange about the 〜くある  (~ku aru) form of adjectives (ex: 美しくある), and there was no good answer so I did some research. By the time I was ready to post, the question had been deleted, so will make a make a post here with my findings. To review, let’s… Read More »

Linguistic debate on the existence of subjects in Japanese (from three points of view)

Recently I came across this interesting post by fellow blogger Moaz Elgabry. For only having studied Japanese a few years, his Japanese writing skill is quite impressive, and I’m curious to see his thoughts on different topics. His post discusses whether the Japanese language really needs to have a grammatical subject and how such a subject should be… Read More »

Japanese vocabulary list: airplane related terms

I’ve created a vocabulary list of Japanese words related to airplanes and air travel in general. This is one area I’ve found I have some weaknesses in, and I thought if I was going to review these words myself I might has well write it up for others to learn from. 飛行機 (hikouki): airplane 空港 (kuukou):… Read More »

Translation challenges: the tradeoffs of title translation with “Godzilla”

When translating some form of media from it’s original language into another language, the translation of the title is extremely important – nearly as important as choosing the title for the original work. A good title manages to capture one’s interest to learn more about the work in question, or at least stands out enough so… Read More »

Japanese particle confusion:  人「?」手伝ってあげる

All human-made languages are built from rules, upon which are piled on exception after exception (at least in the languages I have studied). In this post I’d like to go over a confusing usage of a Japanese particle that I’ve stumbled across in my own speech several times. What particle do you think fits in the… Read More »

Origami Tales: The artful performance of Kuniko Yamamoto

Today we visited an event at a library in Fort Lauderdale, South Florida, which had many great activities for kids including a free book for the first 1000 children to arrive, boardgames, picture taking area, face painting, and live performances. The first performance was by a Japanese woman of the name of Kuniko Yamamoto, titled… Read More »

Useful Japanese expression: shikata nai (仕方ない) and a bunch of variants

The phrase “仕方ない” (shikata nai) is one that I learned very early in my Japanese studies and I’ve found it to be fairly commonly used, as well as pretty straightforward to understand. The word 仕方 (shikata) means “way to do something” or “method”. For example, since お礼 means “thanks”, then お礼の仕方 means “the way to thank”… Read More »

Interesting in buying a bunch of Keigo Higashino(東野 圭吾)novels?

While trying to organize things around the house lately, I found a bunch of novels from the famous author Keigo Higashino, known for his “Galileo” series of novels which was made into a movie, as well as many others (like 白夜行) I have around 49 novels from this great author which I’m looking to sell in bulk,… Read More »