I reported a few years ago about a program where those with Japanese citizenship can get free textbooks each year from the Japanese consulate. We have been getting these for our son, and I have looked through many of them myself. Frankly, each of these textbooks has been extremely helpful in teaching me various things… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the common word 世話 (sewa) and some uses of it, including an important expression used in daily life. “Sewa”––usually written in kanji as “世話” and sometimes in hiragana as せわ––can be used for a variety of meanings. But I’d like to focus on the most common, and… Read More »
This is the second post of my Tackling Translation Troubles (TTT) series where I go over common challenges faced in Japanese to English translation, leveraging my own experience. In each episode I will try to use at least one example from Japanese literature to illustrate the topic at hand. (You can see the full list… Read More »
While I am by no means a heavy Netflix watcher, I like to browse the movies and series once in a while and try out anything that looks interesting. More often than not, I end up getting bored partway through and don’t finish the series or the movie. But just the other day I ended… Read More »
Languages are filled with combinations of certain words that are used to express something that is more than the sum of their parts. You can call these “expressions”, though I like to call them the slightly more fitting term “grammar pattern”. These can be especially tricky to learn because sometimes you can’t simply look them… Read More »
Arigatai Books is proud to announce the release of a new ebook with short stories from a fresh (albeit classic) voice, Masao Yamakawa, an Akutagawa/Naoki-nominated writer with a unique literary style. The stories are published in both bilingual English/Japanese and English-only versions.
In this article I would like to describe how to express the idea of being “cool” in Japanese, along with a few related points. “Cool” has a bunch of meanings in English, so I want to clarify I am talking about the “stylish”, “fashionable” or “good” meaning, which isn’t related to temperature. The most common… Read More »
My review of head of Ki-Aikido Shin’ichi Tohei’s latest book about improving your posture and breathing in order to maximize your potential as a person, including applications to many daily-life areas such as driving, sitting, and even washing dished. This book is strongly related to a NHK special that ran last year on similar topics.
In Japanese, 嬉しい (ureshii) and 幸せ (shiawase) are two words that express happiness, but they have a very different connotation. “Ureshii” is more about a (potentially short-lived) feeling of pleasure or contentment, as in “You look happy today”, whereas “shiawase” is more about a big-picture (potentially long-term) state of happiness in terms of being fortunate… Read More »
To celebrate the release of Volume 6 of my series of Japanese classic fairy tales this week, I’ve decided to run a little giveaway where I give out 6 free copies of the audiobook of Volume 1 of this series. As I will be using promo codes provided by Audible, you will have to have… Read More »