I’m happy to announce Arigatai Book’s first audio book release: “Japanese Classic Fairy Tales” by Mimei Ogawa (Volume 1), available now on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.
I was recently contacted by Jojo Masala, the creator of a new website for language learning, called “learnl”. He asked me if I was interested in trying it out, though he cautioned that, “It’s in it’s early days and kind of just an MVP now.” (Note: for those of you not too familiar with software… Read More »
In this post I wrote a detailed review of Amazon’s game streaming service Luna in Japanese.
Kouichi Tohei (藤平光一) was a skilled martial artist who leveraged difficulties in his life to reach an amazing level of ability, and went on to established his own style of Aikido called Ki-Aikido, more formally known as Shin Shin Touitsu Aikido (心身統一合氣道). But he did more than simply practice physical martial arts techniques; Tohei Sensei… Read More »
Musings and hints on the difficulties of learning conversation in a foreign language, inspired by a twitter post of someone who was struggling to learn conversation in Japanese without a teacher.
I’m pleased to announce the release of a book of short stories by classic author Kyusaku Yumeno, with stories listed in both English-only and Japanese/English parallel formats. Over 60 translation notes are included to give a deeper understanding of the original text.
I translated the second part of Kenji Miyazawa’s famous story “Matasaburo of the Wind”, which happens to be the same story referred to in the song “Matasaburo” by the rock band Yorushika.
This is the first post of a new series about dealing with common problems experienced in Japanese to English translation. This time I go over some approaches to translating adjectival clauses, which can be tricky due to differences between the grammar in these two languages.
In this post I talk about the concept of iteration, and how it relates to fractals, the act of writing creative works, and the process of translation.
Understanding jokes and other forms of comedy in a foreign language can be a difficult undertaking for language learners. To begin with, comedic wordplay based on homonyms (two words with the same sound but different meaning) is often used and may involve subtle aspects of pronunciation (intonation, etc.) Pop culture references are also abundant, including… Read More »