These days rather than reading Japanese novels, each which can still take me quite a long time to finish, I’ve been reading a literary magazine called 小説幻冬 (“Shousetsu Gento”, where “shousetsu” means ‘novel’ or ‘short story’) published by 幻冬社 (Gentosha). [Gotta love the name “幻冬”, which is made up for the characters for “mysterious” and… Read More »
This is the English translation of the last part (of four) 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. While this… Read More »
Reading foreign language material is always an adventure, especially when you come across grammar you’ve never seen before. Oftentimes, you can just figure out the meaning from context, but I’m the type of person that wants to understand the grammar completely so I can grasp any nuances involved and potentially learn to use the patterns… Read More »
This is the English translation of the third part (of four) 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,… Read More »
This is a list of Japanese words related to school and educational institutions. I’ve always enjoyed school and If you are staring to use these terms either for yourself, or for a loved one, I wish you the best luck! While I haven’t attended a school in Japan personally, I hear that they are much more difficult… Read More »
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 »
The other day I got an email from Megzari Raphael, the author of the app “Sokuji: Japanese Dictionary Browser” who asked me to check out this app which targets Japanese learners. “Sokuji: Japanese Dictionary Browser” is an iPhone app which tries to serve a single, important purpose: easy, fast lookup of Japanese words while browsing the web. The… 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 »
As I’ve written about before, in Japanese oftentimes words or entire phrases can be omitted, even more so than in English. I’d like to talk about another case where things can be omitted in Japanese, but first I want to give a quick summary of talking about reasons in Japanese. Expressing a reason is pretty straightforward and typically… 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 »