In recent years I have been spending a good portion of my hobby time on Japanese-related stuff (studying, reading, translating), but before I got into Japanese I spent a lot of time playing a few musical instruments, particularly piano. While this post will be a little off-topic compared to my usual focus, I thought my… Read More »
I’m a pretty big fan of Japanese gardens, to the point I remade my backyard into one, so I was happy to read “Minature Japanese Gardens: Beautiful Bonsai Landscape Gardens For Your Home” by Kenji Kobayashi (小林 健二). It is published by Tuttle Publishing. This book is a great way to learn about bonsai plants… Read More »
While I try to keep this blog focused on Japanese-related stuff, once in a while I will post about something else, and waiting about blogging is one my favorite topics for that. Several years ago I switched this blog from a basic WordPress.com account to a self-hosted account. While there is some cost associated with… Read More »
In mid-June I released an English translation of the first part of an intriguing Japanese SF novella that I had discovered titled “Two of Six: A Captain’s Dilemma” (Japanese title: “６分の２”), written by Tomohito Moriyama (森山智仁). The story involves a system malfunction on a spaceship requiring evacuation of the humans aboard, but the escape pod… Read More »
As part of the simple marketing effort for my latest book, “Classic Japanese Fairy Tales”, I have been searching out people on Goodreads to see if they are interested in reading the book and writing a review. While I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time marketing (frankly, I enjoy translation a great… Read More »
As a result of the various projects I’ve been working on over the last few years, I have many “hats” that I don from time to time––author, publisher, book agent, editor, marketer, and of course translator. It seems rarer and rarer these days that I take time to read books in English, instead devoting a… Read More »
The other day I had the luck of finding out about Mr. Mizuhiro Kaimai (開米瑞浩) when he left a comment on one of my blog posts and introduced me to a section of his blog where he talks about “Japanese Grammar in Logic Diagramming”. In this series of articles, Mr. Kaimai discusses several aspects of Japanese… Read More »
(Update: As Reajer has shut down, I have disabled the links in this article, but I will leave the rest of the article for the time being for historical reasons.) In October 2016, I reviewed the site Reajer.com which produces bilingual Japanese/English E-books with detailed explanations, across a wide range of levels from beginner to advanced.… Read More »
The other day, John Sensei of Manga Sensei contacted me and invited me to do an interview for his podcast. At first I hesitated, feeling a little nervous since this was the first time I would be giving a voice interview, not to mention that part of it would be in Japanese. But in the… Read More »
Fellow blogger and podcaster John Sensei of Manga Sensei has recently created a Kickstarter for a new Japanese learning app, Japanese Verb Conjugator. Rather than be a jack-of-all-trades app that tries to do everything, this app will target the process of conjugating verbs in Japanese (活用, katsuyou). While I feel verb conjugation is a little… Read More »