I’ve been into piano for quite a long time, and really enjoyed the Japanese novel “Honey Bees and Distant Thunder” by Riku Onda where the story revolves around a series of skilled pianists attending a classical piano competition. (I reviewed in detail here) I just came across an amazing performance by Japanese Jazz composer and… Read More »
While I try to keep my posts mostly related to learning Japanese or translations, because of the amount of time I spend thinking about blog statistics I like to write articles about stats once in a while. By no means do I consider myself an expert at statistics, but I know they are a tricky… Read More »
Over time I’ve had many people, both offline and online, take a look at things I’ve written and give valuable feedback to help me become a better writer and translator. After some consideration I’ve decided to do a slightly more formal search for one or more people to act as editors/proofreaders for things that I… Read More »
One the translation projects I’ve been working on the last few months is the story “Final Days of Summer” (残夏) by Masaki Hashiba (ハシバ柾), which is a set of short, interrelated fiction stories . So far, I’ve completely translated the first story “Stargazer” which you can see in full here. The other day I was doing some… Read More »
Once I got to the point where I could read novels in Japanese, it became difficult for me to budget time for English novels. Although I still read much faster in English and would say I still enjoy it more on average than Japanese books, each Japanese novel I read will improve my vocabulary, (hopefully) my reading speed,… Read More »
It’s amazing how you can study a foreign language for so long, yet somehow overlook what seem like basic things. The other day I was reading a book about Japan written for elementary school children which talked about Japan’s history and culture. On one of the first few pages, it said that the Japanese call their country… Read More »
I am formidable. Perhaps one of the toughest of my kind. Expect years, a decade, or longer. Come, live in my land, and you may learn my ways. But there are no guarantees. I am kind. Less sound, less tense. Less picky about pitch than some others. Just watch for tiny, flying particles. I am… Read More »
Several months ago, a reader of my blog was nice enough to take a few of my translations and post them to the site Novel Updates. Overall, it’s been a good thing for my blog, getting me more readers, more feedback, and helped me meet a few new people. But one day when I was… Read More »
Since the year is almost over, I thought I would do a quick look back about what I did and learned in 2016 related to Japanese. More than anything else, 2016 was the first year where I got really into doing translations from Japanese to English, as both a hobby and as a side job… Read More »
Recently someone told me of an article in the New York Times titled “The Great A.I. Awakening”, which talks about how Google Translate has switched over to using an A.I. based system, and the supposed improvements. The beginning of the article talks about Japanese to English translation, and includes several English translations of a passage… Read More »