When studying Japanese, especially if you don’t live in Japan, there are always blind spots which can develop in your learning depending on what materials and methods you use to study. One area that I’ve found difficult is slang, because many of the materials I use (especially books and TV dramas) tend to not use… Read More »
Yesterday in WWDC, Apple’s yearly developer conference, there was a brief mention of their oldest attendant, Masako Wamakiya (若宮正子), who actually has her own iPhone application in the Apple mobile app store. Masako, at 82, decided she wanted to create apps that senior citizens after she retired from her job at a bank. The app… Read More »
Recently I posted a review of the book “Poverty Lessons” by Toru Kazama, which is biography of the actor’s life, focusing on his difficult times in poverty and what he learned as a result of that. As a translation exercise and to give a little exposure of this great book to English-speaking audiences, I’ve decided to translate… Read More »
When I read for pleasure in either Japanese or English, I tend to go with fiction, and the book reviews I post on this blog reflect that pretty well. But over time, I’ve still read my share of non-fiction books, including those about stock investing, technology, and science. There is one genre, however, which I’ve never… Read More »
When I discovered the book “Convenience Store Woman” (Japanese title “コンビニ人間”) by Sayaka Murata had won the 155th Akutagawa prize (arguably the biggest prize for Japanese literature), I decided to check it out myself. I purposefully stayed away from reviews or information about the book, and all I really knew was the book was about a woman who… Read More »
[Update: As it seems a proper English translation of this book has been released, I have removed my translation from this page. I am leaving the rest of the page just for historical reasons.] On the blog Shosetsu Ninja, Yeti reviews Japanese books, and he has recently also started putting up a few translations of… Read More »
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 »
Sometime last year I wrote a review of the site “syosetu.com” (小説家になろう) which is a nice place to get your fill of free (and legal) Japanese novels and short stories. Since then, I have been a pretty heavy user of the site, reading portions of a great many stories, and writing emails to handful of authors to get… 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 »
(Note: this list is primarily about Japanese study resources, but near the bottom I’ve added some entries that are related to Japan or sites that I frequent.) Japandev: a neat search engine for finding tech jobs in Japan. https://japan-dev.com/ Kanshudo: An awesome site that helps with reading practice, learning kanji, and other things. Has many… Read More »