I reported a few years ago about a program where those with Japanese citizenship can get free textbooks each year from the Japanese consulate. We have been getting these for our son, and I have looked through many of them myself. Frankly, each of these textbooks has been extremely helpful in teaching me various things… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the common word 世話 (sewa) and some uses of it, including an important expression used in daily life. “Sewa”––usually written in kanji as “世話” and sometimes in hiragana as せわ––can be used for a variety of meanings. But I’d like to focus on the most common, and… Read More »
This is the second post of my Tackling Translation Troubles (TTT) series where I go over common challenges faced in Japanese to English translation, leveraging my own experience. In each episode I will try to use at least one example from Japanese literature to illustrate the topic at hand. (You can see the full list… Read More »
While I am by no means a heavy Netflix watcher, I like to browse the movies and series once in a while and try out anything that looks interesting. More often than not, I end up getting bored partway through and don’t finish the series or the movie. But just the other day I ended… Read More »
Arigatai Books is proud to announce the release of a new ebook with short stories from a fresh (albeit classic) voice, Masao Yamakawa, an Akutagawa/Naoki-nominated writer with a unique literary style. The stories are published in both bilingual English/Japanese and English-only versions.
In this article I would like to describe how to express the idea of being “cool” in Japanese, along with a few related points. “Cool” has a bunch of meanings in English, so I want to clarify I am talking about the “stylish”, “fashionable” or “good” meaning, which isn’t related to temperature. The most common… Read More »
In Japanese, 嬉しい (ureshii) and 幸せ (shiawase) are two words that express happiness, but they have a very different connotation. “Ureshii” is more about a (potentially short-lived) feeling of pleasure or contentment, as in “You look happy today”, whereas “shiawase” is more about a big-picture (potentially long-term) state of happiness in terms of being fortunate… Read More »
In this post, I wanted to discuss an interesting connection between the volitional form in Japanese and the words “deshou” / “darou”. To begin with I will go over the meaning of each, and then see how they relate. The volitional form represents the speaker’s volition, or will, and for the verb “suru” looks like… Read More »
One important aspect of the Japanese language, especially compared to English, is how nearly anything can be omitted––at least as long as the context is sufficient for the reader/listener to guess what is missing. But for those used to explicitly stating things (even if they are ‘obvious’ from the context), it can be tricky to… Read More »
The word “demo” in Japanese (generally written in hiragana as でも) can have a variety of meanings depending on the context. In this article I will go through some of the most common ones and give example sentences for each. Usage 1: Contrasting a previous statement (“but”) One of the simplest and most common usage… Read More »