I’m prod to announce the latest release of Arigatai Books: a surreal story about a man wandering around Tokyo a century ago, published in bilingual Japanese/English with an extended translators essay.
Japanese dramas, like anime, are something that I have gradually lost interest in over time. While I still enjoy a good drama or anime now and then, I’ve become familiar with all the common tropes and am sensitive to the acting and other parts of the production, so I frequently get bored after a single… Read More »
I’ve decided to do an audio narration of the first two chapters of “Acala the Immovable” by Soto Tachibana, a dramatic story about a couple who heads to a remote country town to take a break from it all.
Learning a language involves not just understanding the meanings of words and combinations of words, but also their nuances and when it is appropriate to use them. In this post, I would like to go over the casual expression “かもだけど” (ka mo da kedo). This expression is composed of two parts, the “ka mo” and… Read More »
Recently someone on Twitter was asking about the difference between “のが” (no ga) and ”のか” (no ka). I responded briefly to their post, but I wanted to give a little more detailed treatment here. In the case of “のか”, the の is often used to an explanatory or factual feeling, similar to how it does… Read More »
I’m pleased to announce the release of the 2nd volume of “Gensen: Selected Stories in Modern Japanese Literature”, with each story listed in both English and parallel Japanese/English versions, as will as mini-biographies on each author.
As you surely know, the world has been in a pretty crazy state the last few years, and as a result traveling overseas or even out-of-state has been challenging, if not worrisome. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to get out of Oregon for the first time in quite a long time and… Read More »
One significant difference between Japanese and a language like English is that words are more frequently omitted when they can be inferred from context. This applies to pretty much all types of speech: verbs, nouns, objects, and even particles (little grammatical helpers). In English, except for some special cases and slang usages, when referring to… Read More »
In this post I talk about how I achieved an Aikido black belt in only a few years, including some details on how I trained, what is required to get a black belt, and some thoughts about how the test went.
Changing your PC’s language setting to Japanese is a great way to get daily exposure to a bunch of words, and to actually test your understanding of those words in a real way. There are drawbacks, like the possibility of running into unnatural translations (since after all much software is first written in another language… Read More »