On a recent trip to Japan (which I am in the process of reporting on here), I browsed through many bookstores. Because my reading speed in Japanese still hasn’t quite caught up to my English reading speed, rather than actually read a few pages of a book I generally focus on searching for covers and… Read More »
This article is part of the series on my July 2018 trip to Japan. Please see the table of contents page for other articles in this series as they are posted. I think many people have heard about Japan’s “maid cafes” (メイドカフェ or メイド喫茶）that allow viewing and interacting with cute girls in maid uniforms; but… 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 »
This article is part of the series on my July 2018 trip to Japan. Please see the table of contents page for other articles in this series as they are posted. While I have been interested in Japan’s culture as far back as I can remember, as you can probably tell from this blog it… Read More »
Twitter is a form of social media that took me some time to figure out, although I guess I still have a lot to learn, both as a consumer and generator of content. While I still debate the usefulness of reading random thoughts of famous people, there’s no doubt that getting a real-time stream of… Read More »
Generally, I try to focus on fiction works in both my reading and translation of Japanese. It’s not that I don’t enjoy non-fiction, it’s just that I have limited time and fiction is usually more relaxing and interesting for me. However, I recently had an opportunity to read through the book 「脳が若返る！大人の古典・名文暗唱ドリル」 compiled by 篠原菊紀 (Kikunori… Read More »
Recently when I was reading a book with explanations of old Japanese (for example a Matsuo Bashō poem from over 300 years ago), I came across the word 超訳 (pronounced ‘chouyaku’). I had never seen this word before, despite having prepared this vocabulary list which included a few terms about translation. While the word was not… Read More »
This list is about words related to board (Catan, etc.) or card games (poker, etc.). I hope you find these useful! If you are interested in Chess specifically, I have a vocabulary list for that here. ルール (ruuru): rule / rules 解説 (kaisetsu): explanation 初心者 (shoshinsha): beginner ボードゲーム (boodo geemu): board game 遊ぶ (asobu): to… Read More »
After doing translations of Japanese fiction for over two years now, I’ve gradually moved from the stage of just putting translations on my blog informally to releasing them in E-book form on Amazon. My first two books were translations of a classic SF Japanese author (Juza Unno), and while that was a great experience, for… Read More »
Sometimes in languages there are grammatical rules which are tricky or obscure such that even native speakers have difficulty with them. One example in English could be comma usage (although depending on who you ask, there is some subjectivity involved there). In this article, I’d like to go over an aspect of Japanese grammar that… Read More »