Learning a foreign language is a challenge no matter which language you choose, and the difficulty achieving fluency depends on how distant it is from your native tongue(s), and whether you are in an environment where you are forced (or at least motivated) to use it daily. But once you become reasonably fluent in a… Read More »
The other day when I was working away at writing a new blog post, I was told: 君、水を得た魚だね (kimi, mizu wo eta sakana da ne) I admit I was a little confused when I hard this. So what does it mean? First, let’s look at the words one by one: 水 (mizu): water 得た (eta):… Read More »
YouTube is a great source of Japanese-language content for those studying the language, however with billions of videos, even with a good search mechanism it can be hard to find videos appropriate for language learners. Recently I was searching around on YouTube using some science terms in Japanese (like 分子) and came across a great… Read More »
日経大人OFF (Nikkei otona OFF) is a magazine series by the same company that publishes the Nikkei daily business paper. In this post I am reviewing a special edition of that series from 3/15/2012 titled: 「美しい日本語と正しい敬語が身につく本」, roughly translated as “Guidebook to beautiful Japanese and proper polite language”. As you can guess from its title, this magazine… Read More »
Generally when I pick a Japanese novel to read, either the story itself caught my attention or there was something else about the book (for example, it won one or more awards) that made it seem a worthy read. In the case of the novel “Little Bird” (ことり) by Yoko Ogawa (小川洋子), it was clearly… Read More »
Thanks to the nearly infinite resources available on the internet, studying a foreign language like Japanese on your own has become much easier than ten or twenty years ago. You can learn about many of the finer points of the language, including grammar, and even enjoy online media in that language using things like novels… Read More »
One of the tricky things about running a language-learning blog is deciding what to write about. When I first started this blog back in December 2013, I mostly intended to act as support for those learning Japanese without necessarily getting too involved into detailed explanations about fundamental grammar structures that might already be covered elsewhere in… Read More »
This is the second half of the first chapter of the novel titled “Cube City” (立方体都市), which was originally written in Japanese by Ikkai Inubousaki (犬吠埼一介). I’ve gotten the author’s permission to translate it into English and put it on my blog. You can see the original Japanese text for Chapter 1 here. You can see my translation… Read More »
While I have translated many chapters from a variety of works, its pretty rare that I translate a series to the end. This can be due to its length, a lack of reader interest, or I may have just intended to do a single chapter as an experiment. The fantasy story “The Rainlands” (雨の国) by… Read More »
In this vocabulary list I’d like to give some words related to language, reading, writing, and translation. A majority of these are words I have seen and/or used myself. I purposefully left out technical grammatical terms (like 述語), but I may make another list for them someday. Note: as usual, many of the verbs in… Read More »