“Mono” in Japanese (usually written in hiragana as もの, and sometimes in kanji as 物) is a word that has the basic meaning of “thing”, generally in the sense of a physical (often tangible) thing. 店でいいものを買ったよ (mise de ii mono wo katta yo) I bought something good (=a good thing) at the store. However this… Read More »
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 »
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 »
Like many people, a majority of my study activities use a computer or mobile device, and the times when I use a physical textbook or other resource have drastically reduced over the last decade or two. Nevertheless, something can still be said for physical books that allow you to focus on studying without the countless… Read More »
Japanese verbs, a core part of the language, are relatively straightforward in terms of how they are structured (most end with a “u” sound, i.e. “taberu”, “kau”, “oyogu”, etc.) and how they are conjugated (unlike English verbs, 99.9% of verbs in Japanese follow a set of clear rules). Knowing how to understand and effectively use… Read More »
In this post I talk at length about translation, touching upon how I consider it to be a creative act, but also going into some suggestions on how to be a better translator.
Compared to English, Japanese has countless differences in how things are expressed, including major things like word order, particles, and levels of politeness. However, if you ponder things long enough, and do enough research, you can often find something similar in English, or at least a roughly equivalent way to express things, whether that is… Read More »
Doing a lot of translations these days, I come across a bunch of sites related to word meanings. One site of particular note that I would like to give a brief review of is Linguee (http://www.linguee.com). This site supports meaning lookup for twenty-some languages, although I have only used it for Japanese to English. For… Read More »
These days I’ve been spending a good portion of my time trying to find interesting and noteworthy Japanese fiction to translate and publish, a process I blogged about a few years ago here. But in this article I want to focus on a specific activity I discovered that really has helped me gain a better… Read More »