When practicing my fiction writing skills some years ago, I learned the technique of reading what you write out loud in order to catch mistakes that would otherwise be missed. In recent years I’ve discovered this also helps improve the naturalness of my translations, and I try to read aloud at least portions of my… Read More »
In this post I’ve translated Hayashi Fumiko’s classic fairy tale “The Crane’s Flute” (鶴の笛) in full, a simple story that touches upon important topics.
In this essay (3k+ words) I talk in detail about introducing a child to a second language, using things I have gathered from my own experiences or picked up from other places.
As if raising a child isn’t difficult enough, raising a child to speak a language different than the primary language(s) of the country you live in further complicates things. There are various reasons for why parents want their child or children to speak another language, but I’ve heard many stories where the child ends up… Read More »
Many parents living in a country different from where they were born have a desire to teach their children about their home country’s culture and language. There is a plethora of resources online to study foreign languages, but for children often physical books are seen as the best type of media. However, there are not… Read More »
In the last year or so I’ve had the opportunity to tutor a few young children in Japanese. It’s been a really enjoyable and educational experience, so I wanted to make a list of suggestions for those in a position to teach a foreign language to other children. In my case, the teaching was somewhat… Read More »
When I couldn’t sleep the other day, I got an idea for a new Japanese vocab list about, well, sleep. Without enough sleep it’s hard to function in daily life, let alone study Japanese effectively. As with my other vocabulary lists, a majority of the words are those I have heard used by native speakers… Read More »
In my college days, I was really into the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, although in the last decade or two I don’t think I’ve played a single game. One of the fun things about having children is the possibility of exposing your hobbies and interests to them, and if you are lucky they… 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 »
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 »