I’ve translated Masao Yamakawa’s “Fireworks of the Day” and released in full as a free ebook that you can download for a limited time. It’s a short piece of classic Japanese literature about a teenage boy who takes a woman to a baseball game, only to have her give a shocking declaration.
The word “demo” in Japanese (generally written in hiragana as でも) can have a variety of meanings depending on the context. In this article I will go through some of the most common ones and give example sentences for each. Usage 1: Contrasting a previous statement (“but”) One of the simplest and most common usage… Read More »
I reviewed the semi-biographical essay collection “What’s so great about being 90 years old?” by award-winning nonagenarian author Aiko Sato.
My “method” for learning Japanese (if you can even call it that) is based on the idea of immersing yourself in the language and trying to actively use whatever you have learned whenever an opportunity presents itself. I’m guessing the majority of my readers are not actually living in Japan––though my stats do point to… Read More »
I’ve done a full voice narration of the work “The Foundary” by Kyusaku Yumeno, a story about a disturbing factory and the man who has inherited it.
This is my translation of the 4th part of Kenji Miyazawa’s famous story “Matasaburo of the Wind”, which happens to be the same story referred to in the song “Matasaburo” by the rock band Yorushika.
Besides things like culture and media, one of the major reasons for wanting to learn a foreign language is a desire to live in a country that speaks that language, and to live somewhere the majority of us must also work there to be able to survive. So I’ve decided to make a vocabulary list… Read More »
In this post I’d like to go over the Japanese expression “~nakute sumu” which is used fairly commonly in everyday speech. First, let’s look at an example sentence: 傘を持っていけば濡れなくてすむ。 (kasa wo motte ikeba nurenakute sumu.) すむ can sometimes mean “to live or inhabit” (住む), but from context here we know it has a different meaning,… Read More »
I reviewed the English version of Inio Asano’s “Nijigahara Holograph”, which ended up being one of my favorite manga of all time.
My predilections for art style combined with my love of Japanese culture means that most of the time if I have a choice between a Japanese manga or a Western (English) comic book, I will usually pick the former. But when I came across Animus by French cartoonist Antoine Revoy, I couldn’t help giving it… Read More »