When speaking with native speakers there is never a shortage of unfamiliar words that come up. The other day I heard the word 良かれ (yokare) in daily conversation, and while I was able to guess the basic gist of what it meant, I wanted to dedicate an article to this interesting word. First of all,… Read More »
Late last year my translation of classic Japanese SF author Unno Juza’s story “Mysterious Spacial Rift” (不思議なる空間断層) was made into an audio narration and broadcasted periodically on History Radio, an online radio station (details). I’ve decided to release this narration to the public via Youtube. It is part of a channel titled “Asian literature in… Read More »
I’m running a YouTube series called “TransLiterary Lab” (文学翻訳ラボ) where I do analysis and translation of short excerpts of Japanese literature. You can see more information about this series in this post. In this seventh episode I analyze and translate a small portion of 檸檬 (“Lemon”) from 梶井基次郎 (Motojiro Kajii), for which you can the… Read More »
Unlike the “-s” suffix in English, Japanese doesn’t have an all-purpose way to make words plural. But that doesn’t mean there are no plural words in Japanese; in fact, there are quite a few, and a few patterns that are helpful to learn. In this post I want to talk about expressing plurality in Japanese… Read More »
I’m running a YouTube series called “TransLiterary Lab” (文学翻訳ラボ) where I do analysis and translation of short excerpts of Japanese literature. You can see more information about this series in this post. In this sixth episode I will continue from the previous episode and do a little more analysis and translation of 木精 (kodama) by… Read More »
The interaction between languages over time can be interesting to follow. Words get imported from one language into another, and meaning often changes, from subtle to drastic ways. New words can even be formed using a composite of words from two languages. For various historical reasons, in the last few decades the Japanese language has… Read More »
A discussion about “ukemi” (受け身), a core part of aikido and one of the things I really enjoy about this traditional Japanese martial art.
I’ve running a new series called “TransLiterary Lab” (文学翻訳ラボ) where I do analysis and translation of short excerpts of Japanese literature. You can see more information about this series in this post. In this fifth episode I will do a rough translation of a small excerpt of 木精 (kodama) by 森鴎外 (Mori Ogai), for which… Read More »
I’ve running a new series called “TransLiterary Lab” (文学翻訳ラボ) where I do analysis and translation of short excerpts of Japanese literature. You can see more information about this series in this post. In this fourth episode I will continue from the previous episode and do a little more analysis and translation of 夢十夜 from Natsume… Read More »
In all the languages I have studied, it’s fairly common for certain expressions to have special meanings that extend beyond the literal meaning, and Japanese is no exception. In this post I would like to go over a particular word with an extended meaning that I thought was especially interesting: 噛み砕く (kamikudaku). 噛み砕く is a… Read More »