Cool Japan Guide, by Abby Denson, is marketed with the catchy subtitle: “Fun in the land of manga, lucky cats, and ramen”. Despite the fact I am pretty heavily into Japanese culture, I haven’t read a printed book on it in some time, so I was looking forward to reading this book. This 128 page… Read More »
I picked P.G.Oneill’s “Japanese Respect Language” because I hadn’t seen too many Japanese textbooks focused exclusively on respectful language, which is arguably one of the most difficult aspects of Japanese to master. At the time when I decided to get it I remember thinking the term “respect language” had an unfamiliar ring to it, having usually… Read More »
In the continuing quest to improve my Japanese reading skills and experience various facets of Japanese culture, I’ve been reading different types of books over the last few years. The genres range from children’s picture books to classics like Ningen Shikkaku. My latest challenge was the book “オレたちバブル入行組” (Oretachi baburu nyuukougumi) by Jun Ikeido (池井戸潤), which began serialization… Read More »
My family and I had a great time on our 15-day vacation to Japan this August, and I really enjoyed writing so many posts about it. Although it’s possible to get a page linking to a bunch of blog posts using keywords (like this), for ease of use I think an old-fashioned table of contents… Read More »
It’s been some time since I’ve written an article about bilingual education, so I thought I would review “The Gifted”, a book published last year. This book is about the Japanese boy genius Sho Okawa, who moved to Canada when he was 5 and was declared as “Gifted” at age 9. Only five years later, Sho… Read More »
Recently I happened to stop by Kinokuniya, one of the better Japanese bookstores in San Jose. I wanted to buy a few things there to read, but since I had done practically no research before arriving I ended up picking up the first issue of Hiroya Oku’s “Dog House” base only on the cover art and some text which said something about robots… Read More »
A friend of mine told me he had heard of someone who was making an attempt to read one novel from each country in the world. This sounded like a pretty fun project, but of course my first instinct was to ask “so which novel was picked for Japan?” The answer to this question was… Read More »
We received “99 Tears” as a gift and since it was a relatively thin paperback book I decided to try it out. It’s a set of 12 short stories, each written by a different Japanese author. The settings and characters are all different, but they all share an emphasis on interpersonal relations, especially those with family.… Read More »
Translation of text from one language into another, in particular of a novel or short story, has been an interest of mine for quite a long time. It’s my belief that to be a superb translator, one has to have been brought up speaking both languages, or at least spent 5-10 years in a country… Read More »
In the age of the internet, anyone studying a foreign language can access nearly limitless content in the language of their choice if they search hard enough (though I have read that know some languages are more represented than others online). Having said that, I feel there is something special about using magazines for foreign language study.… Read More »