Recently I was asked by Akylina of popular Literary Sisters blog if I had read anything interesting in 2018. I started drafting a response to her comment, but partway through realized I might as well make a short article about it while I was at it. This year since I was busy translating I didn’t… Read More »
As a result of the various projects I’ve been working on over the last few years, I have many “hats” that I don from time to time––author, publisher, book agent, editor, marketer, and of course translator. It seems rarer and rarer these days that I take time to read books in English, instead devoting a… Read More »
When I first discovered Juza Unno’s “Eighteen O’Clock Music Bath” (now published as part of the compilation “Fast Forward Japan”), I was really excited to find a Japanese dystopian novel. At the time, I felt like there was very few Japanese dystopian works, however after doing a little research I discovered there is quite a… Read More »
Recently in the process of trying to publish my first book across multiple internet bookstores via Draft2Digital I ran into some trouble, and as a result ended up publishing directly via Amazon’s KDP (see here for more details). Things did get resolved with D2D so I wanted to provide an update for anyone who might… Read More »
As part of raising my son bilingual Japanese, over the last few years I’ve spent a great deal of time reading him Japanese children’s books. I always recommend children’s books to people learning Japanese because typically no kanji knowledge is required, there is a so much culture to absorb, and they are just plain fun.… Read More »
Being very much into books since I was young, especially fiction novels, one of my long-term goals in studying Japanese has been to read as many Japanese novels as possible, gradually increasing my speed and reading comprehension of Japanese works to that of English. Over many years, I’ve made much progress on this, to the point… Read More »
In a recent post of mine about suggestions for increasing reading speed in a foreign language, a reader commented about how using parallel texts in two languages (your native language and the one you are studying) is another helpful technique. Surely, using parallel texts is a valuable tool, and it’s pretty easy to do this by… Read More »
When studying a foreign language, one of the more difficult things to achieve is a reading speed close to that of your native language. Unless you were lucky enough to begin studying the foreign language at a very young age, processing and understanding each sentence will take much more effort and time, even assuming you… Read More »
As I mentioned in a past post, for those studying a foreign language it’s great to supplement online resources with real paper magazines and books. I prefer to buy my Japanese reading material in somewhere like Kinokuniya (in New York and California), though at best I’ll be able to travel there once or twice a year, so… Read More »
Sometime back, I wrote a post about Benesse’s distance program learning for children, in particular their Shimajiro series of books. In my household we have been reading these books fairly often to our young son, and he has really grown to love them in a way that surprised me. On several occasions he will run… Read More »