In this article, I’d like to talk about the making of my recently published book Science: Hopes & Fears (Volume 1), which is a compilation of Juza Unno’s science fiction stories translated into English. (You can find it here on Amazon) Although I had been considering it for some time, this was my first attempt… 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 »
(Update: I have since republished these stories in a larger compilation that you can find here.) In late October, I announced I was working on a new translation project–after around two years of listing translations on my blog, for the first time I was aiming to publish a translation in a more formal media than… Read More »
The other day when I was working away at writing a new blog post, I was told: 君、水を得た魚だね (kimi, mizu wo eta sakana da ne) I admit I was a little confused when I hard this. So what does it mean? First, let’s look at the words one by one: 水 (mizu): water 得た (eta):… Read More »
In Japanese, the word 初夢 (hatsuyume) means the first dream of the year. While there are several different definitions of this, the most common one seems to be it is the dream you have on the night of New Years day (Jan 1). By the way, this day is called お正月 (oshougatsu) or 元日 (ganjitsu)… Read More »
Although I frequently have ideas for blog posts, I’ve been mostly staying away from blogging as to focus my energy on my latest translation project (hoping to get something out in a few weeks). However, Yeti from Shosetsu Ninja was one of the people who has been assisting me proofreading some of the stories for… Read More »
A few weeks ago I announced that I was working on a new translation project which is targeting to actually publish something in (at minimum) E-book form. Since then, I’ve made great progress and managed to get rough translations for four stories done and edit them 2-3 times each to start cleaning things up. The… Read More »
YouTube is a great source of Japanese-language content for those studying the language, however with billions of videos, even with a good search mechanism it can be hard to find videos appropriate for language learners. Recently I was searching around on YouTube using some science terms in Japanese (like 分子) and came across a great… Read More »
The other day, I made a post about how I turned my backyard into a Japanese karesansui rock garden and included some hints on how to make your own. I received a comment on that post from someone working for Real Japanese Gardens, a website that has some useful information about Japanese gardens (some posted… Read More »
日経大人OFF (Nikkei otona OFF) is a magazine series by the same company that publishes the Nikkei daily business paper. In this post I am reviewing a special edition of that series from 3/15/2012 titled: 「美しい日本語と正しい敬語が身につく本」, roughly translated as “Guidebook to beautiful Japanese and proper polite language”. As you can guess from its title, this magazine… Read More »