Tag Archives: japanese

Twitter review: “Novel opening bot” (小説冒頭bot): Experience Japanese literature in bite-sized chunks

It’s only recently that I’ve been spending more time using Twitter, both posting links for some of my articles as well as reading those made by others. I’m sure many people will agree that Twitter is a great way to eat up your time, but from what I’ve seen it is, more often than not,… Read More »

Japanese Literature Translation Sample: The Introduction of「蜜蜂と遠雷」(Honey Bees and Distant Thunder) by 「恩田 陸」 (Riku Onda)

Recently I reviewed the Japanese novel “Honey Bees and Distant Thunder” (蜜蜂と遠雷) by Riku Onda (恩田 陸). In this post I decided to translate the short intro of the book as an exercise to improve my translation skills. This excerpt has some really good imagery and translating it was both a joy and a challenge.… Read More »

Roudoku (朗読): The fun and benefits of reading books out loud in Japanese

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 »

Japanese Literature Review: 「蜜蜂と遠雷」(Honey Bees and Distant Thunder) by 「恩田 陸」 (Riku Onda)

Because of how long it takes me to read Japanese novels, I’m generally very picky about what I commit to. But once I start reading a book I almost never give up, regardless of how tough things get. When I heard that music was a central theme of “Honey Bees and Distant Thunder” (蜜蜂と遠雷) and… Read More »

Japanese non-past (present/future) tense, “will”, and intention

One of the nice things about the Japanese language is that it has relatively few grammatical tenses, at least compared to languages like English which can get quite messy. Knowing a handful of tenses can get you pretty far, although you do have to memorize the conjugation for each category of verbs. In this post… Read More »

Oregon Monogatari: One year living in Portland, Oregon (with notes on Japanese culture there)

It’s been a little over a year since I’ve moved with my family to Portland, Oregon. It’s no exaggeration to say that one of the main reasons we chose this area because of the relatively large proportion of Japanese people, at least compared to South Florida where we came from. I’ve already written a few articles… Read More »

Expressing bad intentions in Japanese and 「悪気」 (warugi)

When using Japanese in everday life there are some useful expressions you can pick up that are not commonly used in media like books and manga. One such word is 「悪気」 (warugi), which should not be confused with the similar sounding “Waluigi” character from the Mario world. In Dictionary Goo, we see this word described… Read More »

Welcome back, Aikido: My story of returning to the dojo

(Update: my feelings about Ki-Aikido have changed somewhat since I wrote this article, especially how it differs from other styles of Aikido. I will keep this article for historical reasons, but hope to write more on this topic eventually). Over 3 years ago, I posted an article about the Japanese martial art Aikido (合気道) in which… Read More »

Japanese children’s book review: 「とうさんのあしのうえで」 (tousan no ashi no ue de) [At daddy’s feet]

In several past posts I’ve mentioned how children’s books are a great way to help train your reading skills in Japanese, one of the main reasons being you usually don’t have to worry about knowing kanji (or even katakana for that matter) since furigana reading hints will be comprehensively used. While you can run into… Read More »

Variations on a phrase for asking directions when you are lost

Once in awhile I’ll look through the posts on WordPress tagged ‘Japanese’ and when I find those trying to teach Japanese grammar or vocabulary, I have a habit of searching for mistakes and will generally message the post authors when I find them. Often people who are studying Japanese themselves are posting what they have… Read More »