Some tim ago I had suggested changing your Twitter settings to use Japanese language as one more way to immerse yourself in Japanese on a daily basis. This helps you learn to not only recognize these words, but do it very quickly and eventually reach close to native-level speed. フォロー (foroo) – follow (can be used… Read More »
Doing translations between Japanese and English is always an educational endeavor, teaching me so much about Japanese and language in general. One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is how one can be reasonably skilled in two languages, and yet translating simple phrases can be so challenging. I’ve seen this happen even when I… Read More »
Japanese has relatively few verb tenses, at least compared to English, and you can get a lot across just with the past tense (i.e. shita), non-past (i.e. suru), and te-form (i.e. shite), plus their polite forms (shimashita, shimasu, shimashite [this last one is pretty rare though]). However, while this lack of tenses makes less conjugations to memorize,… Read More »
As part of my training to become a (self taught) Japanese translator, I’ve been doing some unofficial hobby translations from Japanese to English. The first of these was the intro of the most recent Candy Candy novel. For my second translation project, I chose a short story from Endo Shusaku’s “Humorous short story collection” which I reviewed… Read More »
In Japanese there are a few expressions which are close equivalents to English “never”, and in this post I’ll go over a few. If you want to express the concept of “never” in Japanese, you can keep things simple and just use the negative form of a verb. Literally, this is close to “~will not”.… Read More »
Due to a request from one of my readers, in this post I’ll be talking about the Japanese expression “to mo” (とも), which has a variety of uses. First, “to mo” can be used to mean the particle “to” along with the particle “mo”. I won’t be going over either of these particles in great… Read More »
A few weeks back when I had written an article about translation, someone had posted a comment about the site Gengo.com, which is a web-based human translation service. “Gengo” (言語) means “language” in Japanese, and the company is in fact located in Tokyo. The concept of the site is pretty straightforward: Those who need text translated can work… Read More »
One thing that makes mastering a foreign language tricky is how the vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation can change depending on the environment and situation. For example, watching an cartoon targeting children and a comedy show broadcast on TV will be extremely different experiences. For Japanese, assuming you have a good foundation in grammar, if you watch… Read More »
Once you get to the point in your foreign language studies where you are able to start having frequent conversations, you’ll probably start to notice times where the person you are speaking with has difficulty understanding what you are saying. Rather than say “I don’t understand you”, they may be more indirect and try and… Read More »
The other day I was reading some posts about Japanese on Twitter and came across a post that had a simple phrase written in English, and then translated into Japanese. Here is what it said: Hey, did you lose weight? あれ？やせた？ [Are? Yaseta?] At first, this looks like a pretty innocuous phrase. Both the English… Read More »