When learning a foreign language, I think we all tend to go through stages. First, we may have a mild (or major) interest in the culture of a foreign country, and begin to pick up a few words here or there in that country’s native language. In the case of Japanese, it might be a few… Read More »
I feel that particles (such as の、で、に) are the heart of the Japanese language, or at least a grammatical aspect of the language that is significantly different to languages such as English. I think it’s fair to say that without a very strong grasp of particles, one can never fully understand the subtleties of more advanced sentences.… Read More »
As anyone who has studied a foreign language can attest to, knowing what words to study is one of the more challenging things because there is so many words out there. In this post I’m going to go over the word “ほか”（also written in Kanji as “他” or ”外”) and some of it’s uses. This… Read More »
In my last post, I wrote about how the Japanese word “くるま” (which means “car”) originated from the words ”来る” (to come) and “魔” (devil). While these two words are actual words with the meanings I specified, the truth is that they have nothing to do with the word ”くるま”. After all, my post yesterday was written on April… Read More »
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 »
In previous articles here and here, I wrote about the testing process required to become a “Standard” level translator working at the online translation site Gengo.com. Fortunately, I was able to pass the translation test I discussed in the second article, and shortly after I started taking on my own translation jobs during my end-year vacation… 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 »
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 »