Recently, I finished reading the first volume of “Witch of the Library” (図書館の魔女) by Daisuke Takada (高田大介) which I reviewed in detail here. Put simply, it is a pretty interesting hard fantasy (think Tolkien) book which requires a pretty high level of Japanese vocabulary and grammar to get through. Typically, I wait until I finish… Read More »
When searching for a new Japanese novel to read, I decided to peruse through the Fantasy section of Booklive (one of my favorite E-book sites) to see what was available. A few of the books looked pretty cheesy, but one of the book’s title and cover art intrigued me: “Witch of the Library” (図書館の魔女) by Daisuke… 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 »
Recently, I reviewed Jin Mayama’s book “そして、星の輝く夜がくる” which I thoroughly enjoyed and consider it one of the best Japanese novels I’ve read. As I’m always looking to improve my translation skills, especially for novels, I decided on translating just a few pages of it. In short, the novel is about a teacher who volunteers to help… Read More »
Lately I’ve been making it a point to translate a small portion of each Japanese novel I’ve finished reading, for the purpose of polishing my Japanese to English translation abilities. I’ve already had some success doing translation on the side using Gengo, but much of that work is more everyday/functionali stuff (business emails, etc.) as opposed… Read More »
In this post I’ll be reviewing the Japanese novel “Downtown Rocket” by Jun Ikeido, which was published in 2010 by Shogakukan (小学館). Like I sometimes do with Japanese books, I picked this without doing a great amount of research aforehand, more as a impulse buy when I was in Japan last year. There were two things that drew… Read More »
In our trip to Japan this year, we visited many bookstores throughout the country. I love Japanese bookstores not only because I can see what is popular in literary Japan, but also because it’s fun to read the covers and backs of a bunch of books and figure out what type of book each is.… Read More »
Very early on in my studies of Japanese, the idea of translation from Japanese to English popped into my mind. Many times, it would appear as a watchdog, a double check on my understanding. For instance, if I just glazed over a passage which had a few words I didn’t understand, I’d say to myself… Read More »
For some time now, I’ve been thinking of getting into Japanese to English translation more seriously. I’ve just finished the novel “Candy Candy Final Story” by Keiko Nagita, and when I discovered there was no official English translation (and no unofficial one I could find), I realized it was the perfect opportunity for me to… Read More »
“Candy Candy” is a Japanese historical Shoujo (girls) manga written by Keiko Nagita (名木田 恵子) which was originally published in the magazine “Nakayoshi” serially from 1975 to 1979. It was quite popular, and spawned an anime, theatrical show, and several novels. To give an idea of the popularity, around 12 million copies were printed in total for the… Read More »