I recently received a comment about translating a certain phrase, and I thought I would make an article to discuss it. “After that time, I decided that I don’t want to see him again by any means.” I think a fairly natural Japanese translation for this would be the following: “その後、彼とは二度と会いたくないって決めた。” As with most translations,… Read More »
Back when I first started studying Japanese, I wasn’t aware of any translation programs that worked between English and Japanese, and if there was I’m pretty sure they were very expensive and not very commonly used. Nowadays we have things like Google Translate, a free service that translates between over 50 world languages, including Japanese. As… Read More »
Anyone who has studied Japanese knows that the language contains loanwords called 外来語 (“gairaigo”), which words ‘borrowed’ from another language and imported into Japanese. As part of this transition, the works take on a new spelling and pronunciation, which can be a shortened version or one containing syllables from multiple words. The meaning itself can… Read More »
Translation of text from one language into another, in particular of a novel or short story, has been an interest of mine for quite a long time. It’s my belief that to be a superb translator, one has to have been brought up speaking both languages, or at least spent 5-10 years in a country… Read More »
As part of the process of immersing myself in Japanese without actually leaving in Japan, I take advantage of pretty much any media I can get my hands on and usually to try to decipher at least a phrase or so (or longer if I have the time). Today I happened to be drinking a… Read More »
I ran across this quote online, credited as a “Japanese proverb”. ”Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare” I did some searching around and couldn’t find any reference to the original Japanese or the originator of this phrase, so I decided to post on Oshiete Goo in Japanese. You can… Read More »
In one of my other blog posts, I mentioned how watching subtitles when studying a foreign language is a bad idea because your brain stops paying attention to the details of the language and takes the easy route to comprehension. There’s actually another major reason to avoid subtitles which I’ve decided to devote this post… Read More »