Japanese Me

This one gets a little weird in the telling but I’m going to try anyway. The Japanese word for milk is 牛乳.  The first character means cow.  The second character… well, I’ve only ever seen it in dairy-related words so it probably means milk.  Right? Flash forward to Ken and I watching the news on [...]

Read the full story

I think it’s funny and interesting that my students (largely fifth and sixth graders) think that I can understand and listen to Japanese but can’t speak a lick of it.  The two skills have no connection in their mind.  I wonder if grasping the relation is a developmental milestone, something they realize when they hit [...]

Read the full story

I managed to cast off another pair of socks today.  Really small needles and really thin yarn equaled a really long, tedious knit.  Worth it, though. Prima Julia [ravelry]. In other news it’s Golden Week, an extremely well-placed series of national holidays.  This year they land so we get five days off in a row–sweet.  [...]

Read the full story

Part two of an ongoing series. The same Translator Cafe thread that inspired part one of this series has a bunch of good tidbits in it.  Here’s one from a Terry Waltz: Understanding everything is great — but you do realize that working in Asian languages you will have to go both ways, and that [...]

Read the full story

One of the many great things about being in Japan is that there is a ton of authentic reading material in front of me every day–advertisements flashing by on the tv, signs in the supermarket, fliers in my mailbox.  I’ve been flipping through magazines at the bookstore, trying to find something at my level that [...]

Read the full story

I just got the results of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) I took in December.  I went for level 2 (２級), where passing is 240 points. I got 237. Bah.  I’m not really mad or anything though–my reading/grammar section was lacking so at least I know what to study.  In Japan they offer the [...]

Read the full story

I’ve had a lot of free time since I’ve been home so I’ve been hitting the books pretty hard, cramming bunches of Japanese vocabulary into my brain.  I’ve also been roaming around on delicious looking for helpful websites and forum posts about achieving fluency in Japanese.  This translators cafe thread led me to the translation [...]

Read the full story

Did you ever play Memory as a kid?  You know, that game where you try and match cards before your opponent does?  Well, it turns out the Japanese had the same idea, only in the 13th century and with much more panache.  It’s called 百人一首 (hyakunin isshu) or literally “100 people 1 poem”.  It’s traditionally [...]

Read the full story

At the very least, it doesn’t seem a bad gig to get into.  Several blogging translators say they’ve seen little to no difference in their volume–Ryan Ginstrom at the GITS blog is full up with work.  I love hearing this from Ryan in particular as he works in the language pairing I’m aiming for, Japanese [...]

Read the full story

I am so happy I live in an age where I can use the internet to study Japanese–there are so many great tools out there!  Here’s one I discovered just yesterday:  Read the Kanji. It’s a flashcard website that tests your knowledge of kanji readings.  Its beauty is in its simplicity–no complicated preferences, no wading [...]

Read the full story