Daniel Morales - The Japan Times

LIFE / Language

Sep 21, 2015

When translation gets tough, bow to the 'Green Goddess'

For me personally, the most frustrating part of translating Japanese into English is looking up the definitions of words I don't know.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Aug 3, 2015

Jiko PR gives job seekers a rare chance to brag in Japanese

One of the most interesting aspects of job-hunting here is jiko-PR ('self-public relations'), one of the few times when Japanese are forced to show off about their abilities and accomplishments.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Jun 15, 2015

Keep pounding away and eventually Japanese will reveal its secrets

If some patterns in Japanese don't make sense yet, just keep pounding the rock. With enough time and repetition, they'll click.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

May 11, 2015

In Japanese, mastery of the space-time continuum is just a few words away

Words in Japanese that describe timing and conditions make it easy for speakers to be incredibly precise using very few words.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Mar 30, 2015

Submitting yourself to the 50 shades of arigatō gozaimasu

Do you remember the first day of Japanese class or the first day you resolved to finally learn the language on your own? What about the very first Japanese words you ever learned? There's a good chance arigatō gozaimasu (ありがとうございます) were those first words and/or you learned them on that first day of study. Of course the Japanese words for "thank you" are so widely known that you may not even have needed to "learn" them — they might have been something you were already aware of.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Mar 9, 2015

Avoiding the subject isn't such a bad idea in Japanese

Japanese is so efficient as a language that it can sometimes leave new students feeling as though they are floating in space. Without the familiar gravity of shugo (主語, subjects), students are sometimes at a loss to create sentences that involve multiple actors and both direct and indirect actions. This is a result of thinking in English (or another mother tongue) rather than taking advantage of the little tricks that Japanese provides to deal with these situations.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Feb 2, 2015

'Ka' can help you sound less like Mr. Roboto

Knowing how you sound in Japanese is very difficult. For the first few months of study, perhaps even the first few years, the best you can hope for is to imitate sensei (先生, teachers) and tomodachi (友達, friends), geinōjin (芸能人, celebrities) and kishō yohōshi (気象予報士, weather forecasters).

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Jan 5, 2015

The myths and misery of translating Japanese video games

Given ever-expanding access to the culture of Japan, people worldwide have many different reasons for studying the Japanese language these days. But I don't know if job opportunities for non-Japanese have expanded as rapidly. Many folks probably fall back on the same set of options as always: eigo kyōshi (英語教師, English teacher), torihiki-gyōsha (取引業者, trader) and honyakusha (翻訳者, translator).

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Dec 22, 2014

The annual pain and pleasure of punished comedians

Japan is a country of traditions. You take off your shoes when you go indoors. You rinse your body before entering the bath. And you sit around the house with family on Ōmisoka (大晦日, New Year's Eve) and do nothing but watch television and eat food before going to the jinja (神社, shrine) at midnight.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Dec 8, 2014

Going backward to get ahead with studying Japanese

In his book "Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You," translator and Japanese literature scholar Jay Rubin notes that the Japanese language "works backward."

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Oct 6, 2014

Discovering verb stems: A gokan oasis in the desert of gobi

The luckiest Japanese language students begin their studies at birth, possibly even earlier. The rest of us start somewhere else along the way, either on the streets or in a classroom. The streets are a rough teacher, but they can be rewarding as well. Classroom instruction may seem like a better option, but you have just as much chance of ending up ashi wo sukuwareta (足をすくわれた, having your legs pulled out from under you) as you do out on the streets, immersed in life in Japan.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Aug 18, 2014

Complicated characters: Let us now praise difficult kanji

For beginner and intermediate students of Japanese, encountering a kanji such as 鬱 (utsu, depression) in the wild can be a somewhat traumatic event that, appropriately, induces a deep, introspective depression regarding their language ability. Let's pull out our electron microscopes and examine that sucker up close: It's got an upstairs, a downstairs and what appears to be a safety deposit box holding some secret treasure. It has a kakusū (画数, stroke count) of 29 and takes half an hour to write. How the hell would you even determine the bushu (部首, radical) in order to look up the meaning in a kanji dictionary? It looks like it has 10 bushu.

CULTURE / Books

Aug 9, 2014

Haruki Murakami's new book peels back the layers of friendship

Haruki Murakami has made his name in the West with the translations of his tome-like novels, but it was 1987's relatively slim Norwegian Wood that made him famous in Japan. And his latest big hit here is similarly slender.

LIFE / Language

Jun 29, 2014

Particles create the chemistry of adjectives and adverbs

I first started studying Japanese the summer after my first year of college. I was still promising my parents that I would take the med school prerequisites and eventually become a doctor, but I knew going in to college that all I really wanted to do was learn Japanese. I must have had science on my brain because as I started studying, I set up a scientific analogy in my mind: Much like the electrons in atoms, Japanese adjectives and adverbs use particles to form bonds with neighboring words.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

May 4, 2014

Drinking in Japan: Sober words to help you socialize

Drinking in the United States is so relaxed and so much fun that sometimes I forget how important it is as a social ritual in Japan. And like any good Japanese ritual, drinking has a bevy of lovely words that float around it, providing a lesson in language as well as culture.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Mar 23, 2014

Being laughed at can help your Japanese evolve

Students of Japanese are often Japanese-as-a-second-language (JSL) cavemen. JSL cavemen live a mostly pleasant existence of blissful ignorance, using a devolved form of the language as best they can. However, JSL cavemen are not total ignoramuses — their thick hide can be penetrated by awkward social encounters, notably by laughter.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Feb 23, 2014

Keep calm before carrying on when speaking Japanese

In Haruki Murakami's 1985 novel "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," one of the two protagonists is a coolheaded data agent working for the monolithic "System" that protects the world from "Semiotec" data thieves. He takes on a job that's a little too dangerous and finds himself confronted with freelancing goons eager to carve out their own piece of the action.

JAPAN / Media

Apr 21, 2013

In 'Tsukuru Tazaki,' Murakami once again shifts his point of view

Two thousand and nine was a good year to be a Haruki Murakami fan. Seven years after writing his last epic novel, "Kafka on the Shore," with only the bite-sized 2004 "afterdark" to tide over his readership, the author published the massive two-volume "1Q84." Looking back now, it's also clear that Murakami was in between two crests of his career.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Jun 25, 2012

Ii ne! Facebook is a perfect place for Japanese immersion

Facebook has grown at a tremendous rate in Japan over the past four years, jumping from just over 200,000 users in 2008 to more than 6 million by the end of 2011. In the process, Japan has generated one of the social network's highest annual growth rates of 254 percent, second only to Brazil.

LIFE / Language

Aug 29, 2011

Japanese humor: more universally funny than you think

Japanese comedy gets a bad rap. Foreigners either knock it for being too silly and too focused on slapstick or too pun-based and difficult to understand.

author

Meta

Twitter

Podcast

Longform

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER

In your social network

In your inbox

In your social network

In your inbox