Tag Archives: how to japanese podcast

育休

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Take a look at the newsletter for more details, but I’m taking the month off. I wrote about some of my favorite writing I’ve done since I started keeping How to Japanese way back in 2008, so head over there to take a look. Or you can just look over to the right and click on any month to see the archive if you’d like to read through randomly or chronologically.

Sometimes I’m amazed this site has lasted as long as it has, purely from a tech perspective. I’m not the savviest, but I managed to do a few tricks here and there, notably when I switched over to an official WordPress build from another platform. More recently, I neglected my Google Analytics and only just got it working again over the past week, so I have a better sense of where traffic is coming from and what posts people are looking at. Spoiler alert: The keyword searches are as depressing as you’d expect. I don’t have enough data at this point, so after a few months, maybe I’ll write something about the most accessed posts on the site.

I’ve got no plans to change anything about my current writing approach. Once a month on the newsletter and once a month here feels sustainable. I do have two somewhat challenging goals:

1. Get the newsletter on a self-hosted version of Ghost.

Currently I’m on a managed hosting situation, which is actually really convenient and pretty affordable. I can’t decide whether it would be worth it to self host. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, in terms of the hosting itself, getting support for email, making sure everything is connected properly. It might actually cost more to do this. I think I’d also need some help, so if anyone has any resources or would be able to train me, please do reach out.

2. Find a way to archive the site long term.

This is a bit dark to think about, but I wonder about a long, long-term solution to ensure my writing stays online. Maybe this is a fruitless, hopeless thing to want. Maybe our digital writing is just like most paper writing: victim to the whims of time (and algorithms) and likely to disappear in the end. I’m curious about static sites and archiving, so if anyone has any info on those, please do share. I feel like there’s a potential business opportunity for a service that you could pay into over time that would then archive your site or make it a static site at any point you specified. Kind of like the opposite of an annuity or something.

Hope you all have an excellent holiday season. I’m looking forward to an obligation-free (in terms of work and writing) New Year’s. See you all in January. Until then, find me elsewhere on social media.

当日

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This month I wrote about a word that was rattling around in my head earlier this year. 当日 (tōjitsu, the day it happened/will happen).

I started by looking for some usage examples in Aozora but didn’t want to take up too much space in the newsletter, so I thought I’d look at those here.

I found two examples that might be helpful, both by protagonists using 当日 to narrate past events. Here’s a sentence from writing from Sakaguchi Ango titled 小林さんと私のツキアイ (My Relationship with Kobayashi-san):

私は当夜のことを全てよく記憶しているが、それは当日私が腹をこわして酒がのめなくて、一同の酒宴をただ一人傍観したからである。

I remember everything from the evening of the event very well, and that’s due to the fact that my stomach was upset that day and I couldn’t drink so I spent the entirety of the party just observing people.

“that day” here is 当日, but it carries with it a bit more implication than その日 would. And actually in this sentence we can also see 当夜 (tōya, that night/the night in consideration). Pretty cool how 当 can be attached to so many different things and immediately help clarify relationships within time and context.

And here’s Akutagawa Ryunosuke in 野呂松人形 (Noroma Dolls):

当日、僕は車で、その催しがある日暮里のある人の別荘へ行った。

That day, I went to the person’s vacation home in Nippori where the event was being held.

It’s nice to see that you can just set 当日 there at the beginning of a sentence and immediately orient a reader. I think it’s important to note that it doesn’t even need a particle. 当日は would have a different implication from 当日.

In the newsletter I take a look at the flexibility of 当日. It can be a date either in the future or in the past. These two examples are from the past, but depending on the context, it can easily be something two days, two weeks, or two months from now.

謎

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I wrote about a funny Japanese word: 謎 (nazo, mystery). I was inspired to look at 謎 because I was curious about the effect that a viral video from the late 2000s had (or didn’t have) on the career of comedian/actor Katagiri Jin. There’s not much out there, to be honest. All of the original posts of the video were taken down from YouTube due to copyright strikes, so we’ve lost the conversation in those comments. I did manage to find this Reddit post from 2011, which is super interesting and shows that the video had an impact on Redditors at least, and I think this is emblematic of the internet at that point in time. We were shifting from an internet where Homestar Runner thrived to an in-between state as YouTube was getting going but before Vine or TikTok were even imaginable.

And I don’t think the video had much of an impact on Japanese fans. I’m sure many enjoyed the skits, but Katagiri is much more defined by his time in Rahmens and his podcast エレ片のポッ. The skit isn’t even mentioned in the longform blog post I found that examines Katagiri’s career. That article is worth a read. I’m not sure I understood 100% of it, but the thesis is pretty clear and, I think, on point. Worth a read.

ということです

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The newsletter is out for August. I’ve switched over to Ghost from Substack. I have my fingers crossed that it’s a seamless experience bringing everyone over with me, so apologies if there are any difficulties and please feel free to unsubscribe if you’d rather not read. Take a listen to the podcast for a little more background on why I made the switch, something I’ve been considering for a while:

Perhaps fittingly, I’m started the Ghost era of How to Japanese with a topic that I first wrote about way back in 2008: How to convey information in Japanese. I looked at ということです (to iu koto desu), an alternative to そうです (sō desu), the pattern I originally wrote about.

As a little lagniappe for blog readers, I found this interesting Yahoo Chiebukuro post where someone asked about the difference between the two. There are a couple interesting answers, and I think the best answer may not be the one with the gold medal.

The general gist, however, is that ということです is used to report unvarnished information while そうです is information that has been confirmed/refined/focused. So the latter can be taken more as the truth, whereas the former may need further examination.

Also, そうです is more of a spoken phrase, while ということです is more of a polite phrase that can be used in written contexts, which is what we see in the newsletter this month. Do go check out the newsletter for a very fun passage from the book I’m reading right now.

And I thought I’d also share this very cool Google Trends data showing search results for かき氷 over time. I mention this in the podcast:

五月雨式

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The newsletter is online here! And I have a podcast to accompany it:

I’ve decided that I’ll mostly be limiting my tourist recommendations to the end of the podcast, but they won’t always be as lengthy as the posts here the past two months. This month I’ve got two quick recommendations for nice spots in central Kyoto. If I have any longer dumps worthy of a blog post, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Collector’s Mindset

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I just sent out the February newsletter and podcast. This month I wrote about a phrase I encountered last summer while prepping for my annual Murakami fest. Give it a listen here:

You can see the blog post for that entry here.

One of the phrases really stuck out to me, and it’s one that I’ve tried to incorporate into my active Japanese: あとになってわかったこと (Ato ni natte wakatta koto). I won’t translate it here. Click over to the newsletter to see my explanation. Or better yet, listen to the podcast and hear how I’ve been able to take this phrase and expand it into other usages and patterns, nearly all of which I’ve been able to confirm examples for. Pretty neat, especially since they are patterns that I’d never heard before but was able to construct on my own. This is, essentially, how you learn a foreign language. Imitation, adaptation, and eventually creation. You can confirm your new creations by comparing with other examples online, like the blog post from a new father I found.

In the newsletter I’ve also got some strategies about how to best develop your eye and ear for sentences that are interesting, helpful, and useful.

The hardest part is realizing that a sentence is interesting, but the next hardest step (which is basically just as difficult) is to then prompt yourself to write it down to peruse in the future with the goal of increasing exposure. You’ve got to do both.
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And I’m glad that I didn’t forget to share the link for this great (and very extensive) Wikipedia page: 最長片道切符 (saichō katamichi kippu). Can you parse that from the kanji alone? It’s three two-character compounds lumped together, and I bet if you take them in reverse order you can figure it out pretty easily.

At any rate, that’s the Wikipedia page that inspired my interest in the book I’ve been reading lately, which I talk about in more depth on the podcast. Fortunately for me I was able to escape the gravity of my Mercari 積読 addiction and get these pages off the shelf and onto my eyeballs. Keep that pedal pressed.
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On a quick closing note, please do check out my call for comments and opinions at the end of the newsletter. I’m curious to know what readers and listeners are thinking. Do you like having the monthly newsletters mailed to you? Do you prefer that over a blog-style publication? Are you reading both the newsletters and blog posts? If I shifted to a different newsletter platform, would you be willing to read there or do you prefer Substack?

I like the balance between the newsletter and blog with more casual, off the cuff posts here and more feature-style writing on the newsletter, but it would be nice to have more control over the platform (and Substack has some pretty obvious issues). I spent a weekend looking into Ghost as a potential option, but it does seem making a switch would mean taking on another monthly bill and potentially a good amount of tech work (if I were to self-host). I’d love to hear what you think, and if you listen to the podcast I go into a little more details about the tech side of things. If anyone has any experience or thoughts on that side of things, I’d love to hear from you.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls – Review Redux

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The English translation for Murakami Haruki’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls will be published on November 19, and reviews are starting to trickle out, so I thought I’d re-run the review episode of the podcast I put online after reading the Japanese version when it was published in 2023.

I added about 20 minutes of content as an introduction taking a look at two negative reviews (The Guardian and the Financial Times) and one positive review (The Telegraph) along with two interviews (The New Yorker and NPR). I’ll keep an eye on others as they come out and will probably do a quick look at some of them on the next episode of the podcast or in the newsletter this month, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the translation myself. I’ve spent enough time and money on that book.

Check out my full review on Medium and additional comments on the newsletter last year.

The Various Forms of うかがう

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The Japanese verb ukagau.

This month, the core topic I looked at was how easy and broadly useful is 伺う (ukagau) is, especially for folks struggling to gain a handhold with keigo: This is your handhold.

伺う means so many different things at once: to listen/hear, to ask, to visit, and to detect/view. There are a number of set phrases that you should start to memorize, and once they become more familiar, you’ll hopefully find yourself reaching less frequently for more complex verb permutations, which gives you more time to become familiar with those complex verb permutations, making them more familiar and less complex, enabling you to reach for them more easily…it’s a cycle, and you just need a way in.

However, 伺う is more complex that it may first appear, likely because of how broadly it can be used. There are actually (at least) three different kanji that get used for うかがう.

The first and most frequent is 伺 which gets used for those core meanings above.

The two additional kanji take on these meanings:

窺う
「そっと（気づかれないように）様子を見る」という意味
“To secretly watch (so that you aren’t noticed”

Kenkyusha also lists several other definitions: to peer into/through something, to watch/wait for an opportunity, to infer/surmise. So it appears as those this meaning can be rather broad as well and loses some of the deference in the other definitions.

覗う
「何かを通してのぞいて様子を見る」という意味
“To peer through something”

While 窺 can mean “peer into/through” something, this kanji tends to take on more of those meanings because it’s also associated with the verb のぞく (nozoku), which is the more frequently used word for “peek/peer” and gets used with compounds like 覗き穴 (nozokiana, peephole).

Kanjipedia also notes that 候, 偵, and 覘 are also used in various situations with うかがう, but judging from my cursory searches, these are less frequently encountered.

I think the best way to understand these as a whole is to think of all these additional kanji as (most likely) an extension of the “view/detect” definition in intricate different ways that writers can choose to take advantage of. I imagine that うかがう gets used in hiragana form pretty regularly as well, so keep an eye out for that as well.

Impossible Pairs

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The core of the newsletter is about “impossible pairs,” in particular 4日 and 8日. Do you know the difference in pronunciation between these two without looking it up? The good news is that Japanese mix these up as well. So don’t sweat it too much, but it can be good to try and “brute force” pairs like this if you can establish a clear mnemonic or set of phrases that click for you. I also took a look at the difference between 確か (tashika) and 確かに (tashika ni).

I ended up rambling a bit at the beginning of the podcast about my usual nonsense: letting yourself follow the ebbs and flows of motivation as it comes to you. Although the one key point that I hope didn’t get lost is stop and check out the neighborhood around you in Japan. There are likely a ton of excellent restaurants, cafes, and bars for you to enjoy.

I found a reading cafe not far from me in Osaka and it’s given me at least one solid new author to read in Kakuta Mitsuyo. She seems to have had a couple novels and short stories translated, but no nonfiction. Worth taking a look at her writing! And the cafe, which is on Instagram here.

Click through to the newsletter to find a link to some of Kakuta’s nonfiction writing online that we’ll be reading for the October USJETAA Japanese Reading Group, and join us if you can.