Making Sense Of Japanese

Download or read book Making Sense of Japanese written by Jay Rubin and published by Vertical Inc. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Sense of Japanese is the fruit of one foolhardy American's thirty-year struggle to learn and teach the Language of the Infinite. Previously known as Gone Fishin', this book has brought Jay Rubin more feedback than any of his literary translations or scholarly tomes, "even if," he says, "you discount the hate mail from spin-casters and the stray gill-netter." To convey his conviction that "the Japanese language is not vague," Rubin has dared to explain how some of the most challenging Japanese grammatical forms work in terms of everyday English. Reached recently at a recuperative center in the hills north of Kyoto, Rubin declared, "I'm still pretty sure that Japanese is not vague. Or at least, it's not as vague as it used to be. Probably." The notorious "subjectless sentence" of Japanese comes under close scrutiny in Part One. A sentence can't be a sentence without a subject, so even in cases where the subject seems to be lost or hiding, the author provides the tools to help you find it. Some attention is paid as well to the rest of the sentence, known technically to grammarians as "the rest of the sentence." Part Two tackles a number of expressions that have baffled students of Japanese over the decades, and concludes with Rubin's patented technique of analyzing upside-down Japanese sentences right-side up, which, he claims, is "far more restful" than the traditional way, inside-out. "The scholar," according to the great Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume, is "one who specializes in making the comprehensible incomprehensible." Despite his best scholarly efforts, Rubin seems to have done just the opposite. Previously published in the Power Japanese series under the same title and originally as Gone Fishin' in the same series.

Download or read book Gone Fishin' written by Jay Rubin and published by Kodansha Amer Incorporated. This book was released on 1992 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Keigo in Modern Japan written by Patricia J. Wetzel and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-01-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patricia Wetzel offers in this volume a comprehensive examination of a frequently discussed yet much misunderstood aspect of the Japanese language. Keigo, or “polite language,” is often viewed as a quaint accessory to Japanese grammar and a relic of Japan’s feudal past. Nothing, Wetzel contends, could be further from the truth. It is true that Japan has a long history of differentiating linguistic form on the basis of social status, psychological detachment, emotional reserve, and a host of other context-dependent factors. But, as is made clear in this unique and broadly framed study, modern keigo consciousness and keigo grammar emerged out of Japan’s encounter with Western intellectual trends in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Keigo in Modern Japan presents a finely nuanced linguistic and political review of keigo available nowhere else in English. The first chapter outlines the ways in which keigo has been problematized in Western linguistics through the application of structuralist analysis and its offshoots. But keigo’s presence in the English-language literature does not begin to compare with the place it occupies in the Japanese linguistic canon. Wetzel describes the historical roots and growth of keigo and the popularity of how-to manuals, which, she contends, are less about overt instruction than reinforcing what people already believe.

Download or read book Making Sense of Suicide Missions written by Diego Gambetta and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Suicide attacks are a defining act of political violence and an extraordinary social phenomenon. This book investigates the organizers of suicide missions and the perpetrators alike"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book War Memory and East Asian Conflicts, 1930–1945 written by Eveline Buchheim and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how narratives, exhibitions, media representations, and cultural heritage sites that communicate memories of conflicts in East Asia between 1930 and 1945 spread, interact, and are re-packaged for post-war audiences across national divisions. The contributors examine individual case studies of grassroots engagement with war memory, and collectively demonstrate the necessity of remaining aware of the researcher as participating in another kind of engagement with war memory. Contributions showcase a number of ways of doing research on war memory, alongside case studies from diverse regions of the world. Taken together, they bring a fresh perspective to scholarship on war memory, which has tended to focus on space, text, exhibition, or personal narrative, rather than bringing these elements into dialogue with one another.

Download or read book Japanese For Dummies written by Eriko Sato and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previous ed.: New York: Hungry Minds, 2002.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Politics written by Alisa Gaunder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-02-25 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Politics is an advanced level reference guide which surveys the current state of Japanese politics, featuring both traditional topics and cutting edge research. The volume is divided into five sections covering: domestic politics civil society social policy political economy and international relations/security The first four sections begin with an overview chapter that provides historical background information on the section’s overarching topic. The chapters that follow explore more specific topics in the sub-area. In the final section, historical background information is contained in the individual chapters which cover the diverse areas of international political economy, security and foreign policy. Offering a complete overview of the full spectrum of Japanese politics, the Handbook is an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, policy analysts, graduate and undergraduate students studying this ever-evolving field.