war never changes

Podcast Review: Let's Talk in Japanese

Podcast Title: Let's Talk in Japanese!

Ease of Listening: ★★★★★

Length of Episodes: ★★★★★

Level of Engagement: ★★★★★

Episode Frequency: ★★★★★

Overall: ★★★★★

Today I will be reviewing the Let's Talk in Japanese! podcast by Tomo-sensei. This podcast is aimed at Japanese learners who want more chances to listen to spoken Japanese but using vocabulary and grammar that they can understand. The podcast is for levels N1 (the highest level) to N5 (the lowest level), but I would say that a majority of the content is focused on level N3 or N4.

Do I currently listen to this podcast?: Yes, I like this podcast a lot and listen to it frequently.

General Overview

Good For Levels: Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced

In this series, Tomo, a Japanese teacher for foreign students, discusses in Japanese only a variety of topics either selected by him or suggested by the audience. These can range from topics about daily life to JLPT related topics. He understandably discusses topics that he has a decent knowledge of, and admits when there are gaps. He is quite faithful to the level of each episode, which he indicates at the end of the episode title, so you can be sure that you will be able to understand the majority of the content or challenge yourself as the case may be.

Length of Episodes ★★★★★

The podcasts are usually around 10-15 minutes long. This is ideal for a quick listen when you are short on time or just want to supplement your studies, but may not be ideal if you are looking for something a bit longer. I usually listen to two or three podcasts in a row during my commute and feel like I've spent my time well. The short length can be useful if you are not interested in a particular topic, because you can make it to the end of the episode without losing interest and a new topic will come up with the next episode.

Level of Engagement ★★★★★

Although this is just one person (Tomo) talking throughout the podcast, he is engaging because he speaks as though he is talking to a small group. I find it engaging because I can, in the privacy of my room or car, reply to him when he poses questions, or make a response if I am surprised by what he says, etc. Even though it's not interactive per se, it can feel interactive because of the way he speaks in his podcast. I find myself engaged in most episodes, and the shorter length means I don't have to work as hard to stay engaged through the entire episode.

Episode Frequency ★★★★★

New podcasts come out about weekly, and sometimes more frequently than that. I have heard that he works very hard to put out the podcasts so frequently, and I think this intense schedule plus the large archive of material means you can listen almost indefinitely to this podcast.

Overall ★★★★★

This podcast is completely in Japanese and designed by a Japanese teacher for foreigners learning Japanese, and has material for everyone from beginners to advanced learners. The shorter episodes mean you can fit it into a busy schedule, and the JLPT labels mean you can pick and choose episodes based on your own level and be confident that you will get what you expect. I highly recommend this for those looking to improve their listening skills.

what is everyone currently reading🤨🤨

I’ve been having trouble putting this idea into words so you’ll have to bear with me, but I was struck when I saw a Japanese news program interviewing foreign tourists in Japan, and some australian women were dubbed over with a stereotypically feminine speech register (lots of のs and わs), and my first thought was “they weren’t speaking that femininely in english”.

A friend of mine from the UK recently mentioned that he noticed that australia has a generally more masculine culture than england - he felt that everyone is a bit more masculine here, including women. This kind of confirmed to me that my impressions of the dubbing were right - the tourists were speaking in a relatively (internationally) more masculine way. Yet their dub made them sound so much more feminine.

It made me wonder. When translating something, do you translate the manner of speaking “directly”, or “relatively” in terms of cultural norms? Maybe this graph will help me explain the question.

A direct appoach in this case might appear to a Japanese person to result in an unexpectedly masculine register, but preserves how the speaker's cultural upbringing has influenced their speech.

The news program translators chose the relative approach - I think I would prefer the direct approach. I think I prefer it because I believe translation should be a rewriting of the original utterance as if the speaker was originally speaking the target language, and the direct approach compliments that way of thinking the best.

Actually now that I type that, I’m second guessing myself. Does it? It does, if for the purposes of the “rewrite it as if they spoke japanese” thought experiment, we suppose the speaker magically learned japanese seconds before making the utterance, but what if we suppose the speaker magically grew up learning japanese - then maybe they would conform to the relative cultural values. But also, maybe they would never have said such a thing in the first place - their original utterance was informed by their upbringing and cultural values, so how could you possibly know what they would have said if they had known japanese from birth? Maybe my initial instinct was right after all?

If you work in translation, I’m very interested to hear if you have come across this problem and how you deal with it 🙏

Further reading: I think this question also ties into this problem I’ve been struggling to answer for a while.

Yes, this is a classic problem/debate in translation and translation studies:

As a native Spanish speaker I can tell the age of a translation in some ways by the choice to either domesticate or foreignize.

I'm decidedly on the side of foreignization -I do think domestication is somewhat either elitist or country-chauvinistic to a certain degree; if you don't speak the original language of the text then the translator has chosen for you never to interact with the cultural and language context of the source material. Domestication, for what I see, is what is the trend right now, between other reasons because it stands on an understanding of languages as inconmensurable -so if your work in the target language is actually a whole new creation, then just cut the farce and do create the work as it would have existed as written in your own. My problem with that is that, say, if you are translating Jane Austen, you are necessarily working with the context of Regency England that did not even remotely exist in any similar form in the Hispanic world. I feel like Domestication, in the pursuit of a good thing -the recognition of the creative aspect of translation- can downplay too much the set of circumstances of the source material that make the source material possible at all.

I study translation and discussed basically the first example with several of my lecturers, because I saw a reel on Instagram that had a Trump speech on a German news outlets account and it was English (original, Trump's words) with German subtitles. The thing is German nouns have very distinct grammatical gender markers and in gender neutral or gender inclusive language those are neutralized or makes with an asterisk or something similar.

The news outlet's policy is to always use politically correct language and gender neutral/inclusive speech for their texts.

Now what happened was, Trump was giving the most racist, sexist speech possible and the German subtitles made it sound like a totally politically correct speech to large parts. If you can't understand English, then to readers, his subtitled speech sounded so much less awful and you'd think 'well this doesn't sound so awful'. Like positiv censorship.

It was/is a conundrum. One possible idea was to subtitle Trump without gender neutral/inclusive language, but add via an asterisk that this is not the policy of the news outlet with uses it for their own texts.

But then again, Trumps speech was in English, not German, so we can't 100% prove he would or would not use that type of speech in German. We can only assume. And in consequence either have to break with an office policy or politically-clean-wash trumps racist, sexist words.

I’ve been having trouble putting this idea into words so you’ll have to bear with me, but I was struck when I saw a Japanese news program interviewing foreign tourists in Japan, and some australian women were dubbed over with a stereotypically feminine speech register (lots of のs and わs), and my first thought was “they weren’t speaking that femininely in english”.

A friend of mine from the UK recently mentioned that he noticed that australia has a generally more masculine culture than england - he felt that everyone is a bit more masculine here, including women. This kind of confirmed to me that my impressions of the dubbing were right - the tourists were speaking in a relatively (internationally) more masculine way. Yet their dub made them sound so much more feminine.

It made me wonder. When translating something, do you translate the manner of speaking “directly”, or “relatively” in terms of cultural norms? Maybe this graph will help me explain the question.

A direct appoach in this case might appear to a Japanese person to result in an unexpectedly masculine register, but preserves how the speaker's cultural upbringing has influenced their speech.

The news program translators chose the relative approach - I think I would prefer the direct approach. I think I prefer it because I believe translation should be a rewriting of the original utterance as if the speaker was originally speaking the target language, and the direct approach compliments that way of thinking the best.

Actually now that I type that, I’m second guessing myself. Does it? It does, if for the purposes of the “rewrite it as if they spoke japanese” thought experiment, we suppose the speaker magically learned japanese seconds before making the utterance, but what if we suppose the speaker magically grew up learning japanese - then maybe they would conform to the relative cultural values. But also, maybe they would never have said such a thing in the first place - their original utterance was informed by their upbringing and cultural values, so how could you possibly know what they would have said if they had known japanese from birth? Maybe my initial instinct was right after all?

If you work in translation, I’m very interested to hear if you have come across this problem and how you deal with it 🙏

Further reading: I think this question also ties into this problem I’ve been struggling to answer for a while.

Yes, this is a classic problem/debate in translation and translation studies:

As a native Spanish speaker I can tell the age of a translation in some ways by the choice to either domesticate or foreignize.

I'm decidedly on the side of foreignization -I do think domestication is somewhat either elitist or country-chauvinistic to a certain degree; if you don't speak the original language of the text then the translator has chosen for you never to interact with the cultural and language context of the source material. Domestication, for what I see, is what is the trend right now, between other reasons because it stands on an understanding of languages as inconmensurable -so if your work in the target language is actually a whole new creation, then just cut the farce and do create the work as it would have existed as written in your own. My problem with that is that, say, if you are translating Jane Austen, you are necessarily working with the context of Regency England that did not even remotely exist in any similar form in the Hispanic world. I feel like Domestication, in the pursuit of a good thing -the recognition of the creative aspect of translation- can downplay too much the set of circumstances of the source material that make the source material possible at all.

I study translation and discussed basically the first example with several of my lecturers, because I saw a reel on Instagram that had a Trump speech on a German news outlets account and it was English (original, Trump's words) with German subtitles. The thing is German nouns have very distinct grammatical gender markers and in gender neutral or gender inclusive language those are neutralized or makes with an asterisk or something similar.

The news outlet's policy is to always use politically correct language and gender neutral/inclusive speech for their texts.

Now what happened was, Trump was giving the most racist, sexist speech possible and the German subtitles made it sound like a totally politically correct speech to large parts. If you can't understand English, then to readers, his subtitled speech sounded so much less awful and you'd think 'well this doesn't sound so awful'. Like positiv censorship.

It was/is a conundrum. One possible idea was to subtitle Trump without gender neutral/inclusive language, but add via an asterisk that this is not the policy of the news outlet with uses it for their own texts.

But then again, Trumps speech was in English, not German, so we can't 100% prove he would or would not use that type of speech in German. We can only assume. And in consequence either have to break with an office policy or politically-clean-wash trumps racist, sexist words.

Yeah

Reblog and put your rare pair in the tags/comments! I want to see the depths people will go to create, for the most random two characters in the most obscure media.

Authors Convinced Fanfic is Illegal/Requires Permission

In case it helps your decision:

John Scalzi's position is that fanfic of copyrighted material is illegal and a slippery slope to plagiarism: "the fact of the matter is that if you’re writing fanfic, you’re already doing something legally out of bounds. And, really, if you’re already wantonly violating copyright, what’s a little plagiarism to go along with it??"

And that while he personally doesn't mind if people write fanfic for his work (how benevolent!) he still thinks that they're breaking the law, and he doesn't think anyone should care if fic authors get plagiarized. (x)

Anne Rice's position waffled a bit before she died, but when she was against it she was notorious for her legal threats, and she's still on FFN's list of authors whose work can't be written about.

Diana Gabaldin also said fanfic was like "someone selling your children into white slavery." Yeah.

Anne McCaffrey changed her mind on what fans were "allowed" to write several times, ranging from "nothing" to "no porn" to "OCs only!" to "only on fansites I've personally approved" to "no crossovers" to "your OCs can only ride certain colors of dragon if they meet my requirements" plus more I'm probably forgetting. She got pretty specific.

scalzi just posted this on bsky:

My Policy on Fanfic and Other Adaptations of My Work (dated 2007) (whatever.scalzi.com)

The Diana Gabaldon one is also missing the VITAL context that she compared fanfic to white slavery and rape when her main character is a very direct expy of a 1960s Doctor Who Companion and IIRC she sent a copy of her book to the actor.

Guess what happens to the character in her book.

Huh. A single year between 'the evils of fanfic' and 'idk, just don't show it to me' for scalzi.

Anne Rice is, AFAK, the only one to actually send lawers after her fans, so she got my vote, though Diana Gabaldon's blatant hypocrisy and the fact that she's still alive (and being dragged by @thebibliosphere) means she can still move up the list.

Gabaldon gets my vote because Anne Rice is dead and can’t hurt us anymore. And also because it's fucking on sight with Gabaldon if I ever meet her again.

Anne Maccaffrey also used to send legal threats to rp sites until she started to relax her rules. It used to be a big deal to be one of the three sites that had her personal approval stamp on them.

... Is robin hobb the rangers apprentice author??? Or am I getting him confused with someone else

@bisquid no she wrote the Farseers aka Assassin's Apprentice and later (weirder) adventures, along with some other, equally if not more weird books in different settings.

Ahhh thank for explaining. Who the fuck wrote rangers apprentice then...

John Flanagan, apparently. good to know! They're good books, nice to know the author might not be a twat

Also I literally told Scalzi at a book signing that writing Redshirts fanfic got me back into writing and he had nothing but nice things to say about what fic can do for you as a writer!!!

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before: GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCK PIECE OF SHIT

after: hello mommy 🥺 could you pretty please help me with this 🥺 it’s me your baby boy

Quick someone show this to all the old shrinks who “didn’t want to label” us

man I wish people understood how much it sucks ass to be neurodivergent and trying to find the middle ground where people like/tolerate you. like, I'm either "boring" (trying to wait my turn in conversations, holding space for other people, taking a back seat to let others get some spotlight) or "too much" (too loud/talking too much, getting excited to share, trying to participate in group conversations/activities). No one really talks about how much of being neurodivergent is just sort of trying to make yourself palatable.

I feel like so much of my life has been spent trying to find this effortless sort of middle ground everyone else seems to automatically already know, and I'm always swinging too far one way or the other. I'm lucky to have neurodivergent friends who grok me, but goddamn I wish that I could just like, exist without the constant background script in my brain that's like "you're being too loud. You're not talking enough. you're being self-centered. you're being boring. you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong." I feel like I'm back in high school trying to make friends but stuck as the eternal "weird kid"

it's just... lonely and sucks bad.