号外 - USJETAA Japanese Reading Group

We're getting the band back together!

お邪魔します。

In the January newsletter I neglected to mention that I’ve teamed up with USJETAA to relaunch my monthly Japanese reading group. Check out the Facebook event for details.

I started a reading group with JETAA Chicago back in 2014, and we had moderate success. Unfortunately, our members moved away one by one, and we had less success with a virtual format.

But that was in the Before Times. Say what you will about the pandemic (and I’ve likely said it over on Twitter), it has made us all more open to getting some social interaction on our medium screens.

Delia Cai @delia_cai

another day of staring at the big screen while scrolling through my little screen so as to reward myself for staring at the medium screen all week

You can see all our previous readings here. I’ve maintained the spirit of the group by reading a new piece on my own each month and listing it in case anyone ever needs a repository of vetted public domain literature. I really enjoyed the story I found for January.

Daniel Morales @howtojapanese

Just read a curious little short story by Yamakawa Masao! 待っている女 aozora.gr.jp/cards/001801/f… Good for intermediate-level students. Clean sentences. Pretty straightforward and simple. Dates from 1962, reads like a Murakami story. Recommend!

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For February we’re reading the first night of Natsume Soseki’s 夢十夜. This is a classic. Almost everyone reads it in Japanese class at some point, so it felt like a great place to start.

Stone-gargler himself.

Because y’all are subscribers, I’ll give you a sneak peak of the readings for the whole year. I still need to fill in two months. Do you have any suggestions? I’d love to hear them.

My goal is to include six men and six women writers, but Aozora’s main weakness is that it significantly under-represents women. The volunteers uploading works just don’t upload many works by women, for whatever reason.

The goal of the reading group is to “be helpful.” Reading Japanese isn’t easy, and senpai have a responsibility to help others. I benefited from a few particular senpai, which I’ve written about on the JT, and I love to pay it forward when I can. We’ll read the works sentence by sentence. The goal isn’t translation as much as it is to understand how the Japanese is working.

Hope to see you there!