Personal

As I mentioned in my last post How I Read Over 50 Books in 2024 I read 56 books in 2024. A feat that was not easy to achieve. I had to slowly build the habit and learn about my

I read 56 books* in 2024! This was a mixture of fantasy, sci-fi, romance, literary fiction, and non-fiction books. Ranging from 115 pages to the longest at 845. Half of these were in Japanese and half were in English. (*Not

I love reading. Every year my goal is to read at least 24 books, but my secret (real) goal is 48. (That way I have an achievable goal I can feel good about completing even if I don’t hit my

We don’t talk about failures enough. “Translation is a super competitive industry. It’s a dog-eat-dog world where only the best survive. If we show our weaknesses, our failures, then we’ll damage our job prospects forever. Don’t let you’re PM know

It felt like the first six months of the year were well paced. I was getting a fair amount of work done, writing articles, studying interpreting and Japanese…… Then July happened. But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves. Year in

I want to be better at setting myself monthly goals for self-development. These are things I keep saying I want to do but kept putting off. I hope to set myself just 3 goals a month and the will update

The new year is always a great time to set self-improvements and self-development goals. But I’ve always found that calling them “resolutions” and aiming for the end of the year never works. I much prefer to set monthly and three

In secondary school (middle school) we had to learn French and Spanish. I really hated these classes because I just couldn’t do them. In all my classes I struggled with spelling and reading, but languages were the worst. I got

Happy National Translation Day! I would like to celebrate National Translation Day (9/30) by telling you a story about frustration, fighting, and self discovery.   Translation Never Seemed to Click At First My very first job outside of University was

So 3 months ago I wrote about My New Language Challenge where I gave myself 3 months to learn Korean. It did not go as planned…   Starting on a High So at first I was incredibly motivated. I was studying

6 years ago I was in my 7th month of living in Japan, studying at Kansai Gaidai in Osaka. Osaka is over 500 miles from Tohoku yet we still felt the 2011 earthquake and experienced it in our own way.

For about 5 years now I’ve been wanting to learn Korean. It started as “it would be nice to start learning Korean”… Then it became “I’d really like to learn Korean”… And now it’s become “I am going to learn

I really believe new years resolutions can be a great thing to drive people to self improvement. Not in a “New Year, New Me!” kind of way. That’s silly. I don’t want to be “new” I want to be “me”,

  JEN Translations and my work translating Japanese to English has been very quiet this last month. So I wanted to provide an explanation for why. I recently moved from the UK to the US to be with my husband.