About This Blog

I decided to start a blog where I can comment on my translations at my site and maybe write about other things.

People who are interested in translation or are learning Japanese might find it interesting.

A little about me:

I started learning Japanese sometime in 2000/2001 since I was interested in anime and video games.

I started by learning the hiragana and katakana and trying to figure out what was written in some Japanese video games. Some of those notes might still exist (on paper, at my parents home).

I haven't took any classes, I learned Japanese by myself with the help of the Internet.

Sometime around 2004, I think, I started uploading translations to my site.

Since I translate from a language that is not my native tongue into another such language, it is sometimes frustrating.

Sometimes the feeling of doubt arises that maybe everything I know about Japanese and English is somehow mistaken, that I've learned everything all wrong. :-)

About the blog title:

Reading a book about music (Finnish translation of Welt Der Tonkunst by Hans Schnoor), I encountered the word "aivokummitus" which is Finnish and literally means "brain ghost".

I'd never seen that word before and thought that now there's a funny word.

Since the book is translated from German, maybe it's a direct translation? (Google returns only 48 results for "aivokummitus")

As I was deciding what I should name this blog, I thought that maybe it should be a four kanji word like my main site.

So I thought what would "brain ghost" be in Japanese. 脳内幽霊. (脳内 means literally intracerebral, within the brain)

From there I just changed the kanji 幽 into the antonym of its homophone, that is, from 有 to 無.

The most important thing of course was that Google didn't give any results for "脳内無霊". :-)

I can only guess what connotations it gives to a native Japanese speaker.

脳内無霊 translates to 脳 brain, 内 inside, 無 no, 霊 spirit/soul.

Well then.

Thank you very much in advance (for your kind cooperation). ;-)