![Barbara Conrady-Takenaka, voice actress, does stage reading in German and English](https://en.voice-actress.de/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/1690/72/Kirschbluete-300x300.jpg)
Reading to people has always been my passion for as long as I can remember. I enjoy forming and enunciating words and names, and bringing stories and characters to life.
My love for languages and my fascination for Japan has enveloped my life. It seemed only natural for me to choose the profession of translator / interpreter for Japanese. I wanted to build bridges for people in Japan and the German speaking world..
My path led me to Japan where I got the chance to develop my bridge-building activities by teaching German at the Goethe-Institute of Tokyo. After spending many happy years in Japan, my path led me back to Germany where I finally reached the other end of the bridge: I taught Japanese to German native speakers. After that experience, I got the chance to move back to Japan within Germany – I worked for two years in the office of the Japanese Club Düsseldorf, a town also known as “Little Tokyo on the Rhine”. There, I had the luck and honour to contribute to some unforgettable moments of building bridges between Japanese and German people.
Through all those years, my passion for reading to people was my faithful and constant companion.
I took private lessons with the acting instructor Heidi Spohr who taught me to train my voice to be subtly nuanced, to make characters more vivid. I developed my ability to conjure up “mental cinema”. My numerous stage readings, e. g. in Cologne’s Japanese Cultural Institute and the Museum of East Asian Art, have been very successful, which made it clear to me that I had found my destiny:
I invite all literature-loving people to the world of fiction. I offer you an opportunity to experience something new – through listening and imagining.