One of the many painful things about learning Japanese was learning how to use a Japanese dictionary. It is something that students aren’t usually taught by native Japanese. They already know how to use a Japanese dictionary and input Japanese into a PC or smartphone. It seems not to have occurred to any of my instructors to discuss how to get an alternative character set on your PC or phone and how to look up a word in a dictionary.
Japanese learners owe a huge debt to Jim Breen at Monash University in Australia. Way back in 1991 he started a project that became the EDICT / JMDict Dictionary File. It is a public domain multi language Japanese dictionary database. Prior to this most electronic Japanese to English dictionaries were expensive proprietary devices designed for Japanese speakers to look up English. Almost every dictionary application on the web and the various smartphone dictionaries use Jim Breen’s data file. So the all dictionary programs may have better or worse usability and search logic, but nine out of ten times the definition they provide will be identical. The exception to this is the dictionaries designed for native Japanese speakers to look up English. That’s a topic for another day.
As an Android user the dictionary on my phone that I use all the time is called Aedict. One of the interesting things about whatever he used to develop the application is that he als runs a web version that is identical to the phone application. It’s available here:
So let’s suppose that you are reading some Japanese and come across the following word:
出る
What do you do if you have no idea how it is read or pronounced? If it’s on the computer the easiest thing to do is copy the word and past it into the dictionary. If you can’t do that you got several options each of them increasingly annoying. First, let’s suppose you actually know the reading – in this case it is “deru”. I can type that in romaji right into the search box.
Your second option is to actually type the word in either hiragana or katakana. The dictionary will recognized the hiragana or katakana the same as if you used romaji. However, your phone (or here my Windows 10 PC) will also bring up list of characters that are written with those same hiragana characters. Take a look in the middle of the box in the second illustration.
Next, let’s suppose the character is physically written somewhere and you have no idea what it means or how to read it. You have several options. Below you see icons for a paintbrush or fude brush a puzzle piece and 4-1-4.
I’ll skip the puzzle piece and 4-14 approaches as those particular methods work based on the structure and shape of the character and the number of strokes and are even more complex. Instead let’s focus on the paintbrush. We can actually draw the character right on the phone! (Or in the example below with my mouse – which explains why it looks so bad.)
The problem is that all of the character drawing applications for Japanese assume a basic knowledge of stroke order and number and type of stroke. In the first example above I drew the character with the proper number and type of strokes. You can see at the very top the very first character the application guessed is the correct kanji. The second character may look drawn almost exactly the same, but it isn’t.
Look in the middle of the illustration – it says Strokes: 6. This character is only drawn with 5 strokes. In small stroke character like this it isn’t too problematic, but in significantly more complex characters adding or missing a stroke can make this particular input method daunting. You can see there is a check box to allow the program to guess +- 2 Strokes. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Below Aedict displays both the proper way to draw this character and the definition. I picked “deru” because I find this word maddening. It usage matches up to multiple different English meanings. The definition scrolls on beyond what I have displayed here.
The application also provides other words and other readings that use the same character. It also uses another wonderful public domain project called the Tatoeaba Project that a collection of Japanese sentences and translations in multiple languages.
And finally because I chose a verb to look up the dictionary program tells us how to inflect it to make various grammar forms like present and past tenses. In the old days you used to have also input verbs into electronic dictionaries in what is actually called “dictionary form”, but now most dictionary programs, including this one, will “de-inflect” verbs so that you can simply input the word as you read it. That was huge deal because certain Japanese verbs are inflected in one of five ways and it can be difficult to tell which of the five was to use to get the dictionary form.
There you go! Simple right? Happy Japanese learning everyone.
Cocoa Hoto enters the cafe Rabbit House, assuming there are rabbits to be cuddled. What Cocoa actually finds is her high school boarding house, staffed by the owner’s daughter, Chino Kafū, a small, precocious, and somewhat shy girl with an angora rabbit on her head. She quickly befriends Chino with the full intention of becoming like her older sister, much to Chino’s annoyance. From there she will experience her new life and befriend many others, including the military-influenced, yet feminine Rize Tedeza, the playful Chiya Ujimatsu who goes at her own pace, and the impoverished Syaro Kirima who commands an air of nobility and admiration despite her background. Slowly, through slices of life, often comedic, Cocoa becomes irreplaceable in her new friends’ lives, with Chino at the forefront.
This anime isn’t as awful as the summary makes it appear. It’s a standard slice of life comedy with around six or so characters who simply make small talk and do funny and cute things. It is by no means high art, but a fun way to spend 20 minutes an episode if you like anime. Nothing to recommend for a non-anime person to watch, however.
Japanese: ご注文はうさぎですか？
Romanized: Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka?
English Title: Is the Order a Rabbit?
ご – go – this is an honorific. This is essentially untranslatable in English, but if you have to get point across you can use “honorable”. The reason it’s used here is that when you are asked for your food order at a restaurant, even in the most casual of places, the staff will almost always use “go” in front of the word for your order which is…
注文 – chuumon – order or request.
は – ha – (pronounce “wa”) – grammar particle used to denote the topic of the sentence.
うさぎ – usagi – rabbit. Normally animal names are written in katakana – ウサギ – and I’m not sure why the hiragana is used here. The word rabbit is quite common so that may be part of the reason. Female names are also frequently written in hiragana as as it it tends to be viewed as “cuter” so that could also be part of the reasoning here. The story is about a cafe full of cute girls.
です – copula. More below on this. In this particular case it is translated as “is”.
か？- ka – another grammar particle that changes a declarative statement into a question. Technically the question mark, borrowed from the west, is unnecessary, but frequently used.
A literal translation would be “as for your (honorable) order, it’s a rabbit?” The actual English title is very close to the Japanese.
When I first started learning Japanese I had little interest in linguistics. However, I’ve always had an interest in English grammar. So I had no idea in English the verb “to be” served dual purposes. It can be used as a copula and for the purpose of existence.
In linguistics, a copula (plural: copulas or copulae; abbreviated cop) is a word that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word is in the sentence “The sky is blue.” The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a “link” or “tie” that connects two different things. – Wikipedia
In Japanese the somewhat well known “desu” or です is used as a copula. Note that “desu” is polite. There is a plain form that is also very commonly used “da” or だ. A big thing note here – the plain form copula also varies depending on dialect and region.
To provide an example let’s look at the following:
この部屋は台所です。Kono heya wa daidokoro desu.
“As for this room it is the/a kitchen.” More naturally – “This room is the kitchen”.
Japanese doesn’t have articles (“a” or “the”) like English. My Japanese friends learning English find figuring out which article to use in English maddening.
However, unlike English, Japanese has two other words that are used for existence – “aru” or ある and “iru” or いる. In the polite form they are “arimasu” or あります and “imasu” or います. Why are there two forms? Because it’s Japanese and things need to be difficult. Animate objects take “iru” and inanimate objects use “aru”.
台所に猫がいます。Daidokoro ni neko ga imasu.
“There is a cat in the kitchen.” OR “The cat is in the kitchen.” Without context we don’t know if we are talking about our family pet or if the neighbor’s cat climbed through the window. Welcome to the obscurity of Japanese. A cat is animate so we use “imasu”. Note that the particles we are using here are different compared to the sentence with “desu”. We are using the particles “ni” and “ga” and not “wa”.
台所に冷蔵庫があります。Daidokoro ni reizouko ga arimasu.
“The refrigerator is in the kitchen.” Last time I checked a refrigerator isn’t able to move on its own volition so we use “arimasu”. A car also doesn’t move of its own volition so we use “aru” when describing the existence of a car. However, a robot despite being a machine does move by its own volition so robots use “iru”. Simple, right?
There you have it. In English the verb “to be” accomplishes what takes three different words in Japanese – desu, arimasu and imasu. In their plain forms these are iru, aru and da in standard Japanese.
Actually, thinking about it further, if we use very polite forms of Japanese we need some additional forms for existence and the copula. I’ll save that maddening topic that is polite Japanese for our more fluent in Japanese Glibs…
NOTE:sloopy is wobbling, and chugging Vick’s products – Dayquil/Nyquil/ZZZquil – who knows? So, as part of a very Japanese Day here at Glibs…enjoy!
At least for today.
(The following was submitted with the gracious assistance and support of Heroic Mulatto in proofreading and lending his academic understanding of the subject)
The difficulty of learning any language depends on the language or languages which the learner speaks to begin with. For a native speaker of Spanish, Italian is a relatively simple language to learn as they share many characteristics. Learning a language from the same group as your native language is much easier than learning one from a very different language group.
English comes from the group of Indo-European languages, sharing characteristics with Germanic languages (German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, etc.), Roman languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) and Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Croatian, etc.). As different as these languages seem to be from the perspective of a person who might only speak one or even some number of these languages they have much more in common than they do with languages from other, unrelated language groups.
The language group to which Japanese belongs is an open issue with many modern linguists placing it in its own group. In the past it was grouped (somewhat loosely) with Korean and Mongolian. For our discussion we can state that Japanese is very different in many aspects from the Indo-European group.
The word order of a basic sentence in English is subject-verb-object. The word order of a basic Japanese sentence is subject-object-verb. This is probably the first difference between these two languages which the new learner finds out about. Further meaning is added with particle words (in English these are similar to “of”, “to”, “on”, “for”, etc.) and verb suffixes.
Japanese particle words do not correspond directly to any similar words in English. For instance, one of the first two particles the new learner will hear are “wa” and “ga”. There is no word in English remotely similar to either of these particles. The closest explanation for “wa” is “speaking of” with regards to the subject preceding it.
As an example, the sentence “I am drinking” would be “Watashi wa nonde iru”. “Watashi” is “I”. “Nonde” is “drinking”, and “iru” is the Japanese active “be” verb. So a rough translation of this sentence, in Japanese word order, would be “I, speaking of, drinking is”.
So you can see that Japanese grammar is very different from English grammar. But that’s not where it stops. Japanese language reflects the high-context modes of expression of the Japanese culture which means that much of the meaning is inferred from context and not stated explicitly. In standard Japanese conversation it is not uncommon for the subject to not be stated when that subject could be inferred from the situation. So quite often you would hear the above sentence “I am drinking” expressed simply as “nonde iru” since the reference to oneself is pretty easy to infer and thus not stated.
While Japanese is not unique in how it commonly drops the subject from subsequent discussion once it has been mentioned, it can be challenging for English speakers to keep up when a document rambles on for paragraphs, expecting the reader to remember the implied subject back at the top of the first page.
This makes translation into English particularly problematic as the subject is merely inferred in Japanese while the subject is often key in English. When you are explaining a business transaction and the original Japanese text is “it was decided to invest in the venture” without stating who it was who made that decision you have to infer from the body of the text who it was and add that in the English translation even when it is not written anywhere in the Japanese sentence. In translating Japanese to English I often have to make notes to keep track of the subject from one sentence or paragraph to the next. And from my experience, in written Japanese there are no rules against run-on sentences.
The same is common in colloquial speech which is even more problematic as you can’t just refer back to the previous page. I have been in conversations with Japanese native speakers in which one person (not me) begged forgiveness and said they had lost the plot back at “X” (three or four minutes earlier in the conversation).
In common usage Japanese language leaves out huge chunks of words which English speakers depend on to get the full meaning. If I were to translate the content of a normal conversation – only the words actually spoken in Japanese – it might sound something like this :
“Saturday went saw ‘Coriander’
How was?
Fun! Liked scene when main character jumped. Laughed.
Want to go see but wait to download. Expensive.
Make copy for me?
Yeah, give.”
The one saving grace of the Japanese language is the simplicity of pronouncing it. It has only five vowels which are the same as those in Spanish or Italian. The consonants are also very simple and easy to pronounce.
The one point of Japanese pronunciation which many new learners find challenging is long vowels. A long vowel is a vowel which is pronounced as two syllables of the same vowel sound. A common example is the two words for “uncle” and “grandfather”. “Uncle” is “ojisan” (short “I” sound) while “grandfather” is “ojiisan” (long “I” sound). To the neophyte these two words often sound the same while to a Japanese speaker the difference is distinct.
The Kanji. Definitely the most difficult aspect of learning the Japanese language. To be fully literate in Japanese you have to know 2 sets of Kana – Katakana and Hiragana – each with 46 Kana characters, and about 2,000 Kanji. Learning the Kana, if you are living in Japan where you see it all around you, is an almost trivial exercise, particularly when compared to learning the Kanji. Each Kana has only one way to pronounce it – it is always pronounced the same except for a few common exceptions.
The particle word “wa”, mentioned above, is written with the Hiragana character “ha” (は).
One other particle word “o” is written with the Hiragana character “wo” (を).
In writing the long vowel for the “o” sound, the second syllable is represented with the Hiragana character “u” (う). This holds true in the unusual case when Japanese words are written in Katakana (the character set which is generally reserved for foreign loan words) and the second syllable is written with the Katakana character “u” (ウ).
To people who have not studied Kanji they seem to be little more than a bunch of brush strokes at different angles with no rhyme nor reason. In fact, the order of every stroke (which stroke is first, second, next, and on through to the last stroke) is fixed as is the point where each starts and ends, even the flair at the end of a stroke – the direction up, down, left, or right – is fixed. Even the visual balance of the character is important and requires years of practice.
The key to getting started is learning the radicals. Radicals are basic sets of strokes, they are often simple Kanji, which are combined into a single Kanji and generally one of them holds a key to its meaning. There are 208 radicals and once you learn them every Kanji you see is easily broken down into its component radicals. Most Kanji are made up of two to four radicals.
There are about 40,000 Kanji in total but very few people have any reason to learn as much as half of that number. I have met one person who had learned every last Kanji – an Australian with a photographic memory who ran a software company producing digital Kanji font sets.
There are a few Kanji which have but one pronunciation. Most have two or three ways to pronounce them and a number can be pronounced several ways – some of which are unique to a specific usage or a place name.
A large number of words in Japanese are made up of two or three Kanji. In this way their usage is similar to English words made up of Greek or Latin root words like “television” or “invisible” which tell you the meaning by their component words.
As an example, there is a Kanji “Roku” (録) which has a meaning similar to “record”. It is used in the word for “register”: “Toroku” (登録), “record sound”: “Rokuon” (録音), and “record images”: “Rokuga” (録画).
But then, just to twist it further, there are a number of common examples of Kanji pairs which have more than one way to pronounce them with one pronunciation not related to how the individual Kanji are pronounced. There is a Kanji which is pronounced Aki, Mei, Myo, (明) and means “bright”. Another Kanji is Nichi, Hi, Ka, Jitsu (日) and means either “sun” or “day”. Together they can be pronounced “Myonichi” (明日) which means “tomorrow” but the more usual pronunciation for this same Kanji pair is “Ashita”. Note that neither Kanji has a pronunciation that could lead one to pronounce this pair as “Ashita”.
If you intend to really learn Japanese I recommend you master the Kana as soon as possible then start learning the Kanji. Knowing Kanji really supports learning new vocabulary. At first you could learn a number of the simplest characters, then get comfortable learning the 208 radicals. Many of the simplest characters are used as radicals so this study does overlap. A few of the radicals have alternative forms – are written differently – and it helps to understand the origin of these alternative forms.
I recommend writing Kanji repetitively. Get a notebook with grid squares and practice daily. You can also use any number of on-line tools. I still use asahi-net.or.jp to brush up from time to time.
You can take some time to get comfortable with the idea of learning Kanji but at some point you will have to accept the challenge and get serious. Set down a goal to learn a fixed number every week and practice them daily. When I got to this point in learning Kanji I was learning 50 new characters a week. The more aggressive you are in learning, the quicker you will reach your goal. When I was doing this I was focusing on recognizing each character and knowing the pronunciations with a lesser focus on understanding the meanings. The meanings don’t often correspond directly to words in English anyway so learning them in context later seemed to make more sense to me.
Contrast all this to Mandarin Chinese which is much harder to learn to pronounce because not only does it have consonants which are difficult for most English speakers to recognize but also is a tonal language – the exact same phonetic sound will have a different meaning depending on the tone. The sound “Ma” can mean horse, mother, scold, or can infer a question, depending on the tone it is pronounced with.
Chinese speaking cultures are also high-context with a direct effect on how the language is expressed which can be difficult for Indo-European language speakers to get used to.
The easiest part of learning Chinese for English speakers is the fact that the basic syntax is very similar – subject-verb-object. Like Japanese they have no concept for an article (the, a, an) which explains why both Japanese and Chinese have a hard time learning when to put in those particles when they first learn English.
Another point where I say Chinese is easier to learn than Japanese is the fact that about 90% of Chinese characters have only one way to pronounce them. The significance of this hit me on my first trip to China after having studied Japanese for ten years. Walking around the place seeing the characters everywhere reinforced my knowledge of them. I would see a character I had learned and know how to pronounce it even if I didn’t know the context it was being used in. In Japan, with the characters having multiple ways to say them, when I saw a character and didn’t know the word or context it was used in I could never be sure which pronunciation was correct.
Korean is probably the easiest north Asian language to learn if you have to pick one. Its pronunciation is simpler than Chinese while being just a bit more difficult than Japanese. The grammar is very similar to Japanese and it is about the same level when it comes to context. The written system is probably the most phonologically consistent script ever devised by humans and although they do use Chinese characters I understand that one can live there in the Korean language not knowing a single Chinese character and never have a problem with that lack.
Imagine if instead of using “micro”, they had gone with another synonym when coming up with “micro-aggression”: Measly-aggression. Lilliputian-aggression. Pygmy-aggression. Any of those would clearly expose the self-detonating nature contained in the concept. Those synonyms also don’t lend the air of scientific terror that “micro-aggression” enjoys. “Micro” evokes similar terms like “micro-organism” which is a potentially lethal creature because of its diminuitive stature. Micro-aggressions are on par with serving E-coli burgers at a Jack-In-The-Box drive through.
Psychologist Derald Wing Sue describes micro-aggressions as, “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.” You’ll notice that intent is not part of the equation and that is by design as it renders the perpetrator incapable of mounting a defense. When dealing with E-coli, Mens rea is no excuse for diarrhea. As long as the words or behavior appear on a list cultured in a petri dish at some university sociology department, you’re guilty.
Self-righteous and zealous social movements take kernels of truth and surround them with shit so thick it’s impossible to pluck them out. Assuming a Mexican woman at the hotel is a maid, telling someone they are a credit to their race or asking a black person if you can touch their hair certainly could be deemed offensive. However, they would be offensive only if there is no context which would change the dynamics. If the Mexican lady is wearing an orange apron and emptying a trash can in the lobby, you could be forgiven for believing she isn’t an astronaut. “How dare you assume I work here! Micro-aggression!” she shouts. The problem with MA aren’t that assholes are nonexistent, but rather that the entire concept guarantees you’ll be an asshole in return.
In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes, “You have power over your own mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” If there were an AA for MA addicts, the opening prayer would go, “God grant me the serenity to not mistake an offhand comment for HIV.” For any recovering MA addicts out there, I`d like to offer another way of looking at the world: Micro-respect. MR shifts a person’s perspective from finger wagging to chin stroking. The respect comes from waiting for a person to express themselves thoroughly before you jump down their throats like streptococcus.
MR uses the earlier definition of MA with a little tweaking. MR, according to me, are, “Brief, everyday exchanges that send humanizing messages to certain individuals regardless of their group membership.” I can’t go a week without a Japanese person asking me, “Where are you from?” I suppose I could try to get all 120 million Japanese to never, ever ask me that question again. めんどくさい。Rather than pissing blood and assuming that the question is the product of a grave historical injustice, how about I just answer the question and see what happens? In fact, it was the first question the hot young number that became my wife asked me.
Human interactions are messy and festering with opportunities to assign malice to even the most benign questions, comments or behaviors. Sure, MR may allow some comments that are truly bigoted to slip by unchallenged. But, unlike with MR, MA will slap blame on many people that don’t have it coming. There aren’t many cultures that devolved into murderous killing sprees because ten year old boys played “Smear the Queer”. History is replete, however, with many cultures that destroyed themselves by playing “Spear the Unbeliever”.
Let’s start this particular post with the summary of the premise:
Four girls enjoying a school life witness their lives take a turn for the unexpected when they are suddenly stranded on a deserted island. Fortunately, Homare Onishima has experience in surviving in the wild and teaches the other girls on how to make the best of their current situation but it will take true teamwork if the girls are to survive and return home.
Hard pass on this one. Pretty much everything that is wrong with recent anime. Why the girls are stranded has yet to be explained and the characters continue to most of the time wear their full school uniforms that never get dirty. That would make things too difficult to animate in way the industry currently operates. The show mostly shows the girls overcoming their revulsion of eating insects, various creatures and the like in semi-humorous ways along with obligatory fan service. The punchline to most of the gags in the anime usually ends with “sou nan desu ka?”
Japanese: ソウナンですか？
Romanized: sou nan desu ka?
English: Are You Lost?
The title is intentionally written in katakana. Katakana is usually used for foreign words, but also may be used similar to they way we use italics in English. Here it is done to obfuscate the meaning. Written in hiragana そうなんですか? it is used like “really?” in English. However, written in kanji (Chinese derived characters) 遭難ですか? it means “is it a disaster(or shipwreck or accident)?” It’s essentially a rather untranslatable play on words.
What I wanted to show with this anime was the practice of “active listening” used in Japanese. During a conversation the listener uses a variety of expressions while the other person is speaking. In English the amount of interruptions used by the listener in a Japanese conversation would be considered rude. However in Japanese it’s the reverse and not actively listening shows disinterest and is considered rude. For a more comprehensive look at this I’d point interested readers to this webpage – The Art of Aizuchi: Active Listening in Japanese Conversation.
What I wanted to highlight from this anime title was the word “sou”. There are a myriad of meanings for this word, but the usage used here is “so, really or seeming”. Recall the stereotypical pre-woke Hollywood portrayal of Japanese people saying things like, “Ah So, Smith-san!” for “That’s right Mr. Smith”. It shows agreement and an active participation in the conversation.
For me personally, it took about four years of study before I unconsciously started to begin using the various active listening expressions. The most common for me are the many variations of “sou”, “hai, hai,hai” (yes, yes, yes) and “un… un… un…” essentially a grunting sound in English that is casual “yes” in English. I just about fell off the chair when I suddenly realized I was using that one.
The one that I’ve resisted using, but now actually do use is “heeeeeeeeeeee” (sounds like “hey” in English) said with a rising intonation. It’s always sounded ridiculous to me, but it’s incredibly common in Japanese. It expresses surprise. You’ll hear Japanese all say it in unison on TV variety shows and the like.
I’ll leave you with 12 seconds of video that actually uses all the expressions I’ve discussed in active listening as spoken by the woman on the left, Saori Oonishi. The video will start at 25:25.
25:28 – hai, hai, hai
25:30 – honto ni (really, truly)
25:36 – heeeeeeee
25:38 – un,un,un
25:40 – sou desu ne
None of these really add any information to the conversation. They just demonstrate her interest in what the speaker is saying.
For our third installment of learning Japanese through anime titles I’ve picked a title to introduce honorifics in Japanese.
Japanese: かぐや様は告らせたい ～天才たちの恋愛頭脳戦～
Romanized :Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai – Tensai-tachi no Ren’ai Zunōsen
Common English Title: “Kaguya-sama: Love Is War”.
かぐや – “Kaguya” – female given name.
様 – “sama” – honorific – equivalent to Mr., Mrs, Miss, Ms, etc. In Japanese it can be used with both first and last names.
は – “ha” romanized as either “ha” or “wa”, but pronounced “wa”in this usage. This is the topic marker – frequently translated as “as for” in English.
告らせたい “kokurasetai” – passive form of the verb “kokuru” – to confess (one’s love), to propose (marriage), to ask out (on a date) plus “tai” which expresses desire.
I should probably do another entry on passive verb use in Japanese. The passive voice is widely used in Japanese as compared to English. Things happen in Japanese “just happen” similar to the way police officers’ guns just simply discharge in English news stories. Culturally it helps save face and nobody has to accept blame for causing a problem.
～ used as a dash here as far as I can tell. If any of our more Japanese fluent Glibs want to explain the Japanese use of the tilde I’m interested.
天才 – “tensai” – genius
たち “tachi” – makes things plural as relates to people. Japanese usually doesn’t distinguish between singular and plural unless there is a reason to be specific.
の – “no” shows possession. Similar to ” ‘s” in English.
So a literal translation is “(As for) Kaguya-sama (she) wants to be confessed to ~ geniuses’ love brain battle”. Not particularly close to the English title.
Here is your quick lesson on honorifics in Japanese. There are many honorifics so I’m only going to touch on the most common ones here. I’m also freely going to “borrow” and summarize from Wikipedia.
San (さん) is the most commonplace honorific and is a title of respect typically used between equals of any age. Although the closest analog in English are the honorifics “Mr.”, “Miss”, “Ms.”, or “Mrs.”, -san is almost universally added to a person’s name; -san can be used in formal and informal contexts and for both genders.
Sama (様【さま】) is a more respectful version for people of a higher rank than oneself or divine, toward one’s guests or customers, and sometimes toward people one greatly admires. Deities such as native Shinto kami and the Christian God are referred to as kami-sama. When used to refer to oneself, -sama expresses extreme arrogance (or self-effacing irony), as in praising oneself to be of a higher rank, as with ore-sama (俺様, “my esteemed self”).
Kun (君【くん】) is generally used by people of senior status addressing or referring to those of junior status, by anyone addressing or it can be used when referring to men in general, male children or male teenagers, or among male friends. It can be used by males or females when addressing a male to whom they are emotionally attached, or who they have known for a long time. The suffix is also used by juniors when referring to seniors in both academic situations and workplaces. Although -kun is generally used for boys, it is not a hard rule. In business settings, young female employees are addressed as -kun by older males of senior status.
Chan (ちゃん) is a diminutive suffix; it expresses that the speaker finds a person endearing. In general, -chan is used for babies, young children, close friends, grandparents and sometimes female adolescents. Although traditionally, honorifics are not applied to oneself, some people adopt the childlike affectation of referring to themselves in the third person using -chan (childlike because it suggests that one has not learned to distinguish between names used for oneself and names used by others). “Chan” is only used between people who have known each other for a long time or who are of the same gender.
So with this little bit of knowledge you can now quickly determine the relationship of people and social status by how they address each other. Note that for word order in Japanese for native Japanese people your family name goes first followed by your given name. BUT for the gaijin you retain western name order of first name followed by last name.
Japanese people generally don’t use first names until they have an established relationship with a person. However, since westerners don’t usually follow this practice most of the time westerners will be referred to by first name + “san”. This tends to annoy “woke” Westerners in Japan from my readings. It’s never been an issue for me.
Most older Japanese will almost universally use an honorific plus either first or last name. The only time the honorifics get dropped is if the relationship is very close or you intend to be insulting. My understanding is this may be changing with younger people. However all the Japanese people I communicate with including my close friends, we all use honorifics. In the case of my friends first name plus honorific. If any the Glibs that actually live in Japan want to comment about this I’d be interested to hear how they address their close friends and what their experiences are.
Summary
Student council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice-president Kaguya Shinomiya appear to be the perfect couple. Kaguya is the daughter of a wealthy conglomerate family, and Miyuki is the top student at the school and well-known across the prefecture. Although they like each other, they are too proud to confess their love as they believe whoever does so first would lose. The story follows their many schemes to make the other one confess.
This one I can actually recommend. It’s a spoof on the usual high school student council romantic comedy. The two protagonists obviously like each other, but continuously scheme to get the other one to try to confess his or her romantic interest. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and the “will they or won’t they get together” isn’t the point of the series, it’s the gags. Specifically the reason the protagonist is dressed as first name + “sama” is done to suggest high class status and the idea of aloofness.
For our second installment of learning Japanese through anime titles I’d like to suggest that some Japanese animation does, in fact, revolve around an unnatural attraction to one’s younger sister.
Japanese: 俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない (Ore no Imōto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai)
English: “My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute”
俺 “ore” – pronoun for “I”. It’s masculine and casual. So we immediately assume the speaker is likely male.
の – “no” -equivalent to ” ‘s” in English.
妹 – “imouto” – my younger sister.
が – “ga” – grammar particle – marks the subject of a sentence.
こんな -“konna” – “like this”.
に – “ni” – grammar particle – turns the phrase above into an adverb.
可愛い – “kawaii” – word that encompasses “cute” and whole lot more in Japanese. (1) cute, adorable, charming, lovely, pretty, (2) dear, darling, pet, (3) little, tiny. Just to make things interesting this word is an i-adjective in Japanese and has the properties of a verb in English.
わけがない – “wakeganai” – we can break this phrase down into individual words and grammar, but it is much easier to think of it as set phrase “(there is) no reason”.
What I want to draw attention to is that Japanese makes distinctions between “in groups” and “out groups” and within the family based on birth order.
Here we have “imouto” all by itself so the inference would be that it is the speaker’s younger sentence. If someone says “imouto-san” we would assume he or she was speaking about someone else’s little sister. The “san” prefix works like “Mr, Ms, etc.” but can attach to first and last names as well as certain nouns.
However, not all family related words work like this. Let’s look the Japanese for “older sister”.
姉 (あね) – “ane”. This would refer to my older sister. However, that’s not what most siblings would call her. They most likely would use お姉さん (おねえさん) – “oneesan” when speaking directly to her. If he or she were speaking to a third party about his or her older sister, however, the speaker would use “ane”. For example, “ane is married” or “my older sister is married”.
An outsider will always use the “-san” form. “How is your imouto-san doing?” or “How is your onee-san doing?”.
Within the family names for the older sister things get interesting. Usually the older sister would refer to her younger sister by first name (without “san”) or by some nickname. However, in most families the younger sister will refer to her older sister with some variation of “oneesan” or possibly a nickname with some suffix showing respect such as “san”. For example, “oneesan, dinner is ready”.
Summary:
Kyosuke Kosaka, a normal 17-year-old high school student living in Chiba, has not gotten along with his younger sister Kirino in years. For longer than he can remember, Kirino has ignored his comings and goings and looked at him with spurning eyes. It seemed as if the relationship between Kyosuke and his sister, now fourteen, would continue this way forever. One day however, Kyosuke finds a DVD case of a magical girl anime which had fallen in his house’s entrance way. To Kyosuke’s surprise, he finds a hidden eroge inside the case and he soon learns that both the DVD and the game belong to Kirino. That night, Kirino brings Kyosuke to her room and reveals herself to be an otaku with an extensive collection of moe anime and younger sister-themed eroge she has been collecting in secret. Kyosuke quickly becomes Kirino’s confidant for her secret hobby. The series then follows Kyosuke’s efforts to help his sister to reconcile her personal life with her secret hobbies, while restoring their broken relationship and coming to terms with their true feelings for each other.
There are two ways to view this anime. One is that it is a meta criticism of all the current anime tropes that are so popular right now. It has absolutely mediocre animation, but an “A-list” cast of Japanese voice talent. I don’t think you could have more stereotypes in one series. It actually has different endings, similar to Japanese gal games, where the protagonist ends up with different heroines. The other, and sadly quite possible, viewpoint is that they threw as much stuff as they possibly could into one work and cynically knew that it would be a hit whatever they did.
Not recommended for anyone but hardcore anime otaku.
Trying to rise to the call for content I figured I’d try to combine both my interest in Japanese language and anime into a single quick read. I also want to suggest that all Japanese animation doesn’t revolve around an unnatural attraction to one’s younger sister. If there is interest I’ll do more. For the first attempt I figured I’d review an anime that I can actually recommend, Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”.
Japanese: 千と千尋の神隠し
English: “Spirited Away”
千 – “Sen”- In this case what the main character is called through most of the film. It’s an odd name and the reason is explained in the film.
と – “to” this a particle equivalent to “and” here in English and links nouns together. Japanese is a bit more interesting because “to”is generally use link things exhaustively. “I went to the store and purchased (only) milk and bread“. However, Japanese also as another version や or “ya” which is used on a non-exhaustive list “I went to the store and purchased milk や bread” which means “I went to the store and bought milk, bread and other things“.
千尋 – “Chihiro” – Name of the protagonist
の – “no” – shows possession or used to link nouns together. Similar to ” ‘s” in English.
So we actually have the rare case where the Japanese title mostly matches the English one. “Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi” or “Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away”
The key point I want to make here is the different reading of 千. In the first reading it uses onyomi or sound (aka Chinese) reading and in the second 千尋 it is kunyomi or Japanese reading and sounds like “chi”.
The character has the 尋 (hiro) removed from her name and her memory in the film and becomes “Sen” through most of the film. This kind of word play happens throughout the film and would be instantly recognizable to the Japanese audience and is essentially untranslatable in English.
It also stresses just how important kanji or the Chinese characters that Japanese uses are to convey meaning with written Japanese. This kind of word play is central to all kinds of Japanese humor and literature.
Spirited Away (Japanese: 千と千尋の神隠し Hepburn: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, “Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away”) is a 2001 Japanese animated coming-of-age fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, animated by Studio Ghibli for Tokuma Shoten, Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Tohokushinsha Film and Mitsubishi and distributed by Toho…and tells the story of Chihiro Ogino (Hiiragi), a sullen 10-year-old girl who, while moving to a new neighborhood, enters the world of Kami (spirits) of Japanese Shinto folklore. After her parents are transformed into pigs by the witch Yubaba (Natsuki), Chihiro takes a job working in Yubaba’s bathhouse to find a way to free herself and her parents and return to the human world. – Wikipedia
Studio Ghibli films are generally top notch and “Spirited Away” is no exception. There are other more highly rated films from the studio, but near the top of my list is “Spirited Away” for it message of growing up and responsibility. It works as simple and fun story for children while still having many parts that will be interesting and thought provoking for an adult audience.
Be aware of what the people say! And interpret their slang so you feel, cool, and shit.
I get to hear and read a lot of slang in my line of work, so bear with me while I provide a guide to prison/ jail slang.
Snitch / Plant: One inmate trying to tell on another, in order to get a better plea deal. Advice to new inmates is often: be careful who you talk to, it could be a snitch.
Kite: a jail letter. This can be between inmates, or from an inmate to a department in the jail, or his or her attorney. If it’s a kite between inmates, its a tiny paper football, with tiny writing on it, that sometimes is “shot” between cells. Inmates also pass them to other inmates while they are walking to meals, etc.
If it’s a kite to a jail department, then it is usually about something the inmate needs to have done. For example “I kited a letter to accounting because I think they have my out date wrong. I should get credit for more good time.”
Out date: This is the date an inmate will be released. Inmates often write to their attorneys, the court, etc regarding their out dates.
Good time: No, this is not what the inmate did to get in jail. This is “credit” toward the out date. For example, a month in custody (with no incidents) usually results in 4 days “good time.”
Get a play, do a play: This means sell /buy some drugs.
Rillo, rello: These are the small cigars that party stores sell. Users often rip off the cigarello, and use the plastic tip that’s left to smoke a controlled substance.
On paper: This means on probation, or on parole. If you are on paper, don’t go posting facebook photos of yourself with money, guns, or drugs, as your PO will see that shit, and bust you for a PV.
PO: probation /parole officer. PV: probation violation, parole violation. Sometimes the inmate is PV, parole violator.
Trusty/ trustees. These are the inmates who get to 1. wear more comfortable clothing and 2. do jobs in the jail. The jobs can earn them more credit sometimes, or commissary. Plus the inmate gets a little more freedom, can sometimes leave the facility, as long as they report back at the scheduled time.
Color code (not a slang term) There’s also a clothing color code that goes along with inmate status. Low-level inmates are usually in the bright orange/ teal. Trustees get comfy brown scrubs to wear instead, or even a plain white tee to wear with the scrub bottoms. If you’re being transported to court, you might have to wear the traditional “stripes” uniform. If you’ve been caught fighting, then you might go back to orange/ teal and be put in lockdown /solitary. Sometimes called “greens.”
Lockdown: This is what it sounds like: the section an inmate stays in is “locked down” due to an infraction. Lock down means no activities, no phone calls – for the whole section – until the lock down status is clear. Infractions can be something dumb, like toothpaste on the walls, messy cells, etc. Or it could be fighting, or contraband in the cells.
Chore Boy: Users put this in pipes to smoke crack with. It keeps the crack in one place. So when users are arrested, the search often reveals Chore Boy in the pockets, vehicle, etc.
Bond! This is something set at arraignment, depending on the case. Typical bonds are between $1,000 to 100,000 or more. $1,000 might be set for a simple (non-aggravated) assault case, while $100,000 or more might be set for a rape/ CSC charge. PR Bond means “personal recognizance,” or the defendant is not a flight risk, and needs only to show up at court. PR bonds can still have an amount attached to them, so if Defendant no-shows at court, then the cash has to be paid. 10% bond means that the bond is set at $5,000 but the defendant can get a bail bondsman to guarantee it, so the defendant only has to pay $500. C/S is short for Cash/surety – defendant has to put up the whole amount.
Usually bond has other conditions. For example, a defendant can submit to SCRAM, tether/ surveillance or GPS monitoring to make sure conditions are kept.
Bid: this is the term or sentence an inmate has. 5 year bid = 5 year sentence.
Not my best showing. It was not even a little bit good.
Brett escaped his SMITH-family overlords only to be re-apprehended by his employer. If his comments on the meetings he’ll be in today are any indication, I suspect he’ll be returning to the… uh… “welcoming embrace” of the SMITHs before too long. Luckily for you all, my coworkers have been temporarily tamed by a tidal wave of sugar and fat thanks to my office’s 6th annual Pi Day (our first annual Pi Day was just me baking a shitty blueberry pie and telling everyone Pi Day was a thing). My ability to pie crust is significantly better and I’ve gotten weirder with my choices. Anyway, enough about my attempts to manipulate my coworkers with carbohydrates. To the news!
Holy fudge: soft foods helped humans form ‘f’ and ‘v’ sounds –I’mma need some of our cunning linguists to weigh in on this. I spent a year trying to teach little Korean children–who ate an awful lot of 죽 (juk) or soft rice porridge–how to say “fat” instead of “ppat”.
Scientists Call For Global Moratorium On Creating Gene-Edited Babies — I’m reminded of a poignant line from Gattaca on the innate morality of improving our genes through editing: Beautiful piece of equipment there, Jerome. I see a great many in the course of a given day. Yours just happens to be an exceptional example. I don’t know why my folks didn’t order one like that for me.
Six years of practice and both my crust and filling have improved.
