Author Archives: Daniel

号外 – 七夕

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Today is the alternate date for the Tanabata (七夕)  Festival, so I thought I’d talk briefly about the grammatical pattern you see hanging from bamboo around this time – 〜ますように. It’s an interesting phrase to me, partially because, perhaps as an English speaker, it seems like an incomplete sentence. It means “(I hope / I wish) that X happens / comes true.” For example,

いい成績とれますように。
(I hope) I can get good grades.

日本語が上手になりますように。
(I hope) that my Japanese gets better.

I did a quick google search for “七夕　ますように” and came up with a bunch of interesting results, including this page full of wishes.

I put the “I hope” in parenthesis because it is only implied in the Japanese. The actual phrase is only a dependent clause. They had a small Tanabata presentation at one of my elementary schools a month ago, and a bunch of kids had to stand up and tell everyone their wishes. Some of the kids were so uncomfortable with the ending of this sentence grammatically that they stuttered a little です onto the end of their phrase. (サッカーが上手にできますように．．．です。)

Hope everyone’s wishes come true.

 

Note to Self – 言われました

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Any time you want to say one of these phrases in Japanese

“He told me ____.”
“She told me ____.”
“They told me ____.”
“It told me ____.”
“The ____ told me ____.”

you should always be using 言われました.

Cool Compound – 大好物 (Updated)

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The second set of new JETs arrived yesterday. They’ll spend today and tomorrow in Tokyo at an orientation conference and then will ship out on Wednesday to small towns and big cities across Japan. For the next month or so there are no classes, so they’ll putz around on the Internet, help the students practice for the English speech contest, and get used to life.

At the end of August, classes will begin and they’ll all be shocked at the low level of English at Junior High School. One particularly deep-rooted annoyance is the overuse and misuse of the word “interesting.”

Anyone who has taught a class or two will know what I mean. In Japanese, おもしろい means both interesting and funny. It means interesting as in “curious,” not as in “I’d like to research that thouroughly.”

So you end up with sentences like this:

Shin is an interesting boy.

or

I like volleyball. Volleyball is interesting.

Both perfectly normal grammatically, but a bit off, especially the final one, with the usage of interesting.

The funny thing is that while English teachers spend all their time griping about how narrow the vocabulary of their students is, their own Japanese vocabulary is probably equally if not more narrow. 好き is clearly the biggest offender here. This 好き, that 好き, beer 好き, Japan 好き. Yada yada yada.

An easy way to vary this expression is the word 大好物 (だいこうぶつ). As you can tell from the characters, it means, starting from the end, “thing-like-a lot” – something you really like/love/enjoy.

The usage is simple – Xが大好物です。Something is a 大好物 (to you). So next time you’re considering throwing out a 好き or 大好き, remember those annoying students who misuse interesting and use 大好物 instead.

UPDATE: This pattern is used strictly for FOODS that you like. Sorry for any inconveniences. Remember, making mistakes = good.

How to Find Stuff

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The other day at work I was faced with a challenge – a phrase made up of individual words I recognized, but whose collective meaning I didn’t know and wasn’t available in ALC.

The phrase was – 「HIPHOP界のカリスマband name」　It doesn’t matter what the band name is. I understood a good bit of this phrase. HIPHOP was very clear, as was 界. Together they mean “the hip-hop world/industry.” You often see the word 業界 (ぎょうかい), which means a given industry. You can change the 業 to a more specific kanji/word to make it specific – e.g. HIPHOP界, 音楽界, 文学界, etc. カリスマ is also relatively straight forward; it should mean something like “charisma.”  

The strange thing about this phrase is that HIPHOP界のカリスマ all modifies the band, but there’s no な or の connecting the phrase to the band name. At first I thought “charisma” might be part of the band name or some other musician, but it didn’t turn up any searches, so I figured it had to be modifying the band.

Google to the rescue. I tried a search for 「HIPHOP界のカリスマ」, but nothing helpful turned up. I tried image searching and a picture of Eminem came up, as well as some other Japanese hip-hoppers.

That’s when I realized what to search for – 「界のカリスマ」 This gave me tons of different results – ヨガ界のカリスマ、映画界のカリスマ、ファション界のカリスマ. All of these phrases modify different individuals who are all at the top of their respective industry. This I realized when I clicked on the result for 音楽界のカリスマ任天堂の近藤浩治氏. He’s the guy who did all the music for Mario, Zelda and some other Nintendo games. He’s the master.

A few google searches and I figured out that this is the way they say someone is at the top of the industry – someone is, I guess, the "charisma" of their industry. I translated it as the phrase “band name, currently at the top of the hip hop world.” A very strange phrase, and I think there is probably a better way to translate it. I’m just glad I understand it now.

号外 – How to Amazon

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I was testing out the new search engine Cuil (yes, yes, I was "Cuil-ing" myself, if you must know), and an article I had forgotten about popped up. I think I posted it straight to the Fukushima list-serv, and then someone asked to post it on a blog/newsletter. The article is my explanation of how to use Amazon Japan. I just used it again recently, and it’s even better in Tokyo. I ordered three things. Two of them were delivered within a few days. I got a shipping notice for the third item on Sunday at around noon, and it was delivered Sunday evening at around 7 or 8pm. Highly recommended.

Cool Kanji – ※

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Today’s cool kanji isn’t actually a kanji! I’m so excited about this! Aren’t you!? It’s called the 米印（こめじるし） and it’s used in Japan as a marker of clarification/warning. It’s called 米印 because it looks like the 米 character if you rotated it 45 degrees. You often see it below a chart used to explain something. You also see it on instructions warning you to do something a specific way. I just bought a desk and had I paid attention to the 米印, I would have realized I didn’t need to hunt down a weirdly shaped screwdriver – one came with the desk.

One of the coolest things about this character is that if you type in こめじるし and then 変換（へんかん, change from kana to kanji） it,  ※ will be one of the options. On Windows, it changes the whole thing, but on my Mac it only changes こめ. I need to experiment further on Windows.

Another cool character is the Japanese post office mark – 〒. Also not a kanji, but like 米印 it can be accessed by typing in equivalent kana, in this case ゆうびん.

Friday Puzzle – A Boy Named Who?

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This week I’m channeling my inner Will Shortz.

Today’s puzzle is all about the romanization. There is a type of Japanese cat such that when you romanize the Japanese word, you get a common boy’s name in English. What is the cat and what is the boy’s name?

The prize if you win? One can of 100% barley malt beer – e.g. Ebisu, Suntory Malts, Asahi Premium.

Please do not post your answer in the comments. Send it to me via email or facebook. My email address is るぱんさんせい (romanized) at-mark gmail dot com.

Friday Puzzle – Bodacious Answer

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Well, I was right. It was an easy puzzle. Probably easier than I initially imagined. I tried to get clever and talk about radicals (awesome! bodacious!), but four people flooded me with correct possibilities – 手、頭、目、髪、耳、お尻、鼻、指、足、口、顎、爪先、首。Hell, all of them, basically!

Which got me thinking, why is that the case? Sure, 月 is often associated with body parts, but it isn’t used in any of the main ones. The reason is, I believe, because many of the other body parts are so useful in the kind of basic explanation required in pictograms, that they themselves become radicals.

手　The hand, manipulator of things, is used all over the place. Of course it gets in on the finger character (指), but it also grasps (握る), points (指す), holds (持つ), picks up (拾う), and digs (掘る).

口  The mouth, drinker of booze and consumer of grilled chicken parts, is another one you’ll see all over. It eats (喰う), yells (叫ぶ), beeps (鳴る), and cries (鳴く).

I could go on for a while, but I’ll save that for another post when I have more time. Matt from no-sword emailed me with a link to one of his archives where he talks further about the 月 radical. First of all, read the link – a great classic no-sword post. He explains that the body part radical is actually 肉 which eventually became the same as 月. It makes sense if you think about it. The characters that have the 月 radical all are internal organy type parts – 腸、腹、心臓、肝臓, etc. Much more purely fleshy than our external sensory organs.

The winner by random number generation (everything is officially on the Internets, hooray) is Jens. Congrats.

Punishment

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A man moves from the prefectures to Tokyo and the ensuing madness…uh…ensues. Me and all my stuff are in Tokyo, but things haven’t calmed down enough to resume serious writing duties, so you get another pun. This one I thought up in the shower the other day.

If someone asks you, 「おしっこしてきたの？」, you can always reply, "I don’t 尿" and shrug your shoulders.

Well, I thought it was funny.

Hope you all had a nice Marine Day weekend. See you here on Friday.