Author Archives: Daniel

Friday Puzzle – Momentarily HUH?

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This is a fantastic expression I heard used by a teacher at the welcome party for new teachers a week ago:

「まもなくれいてんいちきろになるところです。」

I have endeavored to present this phrase as accurately as possible, but there was booze involved at this welcome party, so you’ll have to forgive me some minor editing. I have also provided ONLY HIRAGANA this week in order to reduplicate it as I heard it. (Does one hear kanji? Methinks not.)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

– explain the meaning of this phrase
– attempt to guess the context in which it was said (in addition to the welcome party, duh)

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 – Make Me Answer

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The goal this past week was to show you the flexibility of the verb する. It’s always introduced as “to do,” but there are plenty of cases where it acts as something other than do. The initial phrase I was thinking of was 〜顔をする. “Make an X face,” where X could be nearly anything – silly, stupid, funny, strange, mysterious. I eliminated food examples because we so automatically associate the English “make” with food, thus the Japanese 料理する, which would have been far too easy.

There were four correct answers:

友達と約束をしました。 – I made a promise with a friend.

私は学校をきれいにする。 – I make the school clean.

きみはいつも僕を幸せにする。 – You always make me happy.

これをもう少し安くしてくださいませんか。 – Could you make it cheaper for me please? (An exceptionally useful phrase, especially to cheapos like JETs.)

The final three all use the same pattern: X + を + 副詞 (adverb) + する → make x more adverb.

Here is how you form the adverb:
安い→安く
幸せ→幸せに
きれい→きれいに

The one small gripe I have is that for sentence three I would say 幸せにしてくれる to emphasize the fact that it is something that きみ is doing to/for 僕.

One submission I got suggested that that セックスをしました could be used for “made love,” but セックスをしました is a bit too straightforward to be translated to something as idiomatic as “making love.” You could probably translate that する into something interesting like “perform” or “undergo,” especially if “coitus” followed either of those words.

The winner this week by random selection (you can confirm the randomness with the other teacher in my town) is Robin – he’s now halfway to a six-pack.

Power Up Your いい

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Another short Wednesday post due to job interviews.

Mastering Japanese can sometimes be as simple as mastering the ladder of politeness – remembering which phrases are used for those high on the ladder and which are used for those lower on the ladder.

いい, as I mentioned last Friday, is often used to either ask permission or refuse something. It’s common courtesy to ask someone, 「いいですか。」 before you sit down next to them. (Notice how I didn’t use a question mark in that sentence. This is something else you should just get used to – you don’t need question marks all the time in Japanese.)

You can power up your いい by turning it into よろしい. This is a polite way to say いい. You can also power up your ですか by turning it into でしょうか. So here’s a little ladder for you.

よろしいでしょうか。
よろしいですか。
いいですか。
いい？／いいの？　(My spider sense tells me that this last one is all about the intonation and that will be easier to be understood as a question if you add the の.)

That’s in order of most polite to most casual. Notice that, as usual, the more syllables a phrase has, the more polite it is.

Cool Kanji – 鯨

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Thar she blows!
 
There are so many kanji for fish. So many that they sell mugs that have all of them printed on the side with the readings in hiragana – a cheat sheet / novelty item.
 
Cheat mug
 
For the most part, they’re written in katakana, but you will find them written in kanji every now and then. My JTE, who has moved on to a different school this year, always used this kanji when he taught the passive voice – “This kanji is called ____ in Japanese.” He wrote a bunch of difficult kanji on the board, which I guess was fun for the kids to try and guess. He mostly used different characters for fish.
 
I always thought this was the coolest of the ones he wrote on the board. Fish on the left, capital on the right, which gives us whale – the biggest of all things that swim in the water and appear not to be mammals.

Friday Puzzle – Make Me

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For this week’s puzzle I want to mix things up a little. I’ll provide you with certain conditions, and you provide me with Japanese that satisfies the conditions. I’ll select the winner randomly from any entry that satisfies all the conditions.

Please give me a Japanese sentence where the verb する could be translated into English as “make” ("making," "made" etc). The one other condition is that food must not be involved. So please send me two sentences – a Japanese sentence using する and the English translation where する is accurately translated as “make.”

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 – Bugs are Fantastic Answer

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I give out stickers to kids at elementary school. We play karuta nearly every week, and when the kids have taken five cards, I allow them to choose one sticker from a stash that I accumulate whenever I go to Tokyo or happen to see cool stickers.

When I was in Australia, we passed a dollar store, so I stocked up on cool Aussie stickers. I got a bunch of flags and antipodean animals. They also had a big sheet filled with bugs, one with ladybugs and another with beetles.

Some of the boys liked these stickers, but I still haven’t given them all away. A month or so ago, a girl was trying to choose her sticker and I said, “How about a bug, mam?” 「虫はいかがでしょうか。」, purposely speaking a little over-politely to be funny. She replied in kind speaking slowly, “No bugs, thank you.” 「虫は、いいです。」

No one likes bugs. Except, of course, these crazy kids in Japan, but they’re mostly the elementary school kids…and the few junior high kids who still like them…and become adults who really like them.

So, no, bugs are not nice, good or cool. I’d rather have very little to do with them, thank you very much.

This use of いいですis the often overlooked refusal of something. Think about this conversation for a second:

A: Would you like anything else to eat?
B: No, thank you.

In English, we incorporate “thank you” into our refusals. I can’t tell you how many times my “No, thank you”s have been misconstrued as “Thank you? Well, here ya go!” (Perhaps because I mumble?) In Japanese, similarly, they incorporate a “good” word into a phrase of refusal – いい.

To make it clearer, you can attach a もう to the front of your いいです, implying that “(whatever you) already (have is) okay.” Okay might be the closest translation. So here are your phrases:

（もう）いいです。
（もう）けっこうです。

The second being a more polite version of the first. I think けっこう might be slightly easier to understand coming from a non-native speaker who, like myself, is probably messing up the intonation of the phrase.

Here’s a conversation I had on Wednesday for further reinforcement:

Konbini lady: 袋はいりますか。
Me: けっこうです。
K: いいですか。

You copy? In English it looks something like this:

K: Do you need a bag?
M: No, thank you.
K: You’re okay (without a bag)?

The lady wasn’t asking me if I was good or if I thought bags were nice or something, she was asking me if I was okay without a bag. An easy way to differentiate this usage of いいです from others is that this one will hardly ever, perhaps never, have anything in front of it. The other usage you will see constructed like this: 〜がいいです, with が directly expressing the subject of いい.

Robin wins again this week, with his answer, “somebody offered to put bugs in the girl’s lunch (you wouldn’t do that would you daniel?) and she was politely refusing them.”

Going Up to the Miyako

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I’m in Tokyo now, so just a quick post. I’ve always thought that 上京（じょうきょう） is one of the coolest two character compounds. Can you figure out what it means? I’ll give you a few blank lines to figure it out.

 

 

 

 

Get it yet?

 

 

 

 

Still no luck?

 

 

 

Okay, it means “go to Tokyo” or “go to Kyoto.” Literally it means “go up to the capital (implied: from our measly little backwater swamp town).” Back in the day said capital was Kyoto. Now it’s Tokyo, so if you use it now, it means go to Tokyo. Ta da.

(Funny that you 上がる to the Kanto Plain.)

Cool Kanji – 縁

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I learned this kanji in Tokushima at a jazz bar. It was a bar in one of those buildings with several different bars packed onto each floor. A man got on the elevator just before I did and held the door for me. Turns out he was going to the same bar I was. There was hardly anyone in the bar – only a few others who turned out to be the band that was playing that night – so we talked for a while, and he told me how surprised he was that I ended up going into the same bar he did. It also happened that he owned a bar himself, so he invited me to stop by and booze a bit the next night. He said that the random chance that we went into the same bar was 何かの縁, which I like to translate as “some kind of connection/fate.” The usage is with 〜ある, so 何かの縁がある.

It has a host of other meanings – relation, connection, ties, fate, destiny, marriage, conjugal relations, chance. A very multifaceted kanji. It has the thread thingy on the left and reminds me of 緑（みどり）　and 豚（ぶた）.

One of the simplest usages is 縁を結ぶ (えんをむすぶ) – to form a connection with.

The 新明解 (しんめいかい), a famous Japanese dictionary, lists the fate definition as the first one and also notes that it comes from Buddhist philosophy. It gives two examples:

前世の縁（ぜんせのえん）- a connection with/to a past life

妙な縁で彼に会う（みょうなえんでかれにあう）-  (I/he/she/they/we) meet him by a strange turn of fate

Friday Puzzle – Bugs are Fantastic

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This is a phrase that a sixth grader said to me once:

「虫は、いいです。」

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

– explain the meaning of this phrase
– attempt to guess the context in which it was said

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.

More Notes on the Appear-ative Tense

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The last post was a bit long, so I split it into two. I want to talk about more about the use of this tense in verbs.

My instinct tells me that it is used more often with the potential form of verbs than with the dictionary form.

(Quick potential review:

食べる        食べられる        can/is able to eat
行く            行ける            can/is able to go
する            できる            can/is able to do
)

Here is a comparison:

食べそう        appear to eat
行きそう        appear to go
しそう          appear to do

食べられそう    appear to be able to eat
行けそう        appear to be able to go
できそう        appear to be able to do

With the dictionary forms, it’s difficult (for me at least) to think up examples. I mean, either the person is or isn’t eating or doing whatever it is they are eating or doing. It’s a very objective judgment.

With the potential, on the other hand, you are making a subjective judgment about what someone (either yourself or someone else) appears able to do. I mean, sure, you’ve eaten twenty hot dogs before in an eating contest, and now, looking at the plate of twenty-five in front of you, it doesn’t look so bad, right? You could probably eat twenty-five. While you think you can eat twenty-five, you want to express a bit of that doubt and subjective judgment:

うん、食べられそうです。

In English, I might be comfortable translating this to the Thomas the Train Engine “I think I can.” In English “I think…” is often used to express the fact that you subjectively believe something to be true but are slightly unsure. It’s used this way in Japanese too, but perhaps not as often. And this tense is less hefty than attaching a big fat 〜と思います to the end of whatever it is you are out there thinking subjectively.