Category Archives: get used to it!

Grossest Idiom Ever?

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Last week at work I came across possibly the grossest idiom in existence – 爪(つめ)の垢(あか)を煎(せん)じて飲む. The first thing I did was turn to my trusty 慣用句 (かんようく) online dictionary. The interface could be better; the search engine is pretty good, but if that doesn’t find it, you have to narrow down the idiom by the first two kana via the menu on the left. Some of the idioms have their own pages, others are just given on a long page with other definitions. The best part is that the whole thing is in Japanese, which forces you to study and get a feel for how it works in Japanese, rather than learning a straight up translation.

This one has its own page, and the definition is: 優れた人の爪の垢を貰って薬として飲むという意味で、その人に肖（あやか）ろうとすること。

So, yes, you boil an awesome person’s fingernail crud and drink it as medicine so that you can be cool like them. Something like that. I had to look up 肖(あやか)ろう, and I think it means something like “be lucky.” Still getting used to the usage here, but I’m thinking it’s something like “I wanna be like Mike.” It can be put into basically any tense by changing 飲む – some of the frequently used tenses are 飲みたい, 飲ませる. The difference between these two is pretty drastic. With 飲みたい, the speaker thinks the person is so great, great enough that they’d drink their fingernail crud. With 飲ませる, someone is clearly lacking something that crud from fingernails of superlative person X could hopefully fix, and the person doing the causing thinks they should drink up. Gross.

Here’s a blog entry with actual usage. Always good practice to learn stuff.

It would be fun to write a fake article about the “recent boom” of Japanese “fingernail crud cafes.”

Don’t Forget – かわいそう

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My folks are in town this next week, so I’ll be recycling ideas from a couple of my favorite posts – consider them spaced repetition reminders rather than sheer laziness.

Don’t forget that かわいそう is a difficult word to translate. I hate it when people just translate it straight up as “pitiful” or “pathetic.” Even “It’s a shame that…” can be off sometimes. I like to think of it as a truly sympathetic “It’s too bad that…” but it really needs to be handled on a case by case basis.

How to Alphabet

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Now here’s some madness to play with your brain: Japanese have difficulty learning the English alphabet for the same reason that Americans have difficulty using the metric system – they already have a perfectly good naming/measuring convention of their own, so psychologically it’s more comfortable to stick with what’s familiar. It’s the same reason that it’s really difficult to adjust to Celsius or Fahrenheit if you’ve grown up with the other. I’ve come to understand what 10C means, but 50F still means more to me.

Yes, the alphabet has so pervaded Japan that they’ve found a way to fit it into their own language. And here is how it works:

A    エー
B    ビー
C    シー
D    ディー
E    イー
F    エフー
G    ジー
H    エイチ
I    アイ
J    ジェー
K    ケー
L    エル
M    エム
N    エヌ
O    オー
P    ピー
Q    キュー
R    アル
S    エス
T    ティー
U    ユー
V    ブイ
W    ダブルユー
X    エックス
Y    ワイ
Z    ゼッド

Follow this rubric with the occasional hint (ラビットのアル) and you’ll have no problem relaying the alphabet in Japanese, even if it means dictating your romanized name over the phone. I think the hardest ones for me to get used to have been V, R, L, M and N, but it’s amazing how much fater アル can relay information than “ARRGH.” Also, it wasn’t until I wrote down this list that I realized why my former students refused to give up the British “zed” – pronouncing it “zee” creates an overlap with the pronunciation for G. I was tempted to write ズィー until I remembered zed.

Avoiding the ない

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I’ve got a short piece on 遠慮 over at Néojaponisme. It’s a rewritten version of one of my first posts  – “How to Say No by Saying Yes”. Don’t forget that you can also make use of お断り as a “Hell no” for comedic purposes.

遠慮 is a useful phrase for avoiding ない, but かねます is a far more blatant dodge. It is a verb ending that attaches to the stem (most often to the verbs できる, する, 致す, and 負う) and means “can’t” or, more appropriately in this case, “unable to”.

So rather than use できない or できません, you can say できかねます which has the same fundamental meaning. This is, as you can probably imagine, an incredibly polite, serious way to say something. Personally I find it hilarious that you can just replace the unpleasant negative ending with one that isn’t negative and make it all better. I’d like to meet the first guy who did that.

(Oda Nobunaga: おい、お前。パイ作ってきてくれ。
Advisor: えっと、あのぅ。パイ、作れなーあっ。作ることができなーあっ。作り．．．かねます。
Nobunaga: かねますって、一体何なんだ？
Advisor: はっきり言えば、できないということ。
Sound of head falling on tatami.)

In every case, the speaker finds him/herself unable to do something that puts him/her in an unfortunate position. かねます almost has a built in “unfortunately” along the same lines as 〜てしまった as well as a “we ask for your understanding” as in ご了承ください.

An extremely useful set phrase I learned in college is わたくしどもでは決めかねます, which can be used if you’re ever put on the spot to make a decision that is outside of your immediate jurisdiction; it literally means “I alone am unable to make that decision”, but it also sort of implies that you will consult your superiors.

する, 致す, and できる are generally attached to other verbs. For example, 賛成 (さんせい) – そういう考えもあるかもしれませんが、賛成できかねます。 “You may think that, but I (unfortunately) am unable to agree.”  

負う, as ALC tells us, is often used to duck responsibility – 責任を負いかねます.

Very much like 遠慮, かねます is one of those secret code words/patterns that is able to convey a lot of meaning efficiently because everyone knows what it really means. You, too, can tap into all the trappings of かねます, as long as you know when you need to use them.

Hot Peppers

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There are two types of people in this world: those who can get used to it and those who can’t. Those who are flexible enough to go with the flow and learn from their surroundings, and those who struggle and fight, holding on to what they know and refusing to let go.

I was ordering Subway for lunch the other day and had a strange moment of realization: I was asking for jalapeños by saying ホットペッパーもお願いします. Whether or not this is a proper pattern of request aside, why ask for “hot peppers”? Why not ask for jalapeños? Japanese can approximate the pronunciation – ハラペーニョ.

I thought about it for a while and dug up some memories from when I was studying in Tokyo five (!) years ago. I vaguely remember asking for jalapeños at the Subway near the Waseda subway stop and being met with vacant stares or  えっ, the Japanese noise of disbelief or confusion. I’d point, and they realized what I was asking for. Eventually somebody must have responded with “ホットペッパー？” because to this day I still use that term at Subway. It works like a charm. Just say the magic word and your sandwich too can look like this:

I got curious, looked around a little and found that the term ホットペッパー is in fact Subway terminology:

If you want jalapeños on your metaphorical Japanese Subway sandwich, don’t fight it; make things easier on yourself and get used to the way they do things here.

Underrated Phrase – お願いします

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Students of Japanese whine about keigo more than any other part of the language. I wonder if they realize that they use it on a daily basis. お願いします is another one of those ultimate “get used to it” phrases, and it is keigo of the humble variety.

The pattern is pretty easy to remember: お + verb stem + します. The only other thing to remember is that you ONLY USE IT FOR VERBS WHERE YOU YOURSELF ARE THE SUBJECT. A few examples: お返しします (I humbly return something to someone), お断りします (I humbly refuse), お持ちします (I humbly carry something), お借りします (I humbly borrow something).

While お願いします is a form of keigo, it has other more important uses than purely just as a humble request. It is, as we say in English about “please,” the “magic word.” It’s almost more important than please in English – it’s please and thank you all wrapped into one.

This is purely theoretical, but I’m willing to bet that people in the States would be more offended by people not saying “thank you” than by people not saying “please.” I’m equally willing to bet that people in Japan are more offended by a lack of お願いします rather than a lack of ありがとう.

願う (ねがう) means to hope or request. I’m confident that it should always be used following a request to someone equal or above you, and it’s worth tacking on to all requests so you don’t end up looking like an asshole. Like a please or a thank you, it softens whatever request you made and shows that you you truly appreciate the effort that they, in this case, will go through. You can add a よろしく on to the front to reemphasize the request (by drawing it out through additional syllables, which always means “more polite” in Japanese). In the case of people on an equal level you can opt for  よろしく on it’s own; I have a feeling that the Japanese teacher of English I worked with used this with his students as a sort of joke when he handed them assignments. (よろしくね *cruel laughter*)

In conclusion, よろしくお願いします is often grossly misunderstood by beginner/intermediate students, including myself long ago; while it is part of the self-introduction routine here, it’s more important when asking someone to do something for you. Once you understand its role there, you are more likely to understand what it means during a self-introduction.

The “No Boku” Challenge!

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I’ve wanted to do this for a while now. Starting today, I will attempt to go for as long as possible speaking Japanese without using a personal pronoun to refer to myself! No 私, no 僕, no 俺, no 自分, and definitely no あたし or おいら. I might make an exception for 家. Nah, none of that either.

I’ll call it the “No Boku” Challenge because boku is my current personal pronoun of choice, and it sounds better than the “No Personal Pronoun” Challenge. Feel free to join in and see how long you can hold out!

I think the three keys to this challenge will be:

1) constant vigilance

2) passive tense

3) giving and receiving verbs

I think this will be a great exercise, especially for students of the language in the intermediate / advanced-intermediate levels; that’s when you start to break free from the English grammar patterns that bar you from true Japanese phraseology.

I’ll do my best to log my progress. Boku will soon be my pink elephant, so I’m sure there will be many harrowing and hilarious tales of near self-referral. Ha ha. (Joke.)

Back

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My introductory Japanese classes are so far in the past now that all my memories feel like a blur. I do have a vague feeling that for whatever reason they never taught us the body parts in a single lesson. Maybe I was expecting something along the lines of my high school Spanish class where we had to label a poster or at least fill in the blanks around a mannequin on handouts and tests. We probably got bits and pieces here and there – お腹がすいている, 喉が渇いている, etc. – but never a full lesson with all the parts…I think.

So maybe that’s why I thought that 背中 (せなか) meant back for so long. I mean, I guess it does, but if you’re talking back pain, that’s 腰 (こし). 背中 feels more like that area around your shoulder bones, almost. The two basically mean upper back and lower back, but if you’re talking in general, 腰 might be the word you’re looking for.

If you’ve been sleeping on a too-thin futon for too long, the phrase you’re looking for is – 腰が痛い.

(Past body part entries: read about boobs here and here – both bring in fans from various search engines – and fingers here.)

Translation Don’ts – 〜をはじめ、

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In the spirit of avoiding mistranslations, here’s another translation don’t.

〜をはじめ、 is a JLPT Level 2 pattern. Maybe a Level 1 pattern. I can’t remember. Whatever.

Here’s a Japanese example sentence:

日本では、日本酒をはじめ、世界中の酒が飲まれている。

Read that and think about it for a second.        Okay?

Please, whatever you do, don’t translate it as “beginning with ~”, in this case “beginning with nihonshu.” Sure, it’s got the 始まる in there, but that’s really not what it means at all. Step away from your previous knowledge of the language, and put the 直訳 down. What you should be paying attention to is when it is used.

I always remember it from the graduation ceremonies at the junior high school. The whole auditorium was full of 200-something first and second year students. The third years parade in, a bunch of important people give speeches, some kids cry, and then they leave. But before all that happens, the big wigs slowly make their way in and sit on the side of the hall. The mayor, the superintendent of education, principals of elementary schools, members of city council. All the important guys. These are the designated “invited guests,” and they get respected. But there are too many to thank personally, so when people give speeches, they thank the invited guests with the phrase 町長をはじめ、. (Notice that I’ve left the comma there.) I’m kicking myself now because I can’t remember the exact phrase, but it’s something like 山口町長をはじめ、招待者の皆様、ありがとうございます。 Something like that. Or maybe there’s a 感謝を申し上げます in there.

Basically it’s saying, “I’d like to thank the mayor and all other invited guests.” (Actually, you can see that exact phrase in action from a congratulatory message to incoming students at a JHS.) Just as the sentence above really means something like, “In Japan, people drink nihonshu as well as other booze from around the world.”

I was thinking about it at work the other day and likened it to a very, very soft もちろん. Of course you’re going to thank the mayor, and of course people drink nihonshu in Japan. It’s just a softening of that italicized emphasis that you get so often with “of course.” But there’s no need to translate that into English.

So get used to it, and learn how to use ~をはじめ、 to shorten long lists of people and things.

Keep Your Ears Open – ご覧のスポンサー

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お預かりします is “get used to it.” よろしくお願いします is “get used to it.”

The essence of “get used to it” is finding those sentences that surround you in everyday life and learning how to use them/what they mean. It is beneficial to break the phrases down and see how they work, but try not to expend too much brain power or else you’ll be one of those freaks explaining the origin of saying “bless you” when someone sneezes. (Demons make you sneeze, of course, thus making you in need of a blessing. Duh.)

Saturday I was watching TV and saw one of these:

I’m sure you’ve all noticed it at some point. At different points in a show, generally just before a commercial break or the end of the show, the phrase 提供 (ていきょう) pops up on the screen with some company names underneath it. Then the voiceover announcer says 「ご覧のスポンサーの提供でお送りします。」

I believe ご覧 refers to the audience looking at the actual company names written on the screen, so literally “the sponsors you (honorably) see.” That combined with 提供 gives us “the contribution of the sponsors you (honorably) see.”

お送りします is the humble honorific of 送る (おくる), so that’s the television channel itself doing the sending, giving us, “We (humbly) send you (this show) via the contributions of the sponsors you (honorably) see.” Woo.

In English we’d probably say something like, “Brought to you by State Farm Insurance – Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is there!” That or "Support for Show X is provided by Chevy Trucks – Like a Rock."