Category Archives: vocab

Grossest Idiom Ever?

Posted on by

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.”

Wiener vs Vienna

Posted on by

Had Vienna coffee for the first time while I was away at Nozawa Onsen this past weekend. When I mentioned it to my roommates, one said that for a long time he thought Vienna coffee had a sausage in it. The katakana are close, and I think wiener can actually vary between the two. Vienna the city, however, is just ウィーン.

Cool Compound – ニコイチ

Posted on by

 

Randomly hopping around on Wikipedia yesterday I came across an amazing phrase – ニコイチ. I had a great time reading the entry and figuring out what it means. I don’t want to ruin the experience for you, so I won’t say what it means here. Go ahead and give it a read. It’s a good read for intermediate students…hopefully not too, too advanced.

Cool Kanji – 繭

Posted on by

 

Took the parents to the Silk Museum in Yokohama. Highly underrated museum – lots of English translation, great depth of information, women can try on a kimono for free, and they have a display where real cocoons are being used to create actual silk thread. Very cool. It’s been empty the two times I’ve been.

I also learned an amazing kanji – 繭 (まゆ). It means cocoon. It’s got all the important parts: the grass radical for the mulberry bushes (草 – just that top bit), the thread radical for the silk (糸), and the insect radical for the worms (虫). Visually it expresses a lot of meaning as the insect and thread are held together tightly by that small matrix, and the plant sits on top, letting us know where it all starts.

Great kanji.

Updated: Changed bamboo to grass upon dope slap from Aak. Domo domo.

Don’t Forget – かわいそう

Posted on by

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.

Cool Compound – 死角

Posted on by

 

Learned this one at work the other day. “Death” and “angle,” pronounced しかく. It means “blind spot.” I thought it was pretty cool.

I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it. I didn’t forget it, but mostly because I was surprised at how shockingly bad my kanji have become in the past year or two. Very little balance going on up there.

Hot Peppers

Posted on by

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.

号外 – Uncool Compound – 盗作

Posted on by

盗作 (とうさく) is a pretty straightforward compound; a literal reading provides “stolen-work”, and from there it’s easy to extrapolate to actual meaning – plagiarism.

Perhaps plagiarism is too harsh a charge, but however you measure it, the Japan Times seems to have poached research from a Néojaponisme article I worked on. Roger Pulvers uses Dimitry Kovelenin’s mistranslation of kumozaru in his Counterpoint column today. It’s awfully similar to the Néojaponisme piece, even down to the use of the monkey proverb:

Dmitry Kovalenin, the excellent Russian translator of the works of Haruki Murakami, once tripped over the translation of kumozaru, meaning the spider monkey that is native of Central and South America. Kovalenin assumed, it seems, that Murakami was referring to a mythical animal, so he used a bizarre made-up equivalent of "spider" and "monkey" in Russian. Another Japanese proverb tells us that "even monkeys fall from trees"; and Kovalenin was man enough to bring this particular fall to light himself by acknowledging it publicly.

The worst part is that Pulvers gets it wrong; as far as I know, as far as the transcript reads, Kovalenin did not in fact “man up.” He boasted about the clever translation and was then called out by other translators at the convention.

I guess there’s a chance that Pulvers came up with the research independently, but there are only three hits for "Dimitry Kovalenin" and "kumozaru" on the Internet (make that four) and judging from the rest of the article, he doesn’t seem that creative: the column is a mish-mash of anecdotes, held together by the general theme that “bad pronunciation can make you say funny/rude things”. He sprinkles this with two suggestions – face the speaker when interpreting and use common sense.

I wish the Japan Times would pay me to write stuff like that.

Cool Compound – 優柔不断

Posted on by
Here’s another extremely useful non-idiomatic four character compound. The pronunciation is ゆうじゅうふだん. It’s not as easy to break down as 疑心暗鬼 was, but here we go:

優 – gentle
柔 – soft/flexible
不 – non-
断 – decline

The first half of this compound is never used alone. The second half appears to mean “constant, habitual, unflagging.” Any idea what it means together? No, not “beer gut,” which would be unflagging softness of the abdominal variety – it means “indecisive.”

One of my roommates went back to her hometown in Akita over the recent holiday, but it took her long enough to decide! She didn’t leave until the 1st or the 2nd, and that was only after a lot of hemming and hawing. She was back two days later, too! I realized that I didn’t know how to say indecisive, so I told her the word in English and then tried to explain it and she taught me this compound. Hooray for Japanese roommates!