Category Archives: vocab

How to ドーナツ

Posted on by

As alluded to in this video, Krispy Kreme is not the best place to get foreign donuts in Japan. That honor goes to Doughnut Plant. One of their cream-filled gourmet doughnuts will carve nearly 500 yen out of your wallet, add several hundred calories to your waistline, and soak the inside of your arteries with fried sugary goodness.

Their current seasonal offering is 和ドーナツ, starring this 抹茶あんドーナツ:

It wasn’t as good as the Pumpkin Cream one I had last fall. I would go for the Vanilla and Green Tea Cream if I was going to order again. Fortunately there is a Doughnut Plant inside Shinagawa Station, which is dangerously close to where I live. These are only on sale until the 15th and can also be found at Dean and Deluca.

(I spent a few minutes wondering why どなつ only 変換s to 度夏. The moral of the story? Know your long vowel markings in katakana.)

Cool Word – 渋い

Posted on by

One winter tradition in Japan is 大掃除 (おおそうじ) – “big” year-end cleaning. Don’t ask me why they do it when it’s cold outside. Doing it in the spring is far more pleasant. My roommates and I cleaned up our place last month on the 23rd. We clean every couple of months or so to prevent the place from getting too dirty. We set バルサン, insect foggers, and go out for a big breakfast somewhere while the smoke dissipates.  This time we went to Coco’s, and for the first time ever I heard a conversation where both meanings of 渋い (しぶい) were used in natural conversation.

I hear it more frequently used to describe a person’s taste in food, music, movies, clothes, bars – anything really. Five of us ordered plain old breakfast sets with Western-style food, but the last roommate ordered a Japanese-style set meal, prompting another roommate to say 渋い！Shochu, bourbon and scotch, high quality enka music, pop from the 70s (especially this super funky version of 東京砂漠), Elvis, drinking tea instead of coffee, tweed – all of these things are 渋い.

A few minutes later another of my roommates was steeping tea. She poured a cup of deep brown tea, took a sip and grimaced a 渋い！ The tea was too strong, too astringent. This is the meaning that there is hardly ever occasion to use. Japanese green tea is generally steeped very briefly, but even if it is steeped for a long time, it never produces that astringent flavor present in darjeelings and assams.

Keeping this fact in mind, now we have to figure out a way to use astringent to describe a person’s tastes. Maybe certain senses of the words “strong” or “extreme” would work. ALC provides “refined,” which also works but probably has a different range of connotations than 渋い. It does overlap at points, though. I guess the main difference is that refined in English is generally a positive term whereas 渋い can probably have some negative connotations. The committee of refined and cool works in most contexts, but there is definitely that sense of someone’s tastes being sort of acerbic, different from the mass populous that is hard to get at in English.

Cool Kanji – 苺

Posted on by
Merry Christmas! No, not Eve. Christmas. In Japan, things go down on the 24th, and often people have no idea that the 25th is actually Christmas Day. The festivities here are more like Valentine’s Day in the US with lights and illuminations and whatnot.

Two years ago I spent Christmas Eve walking around in Fukuoka, a surprisingly hip urban center given its distance from Tokyo, watching couples shop, pick up KFC (another Christmas tradition – if you don’t have a reservation already, no chicken for you), and then get a cake before heading home. It was sweet: there was a lot more handholding than usual.

The cakes come in two varieties – chocolate or strawberry. I’m not sure if that’s the reason or not, but I’ve run into the strawberry kanji a couple times recently. It’s cool – the radical for grass on top with mother underneath.

Ha. I just looked it up in Kōjien to see if it mentions anything about the origin of the kanji (wrong dictionary, eh?) and found this: 温室栽培では年末出荷が主. End of story – in Japan, strawberries = Christmas.

号外 – 冬至

Posted on by

 

Happy 冬至 (とうじ) – the shortest day/longest night of the year. The weather is so nice today that it doesn’t really feel like the arrival of winter, as the characters seem to suggest. As you can see above, I’ve partaken of the ritual gourd and beans, which is supposed to give you the nutrients to make it through the night (and whole next year) without any illness, and later this evening I’ll be soaking in ゆづ湯, also supposed to ward off colds.

Cool Compound – 無濾過

Posted on by

Today’s compound is most excellent. First of all it has a prefix – 無 (む). 無 negates anything it precedes, as do 非 and 不. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember the difference between the three; whatever – just keep that in mind whenever you see one of those three, okay?

濾過 (ろか) gets most of our attention. I had no idea what the first kanji meant, but Mr. Jim Breen tells me it means filter. That makes sense, and it also made me realize what 過 is doing there. Is 通過 (つうか) familiar? 通過 is what happens when you’re standing on a train platform and one of those 通勤特急 trains comes howling by, making you wonder how many people bite it accidentally via train every year. 通 means pass and 過 means through or to exceed/go beyond. To pass through/beyond a point. So 濾過, which is a doozy on the 変換 system apparently, means filter through something or to pass through a filter. Add the 無, and this becomes not being passed through a filter or, in normal English, unfiltered.

What’s isn’t being filtered, you ask? Beer, of course! To be more specific, Kirin’s line of premium beers. They have a pale ale they sell regularly, a white beer that was limited edition I believe, and now the winter limited beer – Beer Chocolat.

It’s definitely dark.

Smells like a lager to me, which is disappointing, but it does have a little roastiness and no, I repeat, NO actual chocolate. It’s not one of those beers, it’s a real chocolate beer because it uses chocolate malt: チョコレート麦芽 (ばくが)一部使用, as it says on the bottle. Chocolate malt, as most respectable drinkers will know, is that malt roasted more than caramel malt and less than black patent malt; roastier flavor than caramel with more sugars intact (not burned away) than black patent.

And like all unfiltered beers, this beer is fresh (expires in 90 days) and has yeasties floating about. Brewer’s yeast is good for you, so drink up.

Back

Posted on by

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.)

笑われていいとも！

Posted on by

One of the elementary schools I taught at for three years was deep in the mountains. Every Thursday I’d drive the beat-up red town car from the junior high school west along the river and then turn right, head into the mountains. The school only had about 30 kids total from 1st to 6th grade, so I taught sets of two grade years: 1st and 2nd, 3rd and 4th, 5th and 6th.

I thought it would be difficult at first, and it was a little when the kids rose a year and got matched with a different set of students, but the older kids always helped the younger ones along. I found that I could get the older kids to provide examples of different patterns and games.

Once I was teaching the 5th and 6th graders vowels. In Japanese the word for vowel is 母音 (ぼいん). [On an interesting side note, the word for consonant is 子音 (しいん)]. 母音 has an unusual pronunciation, so I wrote it on the board for the kids, but for some reason when I said it, the kids started laughing hysterically. I said it again, and they laughed even harder! One kid added, ダニエル先生、すごい！ At one point the assistant principal, who was overseeing the class, had to tell kids to stop laughing. I still had no idea what was so funny. I could tell something I said was strange, but I just moved on with the lesson.

A couple weeks later I was teaching the same material to 3rd and 4th graders, and 母音 elicited the same response. This time, however, one of the little boys mimed a giant set of breasts. Ah ha! I thought, ボイン is the noise that boobs make when they move up and down! No wonder they were laughing so much. I had been standing up in front of the class saying, "Okay, guys, there are two types of boobs – long boobs and short boobs, and they make different sounds for each letter."

Laughter is an amazing warning sign. I love it when people laugh at my Japanese. It lets me know that my joke has worked or that I’ve said something incredibly incorrect and strange. Either way, it’s an easy way for people to reinforce better speaking without having to say, “Hey asshole, you messed up.”

If I get laughed at for a mistake, I don’t usually make that mistake again. On the internship I wrote about previously, I once brought omiyage for the group, announcing them by saying このお土産を京都から連れてきました。They all laughed, and the division head let me know that 連れる is only used for people; basically, I had just said, “I have accompanied this omiyage from Kyoto. Please enjoy.” 持ってきた is the correct pattern. Needless to say, I haven’t made that mistake again.

The point? Try not to take it personally if someone laughs at your Japanese, and feel free to laugh at strange English. You’re doing them a favor.

This isn’t really a puzzle, but I will beer the first person to explain the pun from and relevance of the title.

(I also wrote about laughter when I nearly killed a tanuki.)

Cool Kanji – 壷

Posted on by

 

More Irotori Ninja (色取り忍者) goodness! 1, 2.

Today’s kanji is つぼ (pot), basically an excuse to talk about Irotori Ninja some more.

I think I saw this episode when it aired but didn’t realize how funny the intro part is. The two guests were starring in some movie about 渋い-looking high school kids, which instantly gets associated with the old 数取団 (which I wrote about here). They give Koji Katō a hard time, asking why they don’t play the counting game anymore. (Keiichi Yamamoto, the other member of Katō’s manzai group Gokuraku Tombo, got kicked off the show and blacklisted.) Pretty bold to press a sensitive issue like that.

Another critical vocab word for Japanese comedy is ビンタ – a slap. Slapping and hitting is, for whatever reason, extremely funny in Japan. Watch the 1:45 and the 3:55 mark of the second video to see Shinji Takeda get slapped.

Cool Verb – おののく

Posted on by

 

If you look at it long enough, it almost doesn’t even look like a word at all. It begins to crawl along the page, chomping on other letters and words and leaving sentences half-erased, おののくughts half-finished おののくing a Ludovician love song.

I learned it at おののくoday, and it means tremble or quiver. It sometimes brings it’s friend 恐れ with it 恐れおののくttached as a caboose, adding a sense of fear and awe.

Cool word.            … おののく

Great Moments in Film Translation – Pulp Fiction

Posted on by

 

There’s the most famous line from the movie rendered into Japanese subtitles – “I’m going to make dinner of your backside.” Even a generous untranslation only gets “I’m gonna roast your ass.” Although perhaps “料理ing an 後ろ” is as unusual a wording in Japanese as “getting medieval” is in English which I guess is the one of the highlights of Tarantino movies – dialogue that’s close enough to vernacular English to seem real but at the same time funny and edgy enough to be cool and therefore hyperreal.

The dubbing goes in a different direction and is possibly more accurate: (the best I could tell it is,) けつぶけで破って、グチャグチャしてやる。Man, a little help from the audience. Any idea what a けつぶけ is? I get the けつ part, and I get the やぶる part. I also understand that this is what probably results in グチャグチャ of the, I’m assuming, asshole region.