Category Archives: vocab

Cool Compound – 主食

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shushoku

Over the 4th of July weekend, I went back to the small town in Fukushima where I spent three years teaching English and “coordinating international relations.” I had a nomikai with the students from the English conversation class I taught at the Town Hall, and then a few of us lit fireworks in the parking lot of the town offices. It was a nice little trip, great to get out of the city and just relax the whole weekend.

I ran into one of the great Japanese compounds at the dinner – 主食 (しゅしょく). We started with a toast and then snacked on sashimi, bits of fried food, edamame and a bunch of other things. El vino did flow – beer and 麦焼酎水割り, mostly. Towards the end, I could kind of tell it was time to wrap things up, but then one of the ladies said, だめだ。何か主食とらないと。 We couldn’t leave without having a 主食 – a staple food. The classic Japanese 主食 is rice, but the restaurant had no rice dishes, so we settled for ramen. Apparently noodles count as a staple food. The great illusion with 主食 is that rice is the only one that exists in the world. This proves otherwise.

Because rice isn’t eaten as much abroad, often Japanese will think that there are no 主食 in the US. I always point to Mexican cuisine and the use of corn in tortillas, pupusas, and tamales. Corn and beans are all staple foods all over the world. Don’t fall for the 主食 fallacy.

I’m heading back to my town to help carry the mikoshi in a festival next weekend. Should be fun.

カメラマン ≠ cameraman

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The Google Image results for this one are so awesome that I won’t even bother embedding images. Just check out the difference in the results for cameraman, and then the results for カメラマン.

A cameraman always works with video, whereas a カメラマン works with photographs most of the time, and should therefore be translated as photographer. It can be a video cameraman, but Yahoo gives that as the second definition and provides 撮影技師 as a more specific alternative.

It’s kind of cute to think that カメラマン is simply a “man with a camera” in Japanese. It tickles me in the same way as when this Portuguese girl once told me she bought a new “photographic machine,” which is the literal translation from Portuguese. Remember, laughing at and being laughed at is a good thing when learning a language.

And the moral of the story is… don’t submit to the katakana! Know how to use them and make them work for you! And think before you translate them.

Keep Your Eyes Open – Ions

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I was hydrating the other day with a Pocari Sweat and happened to notice this on the back label (apologies for the image quality):

sweat2
Ah, ha! I thought. I recognize イオン, and I remember all of those elements from chemistry class. All of the elements on top have plus signs next to them, and the ones on the bottom have minus signs, so 陽 (pronounced よう) must mean “positive,” and 陰 (いん) “negative.” Nice. Keeping your eyeballs peeled will learn you a lot.

This reminds me – these two characters are also used as the positive and negative for test results. The only thing scarier than getting back the results of an HIV test is getting back the results of an HIV test in a foreign language and realizing holy shit I cannot understand a single coddamn thing on this piece of paper. Knowing these two kanji will hopefully prevent you from having to worry any longer than is absolutely necessary. 陰性 (いんせい) is what you are hoping for.

Keep Your Eyes Open was a series I meant to continue after this initial exploration last year. Clearly I haven’t been keeping my eyes open wide enough.

Cool Dictionary – Yahoo 辞書

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My least favorite part about reading Japanese dictionaries is all the madness: tiny fonts, jam-packed pages, single kanji that float around and explain things (e.g. what part of speech a word is, what particles are attached to the end). And to be perfectly honest, I’m a lazy man who doesn’t appreciate the whole having to physically pick up a book and actually find the word thing.

Enter Yahoo 辞書. This is a little trick that I picked up at work. Many of the Japanese people in the translation department (who basically play the mirror image of my role, i.e. E-J) use this, and occasionally they’ve sent me links from entries when I ask a question about a Japanese word.

Lots of great things about the dictionary. First of all, it’s digital, which means I only need to move my ten digits. Second, it has a clean layout with simple, easy to read definitions. If you’ve wanted to start using Japanese dictionaries but have been worried that you won’t understand the definitions, this is a great dictionary to start with.

Take for example the word 彷徨う. Plug it into the dictionary and you’ll see immediately that the reading is さまよう. Alternate kanji are さ迷う (which already provides a partial definition). There is a bit of the madness (［動ワ五（ハ四）］), of which I only recognize the 動 as a verb marker and 五 as a 五段動詞 (although I can’t recall the specifics of what that means), but it soon gives way to the clean cut definitions presented in an easy-to-read layout: 1 – 迷って歩きまわる, 2 – あちこち動く, 3 – 判断に迷う. I love it.

They occasionally provide examples of usage from great works of literature such as, in this case, The Tale of Genji…not that I understand them, but still a cool feature. You can also click on the tabs to access the thesaurus (類語) or J-E (和英) dictionaries for the word. Great dictionary. Just need to train myself to use it more often.

(Don’t forget to check out this past entry about how to read from context and use Japanese dictionaries.)

ストーヴ ≠ stove

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I’ve found another great set of equalities for my never-ending quest to debunk all mistranslations of 外来語 and 和製英語.

ストーヴ  =  stove1

stove         =  stove2

I’m sure the usage of ストーヴ overlaps slightly with the English stove, as is evident from a Google Images search, but for the most part ストーヴ refers to a Japanese-style kerosene heater. Anyone who has ever taught English on JET, especially out in the countryside, is probably well familiar with these. I have great memories of them. In addition to heating the room, on top there is always a kettle boiling or a big tub of water being warmed – like water usage in toilets, another great example of Japanese efficiency. In the winter many of my students warmed up their lunch milk in the tub of water. Be warned: doing this will make you extremely sleepy and may even affect your post-lunch teaching ability.

Stoves as Americans think of them, on the other hand, are few and far between in Japan. The ovens underneath take up space that isn’t available in Japan, and there’s also less of a tradition of bread-making and other baking. In most cases a smaller microwave oven will do the trick. Gas or electric ranges are common and generally referred to as レンジ. Additionally, there is a small fish-sized drawer which noobs can use to grill eggplants and toast. The area where the oven would be is generally storage space where Japanese people keep all their cleaning supplies and 2D girlfriends.

Cool Language Thing – 並び

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ninarabi

Here’s a cool language thing I learned on TV and have heard used at work. I was watching Mecha-ike at some point and Okamura was joking about how much he wanted to be paid to do a certain job. (It may have been when he was doing the wedding MC “offer” [Sadly all the YouTube video links on that page are dead, but there is still explanation of different Mecha-ike skits, including “offers”].) He said he wanted to be paid 2並び (にならび). Fortunately for me there are tons of subtitles on Japanese TV and they displayed “￥22,222,” so I instantly knew that 2並び literally means “2 lined up.” Not lined up forever but in the basic Japanese counting unit – the ten thousand.

This works for any number: 11,111 (1並び), 22,222, 33,333 (3並び), 44,444 (4並び), 55,555 (5並び), etc all the way up to 9. Apparently we use it at work as a guarantee for narrators. Should we book a narrator for a job and then have the client cancel last minute, the narrator would still get their guarantee, which would be some number in this X並び format. Most excellent stuff.

I think the way Okamura used it is typical of the pattern – it’s a semi-arbitrary large amount of money but not always in the realm of impossibility.

Game Lingo – 発売

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hatsubai

発売 is a sneaky little compound that isn’t unique to the game industry. You see it all over the place, notably on posters for goods that aren’t being sold yet. The reason I say it’s sneaky is that pesky little 売 hanging around. Yes, 売 means “sell,” but the translation of 発売 should almost never incorporate the word “sell.” In terms of kanji categories, it falls into the V + DO category and literally means something like “start sales”; hence, the correct translation is “release” or “launch.” The most frequent usage is X月Y日発売, but you’ll run into the passive form 発売される・された quite often when translating marketing material for game companies.