Sunday, December 18, 2005

Christmas is Almost Here!

I'm heading back to the US for the holidays. Updates possible but not guaranteed.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

On the flip side...

We have kanji like this one:

[V][Ex][G][GI][S]

There is no defensible position in any realm of logic past, present, or future why one kanji needs that many meanings in English.

Couldn't they have just split it up a bit?!

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

性行動

BEHOLD THE POWER OF KANJI!

Today's word - 性行動(seikoudou) basically means "sex." But it beautifully illustrates the power of kanji.

As a beginning Japanese student, I was constantly knocking kanji. I thought it was the most trivial, ancient, worn-out, pathetic excuse for a writing system I had ever studied. One of my very good friends (who is also a professor with a specialty in Chinese poetry - i.e. "dead kanji"), used to shake his head in a sagely yet sorrowful way when I would begin in on a tirade about why kanji is a useless writing form.

I have come to my senses.

Kanji is by far the best writing system ever created - even when compared to languages that nobody knows anymore, where evidence of their existence cannot even be found. Yes, I'm stating that kanji, as a writing system, is better than languages that may not ever have existed.

Take 性行動 for example. This is not a word that Japanese people use in conversation. It may be used in University Physiology class or perhaps a Biology textbook, but this is definitely not a word you use when going on a first date.

"Yeah but what do you mean?!" - Yeah yeah I'm getting there. Chill out.

性 (sei) is the kanji for sex and gender that I talked briefly about last post. When employed at the beginning of a word, you can instantly assume the word has something to do with sexuality.

行動(koudou) means behavior.

Taken together we get: sexual behavior. Easy as right? No - it gets better.

Here's where the power of kanji comes in to play.

What if you have no idea how to read the kanji in Japanese, but you understand the individual meaning of each kanji?

As in - you understand 性 = sex, 行 = go, and 動 = move. But you don't know their 音読み (onyomi - "on" reading) or 訓読み (kunyomi - "kun" reading).

This is frequently the situation with beginning students of kanji. You have memorized a kanji along with a word in your native language, so you understand basically what it means. But you have no clue what to do when you find two or more kanji you know side-by-side(-by-side, as it were).

Well think about it - the answer is already written on this page: sex, go, move.

And the image springs to life inside your mind. Perhaps you see people, perhaps you see animals, but you are sure to conjure the image of two living things in the animal kingdom sex go moving. You can understand purely on intuition that this word very likely means copulation.

If this post struck a cord inside you, then you'll start to "see" images when people speak Japanese to you. Without kanji, no one understands anything in this language, because it's all sounds without meaning! Native Japanese speakers frequently find themselves saying "何のせい?"(nan no sei?) when they don't understand a word because two or more kanji with the reading 'sei' have sprung to mind. They will draw it out on their desk or their hand, their friend will give them a word with the kanji they mean in it, a word which can only have this specific kanji, and they will go "わー!分かった!" (wa-! wakatta!) as if some brief moment of enlightenment has settled upon an otherwise very confused mind. That last line is a personal jab at some of my students and nothing more.

Ok great - so you start to understand that kanji is a writing system not only for static objects, but dynamic objects and actions. The word "go" doesn't not mean the same thing as "going." We need two words for the static idea of "go" and the dynamic action of actually moving from place A to place B. But in kanji - at least in Chinese kanji - the idea of "going" can be expressed in picture form, alongside other kanji for place, person, and adverbs like how a person is moving.

All just in pictures we call kanji.

Now it gets even better - the Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans, and Japanese all use variations of a pictographic writing system - the Korean writing system is derived from more ancient kanji and looks very different from Chinese and Japanese BUT the best thing about kanji is that they don't need to be read to be understood.

And this is the underlying power of kanji. A Chinese or Taiwanese person can show up in Japan, speak not a word of the Japanese language, and get on very well indeed with street signs, food labels, magazines and newspapers, and menus. The kanji writing system was borrowed from the Chinese, and Japanese academics (for lack of a better term) applied their own pronunciations to each kanji, but the meaning didn't change.

Of course there are going to be exceptions. Some Cambridge dual-Chinese/Japanese scholar is going to email me saying "well, actually, no there is this case of..." and I'll have to eat my words. Who am I kidding - this blog isn't that popular.

The vast majority of kanji mean the same thing regardless of what country you find them in. That's the power of a pictographic writing system, and if the Egyptians had lasted a bit longer, we might have some very strange word-processing systems in use today.

Which brings me to leave you with The Alphabet and it's interesting evolutions. I think the original system is very kanjiesque.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

魔性の女

Today's expression is inspired by Kanye West and my love of teasing students.

魔性の女(mashou no onna) means "golddigger" in Japanese!

I usually like to write a long post explaining why a word means what it means - but I think the Japanese > English translation that I've given is pretty self-explanatory.

I will take a moment to explain the kanji though:

(ma) is the kanji we have for 悪魔 (akuma), meaning devil, and it contains the kanji for demon (鬼 oni). 悪 (aku, or warui) means "bad" and the 魔 has a "devilish" connotation when standing alone. In some research of my own, I've turned up 魔 as the expression "the devil got into X" where X is usually a person (or perhaps annoying animal), and 魔 meaning "addicted" in the sense that one has a certain obsessive-compulsive disposition towards some activity. The term audiophile might be rendered in kanji as 音楽興味魔 (although this is NOT the dictionary term for it). In my hypothetical example, 魔 gives the word the sense of "freakishness" on the part of the music fan.

性 (shou, or sei) is the kanji for sex and gender. This kanji appears in words like 性別 (seibetsu) which is the word "gender" that appears on application forms et. al. Imagine having a document with a box for male and female and you have to check one of them. Above those boxes is "gender" in English and "性別" in Japanese. I have another really fun post about a word using 性, but I'm saving it for another day.

The kana の makes the preceeding noun into a possessive form - the 's of something (Bob + の = Bob's).

After that we have the kanji for female: 女 (onna)

You might assume that 魔性の女 would therefore mean "A devilish gender of woman" or something like that - and it does kind of mean that in a way - but the way the young generation see it is something more akin to "a woman being devilish towards gender" and we assume that the gender is male, so we get a kind of female devilry towards men which comes across as "golddigger."

Now the best part of this whole blog - and this is a rather obscure place to type it out but it needs be said nonetheless - is that I can certify my translations in real time by asking no less than 100 students per day whom I teach.

I've said that I'm not a professional in the past, and I have to keep stressing the point because a person reading this blog assuming I've taken 6 years of PhD level courses in Japanese literature will be let down to learn this isn't the case, AND there is no greater authority for slang terminology than the youth of any nation who make it up. PhDs - from long experience with many - are unfortunately cut off from this target group because they spend so much time indoors reading books preparing for classes. That kind of work ethic only lends itself to pleasing other stuffy academic-types, and I vowed even with my eyes on a PhD that I would never become such a person.

My point is that my translations have a kind of intrinsic authority from the creators - the kids - while very learned (learn ED - Shakespeare pronunciation) sites like WWWJDIC can give all kinds of references to kanji stroke order and meaning and history and blah blah blah - but they can never get into the dirty terminology that hasn't been sanctified by the academic institutions who write the checks.

So don't cite these translations for a college paper - I write about language that comes out after four or five "big boy" Asahi beers on a Friday night.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Slang Expression: 寝起き(neoki)

Today's slang expression comes from my 6-month-old Japanese nephew. He didn't say it personally, but because of his frequent naps, I was fortunate enough to learn it.

I suppose I should point out that kanji makes the Japanese world go round. Some have argued that kanji should be scrapped and katakana with it - Japanese should use hiragana or the roman alphabet only. I was one such person when I was first starting out in my kanji studies. I found some friends at my international university who tended to agree with me (they were Japanese students - not language students, actual Japanese).

Years later I'm compelled to smack myself in the head for being so naive. Kanji clears up the meaning of ANY PHRASE you will ever come across in conversation. One reason this language can be simplified so easily is because of kanji. Without it - no one would understand what anyone else was saying - ever.

So today's slang expression is 寝起き(neoki). Literally it means "sleep wake" as the kanji are 寝る (neru) "to sleep" and 起きる(okiru) "to wake up." However the expression means more like "just woke up" as you would say in the morning to your parents or your roommate. If you were sleeping and the phone woke you, you would have that sluggish voice and say "I just woke up" or "I was asleep (but you woke me up you B@#So today's slang expression is 寝起き(neoki). Literally it means "sleep wake" as the kanji are 寝る (neru) "to sleep" and 起きる(okiru) "to wake up." However the expression means more like "just woke up" as you would say in the morning to your parents or your roommate. If you were sleeping and the phone woke you, you would have that sluggish voice and say "I just woke up" or "I was asleep (but you woke me up you B@#So today's slang expression is 寝起き(neoki). Literally it means "sleep wake" as the kanji are 寝る (neru) "to sleep" and 起きる(okiru) "to wake up." However the expression means more like "just woke up" as you would say in the morning to your parents or your roommate. If you were sleeping and the phone woke you, you would have that sluggish voice and say "I just woke up" or "I was asleep (but you woke me up you B@#So today's slang expression is 寝起き(neoki). Literally it means "sleep wake" as the kanji are 寝る (neru) "to sleep" and 起きる(okiru) "to wake up." However the expression means more like "just woke up" as you would say in the morning to your parents or your roommate. If you were sleeping and the phone woke you, you would have that sluggish voice and say "I just woke up" or "I was asleep (but you woke me up you B@#$&*&*&)." That's the proper use of 寝起き.

My 6-month-old nephew arrived at my house for a visit today in a very "hey what's going on?!" kinda way. He hadn't fully found his bearings after an afternoon nap. I commented that he was kind of low-tension (another frequently encountered Japanese expression I find very strange as we don't use it so much in English), and his mom said "寝起き"

So there you have it! Try to use 寝起き the next time someone barges in on an afternoon nap!

Slang Expression: 智恵遅 (chieoku)

Now today's slang expression may offend. In fact, I guarantee saying this to a Japanese person will offend them. Why would I write about something like that? Well I believe in full-disclosure. As some English-speaking people choose not to use expletives but still understand them when heard, so too, I feel, it's important to understand things you might hear in Japanese even if you would not use such words yourself.

智恵遅 (chieoku) literally means "retarded," as in someone with a mental handicap. Japanese people (young people) use this word in much the same way that American school kids use it to tease others.

You can say "智恵遅のか?" (chieoku no ka?) if you want to say "are you retarded?" in a very demeaning way. I don't recommend it - but should you find yourself around a particularly rambuncious lot of 18-year-old boys on the sports pitch, you might hear something like this. In such a case, I think it's important you understand what is being said.

A larger point comes out with this post. Japanese people are fond of using contractions. Just like English-speakers don't like to say "don't you want to" when "doncha wanna" will suffice, Japanese people don't like to say things in the "book-standard" way.

I feel this point borders on "no duh" as a little sister of mine would say.

However - let me point out that the textbook phrase here is 智恵が遅い (chie ga osoi) which literally translates as "wisdom is slow" from which we get "retarded" or the more politically correct "mentally handicapped."

So use it or don't use it as you see fit. Just another lesson you won't find in 99% of Japanese language books, classes, lessons, etc.

Monday, December 05, 2005

しんどい(shindoi)

So today in one of my classes, a student says, "先生、あなたはしんどい"

I had never heard the word before (well, ok, maybe I have but I can't recall), so I immediately looked it up in my handy electronic dictionary. I highly recommend buying your own 電子辞書 (denshi jisho).

However, the word しんどい will very likely not appear in any modern electronic dictionary.

しんどい does appear in Jim Breen's online dictionary though.

Asking a reliable Japanese source, I learned that しんどい most closely means きつい (kitsui).

Now, though the dictionary definition linked above sounds as though the adjective can be used to describe a situation, location, or perhaps a feeling, the word きつい is primarily used to mean "tiresome" or "troublesome" as in:

授業がきついだねぇ~ (jyugyou ga kitsui da ne~)
"Class is tough...*unspoken sigh*"

However, I'm told that しんどい is "おばあちゃんの言葉" (obaachan no kotoba = grandmother language i.e. "A word my grandma would use"), so be careful if you're going to use the word - make sure you use it around people who would understand it's heritage as well as appreciate it in the sense that you're making fun of the word even while using it seriously.

I suppose by comparison, you could think of しんどい as being as culturally appropriate in 2005 as "swell" would be (for those less inclined to pick up on sarcasm, I'm laying it on rather heavily at the moment).

The new word of the day then should be "しんどい." Make sure to use it in your next class or when you see a Japanese friend next. I lament I cannot provide sound bites for pronunciation purposes, but if you manage to get the exasperated sigh going, you'll nail the spirit of the word perfectly and hopefully get a laugh.

Laughter is what life is all about anyway - if you don't mind a rare philosophical plug ^_^