Thursday, February 10, 2011

No wonder they read English so well

Who in the world uses "municipal" and how in the heck did that word make the final cut for a bus stop advertisement? I can think of at least five better words for the TOEIC to test on: hood, city, local, district, and latte.

Ok so not all of them work well in this context, but any of them would be used more frequently than municipal.

The tragedy here is that the kanji pictured just means "city" or "town" to us.

900円 for an app that isn't going to help you communicate more natively!

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Wow they just keep coming

I think the translation on this one is a bit on the weak side personally:

買い物の割に遅かったな。どこぞでよろしくやっていたのか?

kaimono no wari ni osoka ttana. dokozodeyoroshiku yatte itanoka?

You're pretty late to have just gone shopping. Have you been making out someplace?

In the context that I'm used to hearing it, やる always takes on a more intense sexual connotation. I would probably translate the above something like "have you been screwing around?" because that feels far closer to the intention of the sentence rather than being simply a literal translation of the Japanese.

Probably best not to use やる when you're talking to a girl for the first time.

Unless you think she's down.

Sent from my iPhone 4

Another classic from the dictionary.

This one is for my friend wireball

私はエイリアンに誘拐されていた。

Watashi wa EIRIAN ni yuukai sareteita.

I was abducted by aliens.

Coincidentally I like the power of the kanji multiplier.

While 誘拐 is abduction, 幼児誘拐 yields kidnapping. Not that kidnapping is a serious issue here in Japan, but there may come a time where you see something on the news about a child having been kidnapped, and it would be good to recognize the kanji in that event such that you can keep an eye out.

If you do happen to see the child on the street with their kidnapper - do what I would do: run that bastard down and crack their skull (not the kid).

Kidnapping is bullshit.

Sent from my iPhone 4

This is hilarious

So my favorite iPhone dictionary is Kotoba! (get it on the app store) and the examples included come from the tatoeba project which is an open collection of examples sentences that have been crowd-sourced.

Sometimes you come across gems like this:

ちなみにここ一週間は、例えばフラグが立っていようとも、Hシーンが無い事は確定事項だからな。暫くの間、辛抱な!

chinamini koko isshuukan wa, tatoeba FURAGU ga tatte iyoutomo,H SHI-N ga nai koto wa kakutei jikou dakarana. shibaraku no kan, shinbou na!

By the way, this week - no matter what flags are set - it's a certainty that there will be no ecchi scenes. You'll just have to bear with it a while.

The Japanese in this post that I was focused on is 因みに (ちなみに) and it appears that someone in the community uses this expression to lament about the lack of sex scenes in movies...

Well who can blame them right?

Sent from my iPhone 4

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Lockers

Touch screen lockers in machida station - nice!

And you can pay with your Suica card, •Ö—˜‚ȁ` (‚ׂñ‚è)

Sunday, February 06, 2011

True Wagyu (和牛)

A friend of mine treated me to a real feast. A friend of his from Kobe runs a wagyu teppanyaki restaurant in Ginza. He had been telling me for years that he would take me there on one of my trips to Japan, and finally our schedules aligned properly such that we could make the trip.

This restaurant serves only the highest Kobe beef. It goes without saying that the meat comes from Kobe, with a pre-meal history of Kobe beef and Tajima beef written in English and Japanese (I got the English version - regardless how well you read or speak a language, it is nice sometimes to read something in your native tongue).

I'm not sure how the blog formats the images, so I'll just write everything here and ask that you refer to the images wherever they end up on the page.

My lesson on this trip was オウギュウ. I had no idea what he was saying. Big beef? King beef? Middle cut of beef? There are various kanji that have the reading "おう" but none of it made sense.

Turns out he was being a cheeky tart. It was おう for オウジ or "Aussie beef". After we ate he said "it was really Aussie beef." and watched my eyes grow wide. Then he said "ウソウソ" for "just kidding".

But was he really joking or not? I wonder...

Anyway - it was delicious!

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Things you don't see everyday in japan

For some reason it took me this long to realize that I could update my blog from my iPhone and attach pictures. I'm not great in the common sense (常識 じょうしき) department, but I'm good with book stuff so I give myself a pass.

Here is a beautifully done wall on the outside of a bicycle shop in Machida (町田). Now that I realized the easy way to update my blog, maybe I'll actually do it more often.

Monday, November 08, 2010

I'm pretty sure I called it

With evidence mounting that SSDs are going to cream HDDs in the near future - I think it's safe to say that Apple did indeed ring the death knell first. Yes there were other manufacturers using SSD technology, but clearly it's not just making use of a technology that shifts the way people think, it's implementing that technology in a way that no one else did for a product that no one else could come close to producing.

Hats off Mr. Jobs.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

A divergence from Japanese to my other passion : Apple

Steve Jobs finally did it. He raised the ax over the heads of the HDD industry signalling for death to yet another technology.

I'm so excited that the new MacBook Air only has flash memory for storage. Apple is going to sell millions of them, and other manufacturers will kick into copy-cat mode. Demand will go up further, faster; supply will ramp up to meet demand. Prices will fall, HDDs will eventually die.

The first shot has been fired. It's only a matter of time. At no other point before now has there been the momentum to carry this transition through. Now we have it.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Yeah... Feb 09 until now...

I've been a little busy - I hate to admit it, but the blog took a major back seat.

I've been to Japan three times already this year on business, trying to get a contract in place for my company's software. Coming really close, but failing to seal the deal for one reason or another (note: I'm not solely in charge of sealing the deal).

I'll give a little bit of Hakata-ben in this post (as I'm hearing it all the time at home),

〜しようったたい

This is basically the same as saying:

〜していました。

In Hakata, we like our たい good and sprinkled all over the place, so my wife will be on video chat with her parents saying something like:

買い物しようったたい、な〜にも無かったね。。。

I went shopping, but there wasn't aaaaaaaaaaaaanything to buy.

The amount of 'a's in the word is roughly equivalent to the duration of time she holds the sound.

One of these days I'm getting a stop watch to clock her.