On the Japanese Language - Some Basics (Read 382 times)

[lazulum]

I'll try to make this one in the form of some basics of the language, although I would like to do second-person pronouns, that's not so useful for now. I hope this isn't too basic.



I'll use this as the centerpiece, because: (a) it's a surprisingly easy song to listen to, and (b) I just really quite like the singer, performance, and song haha.

I'll do the title for now:
「私の彼は左利き」

First: two vocabulary

> 彼 (kare) --> refers to a male person, think "he/him". Japanese is very contextual, however, so this can also mean "boyfriend" depending on when and how it is used. If used in the possessive (i.e., "my 彼"), it just about always refers to a boyfriend.

> 左利き (hidarikiki) --> Simply means "left-handed"
左(hidari) means "left", so knowing that helps.


私の --> pronoun + の = possessive

So you can think of it as "my..."
In this case 私の...[彼] --> "my boyfriend"

は as subject marker

Does just that, mark the subject.
So we see that は follows 「私の彼」so we know that the subject is the boyfriend. What follows in this case will be about the boyfriend. Let's see what follows...

私の彼は <-- 左利き

If we were to make this more polite, we would add 「です」--> 「私の彼は左利きです」
That is, "my boyfriend is left-handed"

Some practice

私は左利きです --> No possessive, subject is the self, "I am left-handed"

私のお母さんは左利きです --> My mother is left-handed
(okasan -> mother)

私の父は右利き --> My father is right-handed
(otousan -> father)
(右 [migi] -> right)

Let's get creative...

マリサのお父さんは人間です --> Marisa's father is a human
(人間[ningen] -> human)

コガサの傘はパプルです。--> Kogasa's umbrella is purple
(傘(kasa) -> umbrella)

レンコの鞄は重いです --> Renko's bag is heavy
(鞄[kaban] -> bag)
(重い[omoi] -> heavy)

幻想郷の里は混んでいます。
(里[sato] -> village)
(こんでいます -> crowded)

---

Maybe something a bit more authentic? Give it a try if you want and I will give some feedback.
Ask any questions you like too.

[Aeon]

僕の東方心綺楼の神子は下手です

だが、霊夢のスペルカード好き

double checking that with a translation, it seems to really not like 下手 (supposed to be へた). am i doing something weird or is machine translate just not on board with that word?

傘 (kasa) is umbrella, huh? i am now thinking



yep, she is just small umbrella. what a crazy world
also in that same example, you used パプル. my understanding was that 紫 was good for purple?

[spongelevator]

I remembered the kanji for left and right but I forgot the readings lol
also I remember seeing hand being "te" and having some uuh hold on I will copy and paste it
手
yeah that one that guy
if you put that and hand together is it just "left hand" and for "left handed" it's an entirely different one?
I am not sure how it work though I only know bits and pieces from what I read on random translation blogs from 2014 I will be able to look at grammar finally in a few days so maybe I will have easier time then
also yeah I have heard orange be orenji and purple be papuru but I've also heard that yukari is purple (yukari is called this because she is the purple) and chen is orange
does it vary based on situation I do not know

I already knew about ippon datara but man I only just realized kogasa has one red eye and the rest is blue because it's supposed to look like only one eye
small umbrella is very nice and full of surprise every day

[lazulum]

Aeon

Great job using possessive!

One tiny thing

> 「霊夢のスペルカード好き」
You'll want to use the object marker to mark the thing that you like
(there are ways to use 好き without 「が」 but that is a little advanced, maybe I can do one of these on that in the future)

霊夢のスペルカードが好き

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Yes 下手 is fine
「下手」(Down + hand) works, it just means to be bad at something.
「上手」(Up + hand) is the antonym -- to be good at something


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パープル and 紫 essentially mean the same thing, of course, there are very subtle differences however. You can use either one from my experience, and you can keep that in mind when using Japanese. But to explore the difference:




Murasaki appears, by far, most in historical Japanese (CHJ).
Purple seems to be somewhat recent in its use, I hear young people say it often but I imagine older people will understand it. In context "purple" appears to be comfortably used with low register (although can be used with です/ます). "Murasaki" likely has a perception of coming off as more refined than "purple", and more Japanese of course. There's a cultural thing of using Western words in some occasions even when there's a Japanese word, that's a topic in itself too haha.

I would be interested in investigating further nuances in the uses of each but I do not have the time to at the moment unfortunately.

[lazulum]

spongelevator

Yeah 左 + 手 ＝ left hand yeah
Left-handed is --> 左利き

利き is a word having to deal with effectiveness. It can be combined with other body parts, but I have never really seen it used beyond expressing a dominant hand. Running a search for it on corpora shows it being used very little (at least with this kanji, some words have different nuances or very different meanings if different kanji are used)-- very low frequency word (these are not so good/useful to know when starting to learn a language)


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(misremembered what you typed and typed a response to it already so I kept in hahaha)

Languages have a lot of spatial metaphors however so 下 + 手 = being bad at something
Think of how in English we will say such things as "things are looking up" or "I'm feeling down"

There are also many idiomatic expressions in every language
For 下手 there is a rare sense it can be used as a verb but only in a specific sequence (idiomatic expression)
「下手すると」which is to express the possibility of something very bad

> Example (very advanced): 「人間に感染したっていうのが一番新しいニュースで出てましたけどもこれ下手するとヨーロッパ中に広がってしまうだろうという恐れが非常にあってえー大変な」

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While purple may not be too common, オレンジ is very common in its usage from my experience. Apparently there is also 橙色 but I have never actually heard it uttered. I looked up its usage in corpora and 橙色 appears to have been in usage during the Showa era (1925-1989 [roughly]). However, it appears to have fallen out of use, 「オレンジ」 appears an order of magnitude more than 橙色 now. I would be interested in investigating why that is, but I do not have the time at present unfortunately.

The color you really have to look out for in Japanese is "green" and this is a massive topic as to why. You will hear the word for "blue" used for both. For example, the green stoplight is referred to as "blue" (青). Some other time I would be happy to type up a lot about this topic.

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Yeah Japanese names have all sorts of neat little meanings behind them (contained in the characters)
Except for Marisa, because her name is Western and the Kanji is based off of sound readings alone. So her name is something of a random sequence of words.

[spongelevator]

that kinda stuff with names having meanings I see a lot
I see a lot of wordplay or puns or whatever type stuff in japanese things that english can't do lol
I heard it creates a lot of difficulty with translations of certain works because it either has to be redone or just removed and stated literally
oh yeah I remember hearing about that whole blue and green being the same thing
ao is blue and green while midori is just green though, is that another case where certain words aren't used for some reason? is quite a strange one

[lazulum]

Oh absolutely, the Japanese language has many great puns in it. The meanings in names are wholly lost when they are translated.

There are a lot of reasons why, these involve traces of a light version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, biographical memory, and so forth. There are a lot of studies done on peoples from different speech communities where they categorize colors, categorization schemes often would not make much sense to native English speakers. The general idea is that if you do not have a word for something it is very difficult for it to be perceived.

In the case of Japan, the categorization of "ao" was historically used for what we would consider "blue" and "green"
The word "midori" even today is not used all that much. Midori has an interesting history and is seen as sort of foreign as well I think (different from Western foreignness). A good friend of mine told me about it once, my memory is quite fuzzy so don't quote me on it, but "Midori" was brought over later from China I think. In any case "ao" has been assigned to many things and these things are taught as that, and so they have come to be called that. Just one of many reasons though I am sure.

Another great example is the "red sun" which is taught, and so many grow up thinking of the sun as red, but this is done for political reasons (apparent when you look at the flag 「日の丸」)

Compare:


Midori


Ao

[Aeon]

lazulum
apologies there were like 4 posts before i got back to you

kind of weird for me to think that murasaki is being replaced in popularity by a borrowed word. i can't think of any cases like that in english, at least.
but if it's still around and has its own connotation, that seems cool. i think just having more words is better overall
is the pronunciation "yukari" ever used, or is that just ms. yakumo's personal reading?

i'd never thought about spacial metaphors in kanji like that, pretty neat. i had to use some machine translation to get your advanced example, but good to know

the kanji in japanese names seems pretty cool a lot of the time. i just kinda feel bad for the people who's names end up meaning something super plain or something they dislike. it's probably not seen as a big deal though, just something that's super obvious to me when i try to translate like
uh
i meant to include a touhou with a name that is spelled with kanji for something mundane but i can't find a single one that isn't cool so maybe i'm wrong. shoutouts to raiko and junko, which from the dictionary i'm using is something like "thunder beat" and "pure fox", which are super rad

the thing with midori and ao is interesting. i've heard of that thing where it's harder for people to categorize colours before, although i haven't looked much into it beyond seeing if there were any neat hues i've been missing out on because english was missing something for them

[lazulum]

English is a mishmash of several languages actually, it has been radically shaped and transformed many times over its history. It has words borrowed from French, German, Latin, and even the Nordic languages. If you look at the original written form of Beowulf before the Norman invasion there is scarcely a word you will recognize in fact.

Yeah another thing about verbs in Japanese is that Japanese is not a satellite-framed language like English is. That's why in English we have frequent use of verb phrases such as "go out", "go up", etc. English does have some exceptions borrowed from other languages (Latin, namely) such as "exit" or "enter" where the trajectory of action is contained in a single verb (i.e., enter = "go in"; exit = "go out")

Japanese is the opposite, this will take a little getting used to.
I will ask you these two questions to help you with the mindset.
How would you say:
1. go over the river
2. go across the river
in Japanese?

Yeah the Kanji is quite neat, students of mine have tried giving me Kanji for my name in the past as a kind gesture. There's a lot of variation but also common names. If you don't like your name it would probably be much more difficult to change in Japan than in the States I imagine, Japan uses a family registry system. The advent of an individual SS number was a very, very recent thing (last five years I think).

"Thunder Beat" is a pretty cool name haha
You could alternatively have "雷子" which would be "Thunder Child", which a number of Japanese names are actually like. 雪子 for example is a real name and means "Snow Child". A lot of fun to be had moving kanijs around with names haha

Yeah it is quite interesting, goes beyond colors too. Autobiographical Memory is a fascinating theory that suggests our memories only begin once we have language, and memory is dictated by language. This is connected to the idea that all language is based in visuo-spatial experiences and so everyone's understanding of each word is subject to slight to major variation-- think of cat for example, that can contain additional meanings of something good or bad depending on who you ask.

[Aeon]

alright its been like five days i'm very sorry and massive snoozer, had some funky things going on and wasn't in the best place to use the forums much. just getting back to this thread now, will respond to others soonish

i'll try my best to answer the questions but i might have to use a dictionary a bit, my vocabulary is still lacking much

1.川を上る
2.川を横切る

pretty sure i messed up at least the first one of those, but i kinda get what you're talking about. in english "over" and "across" are just appends to the verb "go", while in japanese each of those have entirely different verbs.

ah, that's unfortunate. i think the option to change names and kind of just throw them in wherever is nice. i've met couple people with four names, and one with five. things like wanted to change their first name but keep the old one around, wanting to keep their maiden name, etc.

oh yeah, i've heard that japanese names use 子 a lot. specifially girls' names, right? even though "child" is a gender-neutral word, i guess it's associated with that. kind of like the use of 私 from before, i suppose

that's a pretty interesting theory. hard to find evidence for or against because of the malleability of memory though, i imagine. for me cat is "little fellow that is usually around" but for a lot of people it's probably "tiny and erratic problem-maker"

[lazulum]

Aeon
No worries, I figured you were busy
I know the feeling, can't respond to too much at the moment, just hosted a club meeting and now have to attend something else soon

That's the English mindset imposed onto Japanese, I still do it from time to time when I think consciously about my language use and try to just translate English in my head.
The answer to both questions is simply:
「川を渡る」
You can be more specific, but naturalistic Japanese would only use that phrase. Trajectory of the action is contained in 「渡る」. In English we would say "go + over" (over = trajectory), or "go through" (through = trajectory)
A lot of Japanese is contextual, so depending on preceding or following information the listener can determine how the river was crossed.

Yeah that's true, there's a cultural reason for that naming convention.
Male names also have far more hard consonants (there are exceptions, of course) than female names, female names are notably softer and really don't use much consonants beyond some with "k".
For example, some female names:
Shiori
Ayane
Ayako
Aoi
Akiko
Sugiyama
Yukiko
Reiko

I'll get back to you on more later.
Have to get back to a friend about something now