Hungry For Words

Kaizen, or ooh, those inscrutable Japanese

There was an article in the New York Times the other day about improving yourself. I'm always looking to improve myself so I read it. Hmm, hmm, hmm, ok not bad. Then I hit upon this part:

She recommends practicing a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements. “Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

Ooh, yet another magical Japanese philosophy for a higher form of Being. Right.

Oyakoukou: Making your parents happy

(photo by imhotep123)

I was  talking to my mother on the phone the other day. At one point she said to me jokingly:

たまには親孝行してちょうだい。

The rough translation of this is "Do something to make me happy sometimes", but the key phrase here is 親孝行, pronounced oya ko-ko-. Oya means 'parent' - that's simple enough. The kou-kou part is the difficult one to translate, a word that doesn't exist in English. In dictionaries it's most often defined as "filial piety". It means to respect, to obey, to serve, and to make happy. It's never (or very rarely) used in any other context other than when referring to parents.

Revenge and Ribenji

All languages borrow words from other languages, but the Japanese may arguably do that more than anyone else. Many words are adopted from English; these words are called wasei eigo (和製英語). Often these words change meaning from the original in a way that makes them hard to understand for a native English speaker.

One such word is Revenge, or as it's spelled phonetically in Japan, ribenji.
In English of course it means to retribution, payback - to get vengeance from another party. The word has entered Japan fairly recently it seems, but it's used in a totally different way. Oddly, the revenge seems primarily directed to onesself, to objects, or mere actions, not one's arch enemy.

Heidi, Heidi in Japanese and German

Heidi is a children's novel written by Johanna Spyri, a 19th century Swiss author who lived most of her life in Zürich. Heidi became tremendously popular outside of -ple amongst others, and there is a recent Heidi musical that was popular last summer in Switzerland. But in the non-English speaking world, Heidi is probably best known via the anime series produced in Japan in the 1970s called Arupusu no sho-jo Haiji (アルプスの少女ハイジ). (Wikipedia English entry)

It's a bit ironic in a way that a Japanese anime has helped to make a Swiss classic (written in German) so popular. But the series really was of top quality, and it's no wonder that it is still shown on TV all over the world. (Except for the English speaking parts of course. Crap like Pikachuu and Yuugi-Oh can make it on the Toon channels but an old anime of a classic children's story...no no no.)

Since I'm a Japanese person currently living in Switzerland. Heidi is never that out of mind. Because whenever I talk to a new Japanese acquaintance, I can guarantee that Heidi will come up in the conversation. Heidiland, the area around Maienfeld in the Grisons (Graubünden), is a major draw for Japanese tourists. (Don't let that deter you from visiting the area though - it really is beautiful around there.)

Painless as possible Japanese (CJK) input on a mostly non-Japanese Mac

I have been a Mac user since the  late '80s. From the start, Mac OSs  have been very 2-byte character language friendly, unlike Windows. This is one of the reasons that I switched to Macs after formerly being an 'IBM-compatible-PC' user. This 2-byte character friendliness has not changed one bit in OS X of course. However, individual applications handle the issue a bit differently.

I write in Latin characters (English and so on) most of the time, but when I write in Japanese I want to not have to go through extra hoops. I want to concentrate on writing. Here are how some notes on how various text editors handle this issue. My app of choice is at the very end!

One must-have for me for Japanese input is that it has to be inline, within the document. I hate it when the Japanese input pops up in a separate window or popup thingie because it distracts me from my writing. It is inevitable for the conversion (henkan,  変換) popup to appear, but the actual input is another question.

iKnow! - a slick browser based language learning app

The other day, I ran across an outstanding online language learning app/website. I hesitated to mention it here, since at the moment it's only for Japanese speakers who want to learn English. Still, you may know someone who is in that position, so here it is. It's called iKnow!.

Yoroshiku and Osewa ni narimasu, and the Japanese culture of interreliance

Happy New Year! I'm sort of worried about the fact that already like 125 + people have subscribed to the RSS feed for this blog. I suspect a lot of those peeps are leftover subbers from when this was the Just Hungry food blog, who never bothered to check, or something (IT"S MOVED OVER THERE LIKE AGES AGO) but nevertheless. If you were drawn to the boobies, I won't always be talking about titillating (snort, snort) body parts, you know.

In any case, let's get back to the topic of language.

Yesterday, I made my round of phone calls to Japan to say Happy New Year and all. This is the standard way of saying Happy New Year to Japanese people.

Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu. (alternate: Shinnen akemashite omedetou gozaimasu)
Kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegaishimasu.

Why Japanese people pronounce the R and L sounds funny

Japanese people have a lot of difficulty differentiating the R and L sounds, especially in English. This is why  funnily translated English that one sees in Japan is commonly called Engrish. (Recently people are calling funny English in China Chinglish.)

There's a simple reason why Japanese people can't pronounce R and L correctly. They don't exist in Japanese. It is not, as was asked of me once, a genetic defect. Japanese people who spent their childhood years in an English speaking country can pronounce both sounds fine.

The Japanese version of the 'rrr' type of sound, the ra ri ru re ro (ら　り　る　れ　ろ) row in the phonetic hiragana alphabet, is somewhere between R and L.

So, 'rice' gets pronounced 'lice', 'balloon' as 'baroon', etc.

People who make fun of this fact are ignorant, racist, mouth-breathing fuckers, most of whom barely speak one language properly, and who deserve to be choked with a big wad of mochi.

Thank you.

Words of the year 2007: fake, w00t, and death tourism

It's that time of the year when various organizations around the world drum up a bit of PR for themselves by selecting a Word Of The Year, which is then picked up by news outlets looking for filler.

Let's do a short hop around the world. This year's kanji character of the year in Japan, as selected by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation in Kyoto, is the one pictured here. Read as Gi or (with an additional hiragana character appended) Itswari, it means "fake" or "lie". It was a year of fakery and lying in Japan, lead by several incidents of food companies using out-of-date ingredients and faking labels, embezzlement scandals, faked up reports on TV, and the like. Not a very positive kind of word to be the One for the year. Last year's word was Life, and 2005's was Love, so I guess you can mark Japan as Mood: Down in 2007. (Japanese news link)

Breasts 'n nipples, part 2: Japanese

This is a picture of the popular mythical boy hero Kintarō, aka Golden Boy, with the mountain ogress who brought him up. Kintarō is the ultimate strong little boy that every Japanese mother wants her son to be like. On Children's Day, the 5th of May (which is basically a day just for boys - girls have their own day which is on the 3rd of March) families with sons put up Kintarō dolls in their alcoves.

(Incidentally, I found this painting on an educational site with various works of art intended to show to  kids during class. Japanese people are generally rather nonchalant about nudity between adults and kids. They don't get all het up about it like they do in the States. Imagine the shock-horror that would ensue if a teacher in the USA showed little kids a picture of an adult woman with bare breasts bending down over a little boy with a bare bottom. But I digress again.)

The word for breast in Japanese is chibusa (乳房). If you analyze each kanji character, the first one is chichi (乳), mammary, and the second is fusa (房), which is a word used for a fruit that grows, hanging, in bunches. Grapes and grapefrufruit are both counted by fusa. So...put them together and you have, sort of, a mammary fruit? A bunch of hanging breast? Well anywho.

The word for nipple is (乳首). The first kanji is the same as for the whole breast, but the second character literally means neck. So...a nipple is the neck of a breast or mammary. Odd eh.