Reading Japanese T-Shirts - Part III
Wednesday 15th November
First off… can I ask if anyone is finding this interesting/useful? Or are you all ignoring it? I get the hint that some are following what’s here, but if no-one’s interested, it’s not worth my time… leave a note in the comments!
Time for some more…
Are you ready for a few more characters? Well, whether you’re ready or not, here they come…
Today, I’ll teach you at least two cities, and you’ll only need three characters. The characters you’ll need today are:
ロ - ro
ト - to
ン - n
The ‘n’ character is the only time in Japanese that a syllable doesn’t end in a vowel.
The cities which we can now write are:
トロント - toronto
and, if you remember last time, we changed テ ‘te’ into デ ‘de’ using the ‘dakuten’ marks. We’ll do the same here with ト ‘to’, giving:
ロンドン - rondon (London)
Time for magic pencil (without the pencil)…
ロ - ro
Start on the top-left corner and draw down the vertical first. Next start in the same place again and draw the top and right sides in a single stroke. Then draw the bottom line from left-to-right.
It’s important to consider the top and right lines as a single stroke because when you start looking things up in dictionaries, the ’stroke count’ is very useful. This is a three-stroke character.
(For the same reason, the character for sun 日 is a four-stroke character. The centre line is stroke three, the bottom is stroke four.)
ト - to (ド - do)
Vertical line first, then the diagonal from top-left to bottom right.
This character, like ヒ and テ can be modified with dakuten, becoming ド - ‘do’.
Note that ‘to’ is pronounced not like ‘two’, but like ‘top’, and ‘do’ like ‘dog’.
ン - n
Note that with this character not only the order but the direction of the strokes are very important. Without going into full details, I’ll just point out now that ン and ソ are distinct characters, the difference being the direction of the pen/brush when drawing the long curved stroke.
So… with that in mind, draw the short stroke first (top to bottom), then - and I think I’ve probably stressed how important this is - start at the bottom left, and draw the curved stroke upwards and to the right.
出来ました！ - Dekimashita! - We’ve done it!
So… you now have an arsenal of 7 characters (10 including dakuten modifications) to work with.
オ - o
テ - te (デ - de)
ト - to (ド - do)
ヒ - hi (ビ - bi)
レ - re
ロ - ro
ン - n
Next time, I’ll give you a chart to draw out which you can fill in with characters as you learn them. Things will be clearer if we group the characters in certain ways.
Free words…
So… at this stage, you should be able to tell me what the following are:
ロドデンドロン is a type of plant - answer
レント is a musical - answer,
ロビン is a super-hero’s sidekick - answer
And finally, you should be able to use the first three Japanese characters to tell me what this thing is for…
…and what the pictured shop sells apart from audio equipment…
If you got those right, then I hope you’re feeling very clever. Those are real signs from Japan in Japanese which you have succesfully read!
–
Update
I nearly forgot… you also now know how to spell トトロ - ‘totoro’, the friendly monster from ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ as you can see on the left-most writing:
I’m trying to follow it, but to be honest, a lot of it is going over my head. Once we get past Indo-European languages I find it very difficult to keep a track of all of the changes mentally, and very quickly lose pace.
It is interesting, though if you hadn’t blogged it, I probably wouldn’t have searched it out for lunchtime reading material.
Kouros
15 Nov 06 at 1:51 pm
P.S. I *think* I know the answer to the picture, but don’t want to post it in case 1. I’m wrong, or 2. I’m right and give the answer away to someone else.
Kouros
15 Nov 06 at 1:54 pm
The piccie looks like some high tech toilet. But the answer I get has more to do with horses….?
and I can’t think of the musical.
ned
15 Nov 06 at 2:04 pm
Yes, Ned. Horses it is.
I’ve added another picture, too.
stu
15 Nov 06 at 2:07 pm
To be honest, I don’t have a natural ability with languages so it’s all going completely over my head!
Aoj
15 Nov 06 at 2:33 pm
I can’t see the japanese, just ?s so it’s all greek to me, so to speak!
miss_sixty
15 Nov 06 at 2:51 pm
I’m finding it interesting, but I don’t have my Japanese t-shirt on me (I’m dying to know what it means) - maybe you could translate when I get a pic?
MarcB
15 Nov 06 at 3:04 pm
I can give it a go. If it’s in the chinese characters (like this: 置換注意) it may take a little while depending on the complexity. If it’s in these characters, it should be a doddle - in fact, we could use it as a case study.
stu
15 Nov 06 at 3:08 pm
I can’t see the Japanese characters either, but it’s still interesting in a strange geeky kind of way
Gottle
15 Nov 06 at 3:18 pm
I’m loving it, and am seriously considering learning Japanese just for fun. But maybe not. Anyway, vair interesting noodles.
Carol
15 Nov 06 at 3:56 pm
Carry on!
Lordhutton
15 Nov 06 at 4:15 pm
It’s truly a comedy language, Carol… it can be great fun learning. The early stages are very rewarding, too. It gets tough as you get into depth.
stu
15 Nov 06 at 4:20 pm
I’m enjoying the lessons too!
Rich
15 Nov 06 at 5:07 pm
I can’t download the Japanese font here at work, but enjoy reading the remarks and looking at the pics!
jane
15 Nov 06 at 5:53 pm
Yay! I got ‘em! I enjoyed that!
Please sir, can I have some more?
Omally
15 Nov 06 at 7:33 pm
I always enjoy remarks about Japanese, which help to revive the little knowledge of the language I once had - although as I don’t see anything written in Japanese fonts (as opposed to actual pictures like “tonarino Totoro”) I have to work out what you are talking about from what you say about the character/word in question! But it is hard to think of any comment to make on them, unless I could find another example and then I couldn’t write it anyway owing to lack of font! I know I should be able to download East Asian fonts but this requires loading the Windows XP/Word CD-ROM and I can’t find mine (I did have one, honest!).
qaminante
15 Nov 06 at 9:53 pm
I’m trying to follow it… but its hard…
Mr Hedgehog
16 Nov 06 at 8:55 am
it would be better with english support, thanks..
sprachcaffe brighton
1 Sep 08 at 10:14 pm