Japanese Kanji dictionaries are very heavy and baggage allowances are strict.

So, do I:

1) Take pants and be illiterate.

or

2) Go commando and be able to read things.

What a conundrum.

すごいだね！ Sugoi da ne!

Warning! No flipping the bird while riding a bear and carrying an axe in a leotard.

Beware of disturbing symbolism…

Beware of high voltage flying mushrooms…

While learning my Japanese, I’m putting all the sentences from my course book into Mnemosyne and learning the meanings as I go along. Looking up is required, because the book is a native Japanese one, so has no English translations, so I use a combination of my Kanji dictionaries, google translate, and if something looks like a simple noun, I use google image search (there is danger involved there, as an Iranian colleague found out when he image-searched to find out what a ‘twat’ was and why he was being called one).

Anyway… I searched for akachan (or 赤ちゃん for those with Japanese characters turned on), and found…

A BABY IN A BUCKET! (or is it a tub?)

So that’s CLEARLY what akachan means. That should only require a small amount of work to get to yagino akachan meaning baby goat in a bucket.

Ever wondered why there are two names for Japanese ritual suicide? I hadn’t until I happened to be browsing the Kanji dictionary at the weekend. The two names are seppuku and harakiri (often anglicised as harry carry).

Well, here’s the explanation…

You may or may not be aware that Japanese characters have many ‘readings’. Depending on their context, the pronunciation of a character can change completely. For example:

今日は - kon nichi wa - means ‘hello’, or literally (perfectly demonstrating the Japanese roundabout way of speaking)… “as far as today is concerned…”

However, if you take off the は in order to end up with a simple ‘today’, you end up with:

今日 - kyō

This stuff is going on all the time, and is one of the reasons I think reading Japanese aloud is significatly harder than Chinese. The latter may have tones to contend with, but at least it’s generally one character to one sound.

The different readings in Japanese are called ‘on’ and ‘kun’ readings. “On” readings are those used in words derived from Chinese, “Kun” readings are used in native Japanese words.

Anyway… back to our suicide. This is based on two characters:

腹 - ‘Belly’. This has an ‘on’ reading of fuku and a ‘kun’ reading of hara.

切 - ‘Cut’. This has ‘on’ readings of setsu and sai. It also has ‘kun’ readings of ki and kiri.

Are you ahead of me yet?

We can clearly see that 腹 hara + 切 kiri gives us 腹切 - harakiri.

What is not quite so obvious is that 切 setsu + 腹 fuku gives setsufuku which is horribly clumsy to pronounce, and is therefore contracted to seppuku. (If you’re a Japanese scholar, it’s no great leap of faith to convert from tsu to a double letter, and from fu to pu - but that’s beyond the scope of this blog).

So there you go. Same characters, one way round it’s:

切腹 - cut belly - Chinese ‘on’ readings - seppuku

and the other way round:

腹切 - belly cut - Japanese ‘kun’ readings - harakiri

Isn’t that fun?

I think it’s possible to be too hard on oneself. I’ve been having major trouble progressing my Japanese and wrote a blog entry bemoaning the fact…

日本語のべんきょうはとてもむずかしいですよ。日本人に話すはしたいです。日本語でもっと書きたいですけど何と書きますか？

少し漢字がわかりますから新聞を読みません。

日本語のラジオをもっと聞くと思います。

This translates to something like:

Studying Japanese is really difficult. I want to have more conversations with Japanese people. I want to write more Japanese, but what do I write about?

I understand few Kanji, so I don’t read newspapers.

I think I will listen to Japanese radio more.

Then it dawned on me… I’m not really doing too bad if I can express all of that in Japanese.

I guess I feel frustration because there are a whole slew of subjects I just don’t have the vocabulary for - but it’ll come. A bit of patience and a bit of graft. It’ll come.

My Japanese Blog has received it’s first hit today from Google. Someone searching for “ユーロヴィジョン” which, as you all know is “yūrovijon” or “Eurovision” (though I, along with many others spelt it in the more traditional form: ユーロビジョン yūrobijon).

How pleased am I with that? Very pleased. That’s how pleased.

Now I just have to keep it up, unlike the Finnish one which fell by the wayside. However, I do know Japanese that much better, so hopefully I won’t be held back too much by my grammar and vocab which is what led me to ditch the Finnish one.

As we all know, the Snowdon climbing - while good in itself - is part of a bigger thing; the plan to climb Mt. Fuji (a little rant related to that coming up at the end). Tonight I made a comparison between Fuji and Snowdon. Now I have experience of a real mountain, it makes more sense to work in relative terms just as I compared Snowdon to the Cat+Fiddle walk.

Here it is:

click for readable version

You’ll notice the red line is where altitude sickness can kick in. That’s quite near the start of the trail. I think a little more practice will be required before the trip.

And on to the rant… do you know how many times, I’ve seen the phrase “affectionately called ‘Fuji-san’” during my research? Many times. That’s how many. And do you know why this is a rant? It’s because there’s nothing affectionate about the name ‘Fuji-san’. The characters making its name are 富士山 - that’s 富士 ‘fuji’ and 山 ’san’. You see ’san’? That’s the character for ‘mountain’. It’s a picture of a mountain. Look… 山. A mountain.

I think it’s all those people who watched the Karate Kid who noted that Mr. Miyagi calls Daniel ‘Daniel-san’. In that case, yes, it’s moderately affectionate (but mostly just polite). And the characters for ’san’ in this case are さん.

It’s like saying Durham is so called because of the stupid pigs there.

San 山. It’s the word for mountain.

And while we’re on the subject… yes ‘yama’ is also a word for a mountain. And the character is also 山. However, Fujiyama is all wrong. So don’t do it, ok? It’s complicated.

日本人と日本語を勉強する人…私の新しい日本語のブログはここ「jpblog.pygmygoat.net」にあります。ようこそ！

ここに一日本語のポーストができます。

Don’t worry folks… this is the only 100% Japanese* blog that will appear here! (*except for this bit which makes it no longer 100%)