Category: Japanese (日本語)

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig

By Simon

Oban / An t-Òban
A sunny morning in Oban / Madainn ghrianach anns an Oban

The trip from Oban to Skye went smoothly, and I bumped into a couple on the bus who I met at SMO last year. There were several other SMO-bound people on the bus, but I didn’t know them at the time. We arrived safely at Broadford on Sunday afternoon, and got a lift to the college from there. Along the way, there was sunshine, lots of rain and some high winds, and the views from the bus were beautiful.

Tyndrum / Taigh an Droma
Changing buses in Tyndrum / Ag atharrachadh bhusaichean ann an Taigh an Droma

So far, the Gaelic song course has been a lot of fun. There are eleven of us in the class from Scotland, England, Ireland, Switzerland and Germany. Some are here for the first time, others have been here before. Most speak at least some Gaelic, and there’s one native speaker. For me, it’s my 10th time here doing Gaelic song courses, and the 7th course I’ve done with Christine Primrose – the other song courses were with Joy Dunlop, Margaret Stewart and Mary Ann Kennedy.

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
Àrainn Chaluim Chille – the newer part of the college / Am pàirt as ùire den cholaiste

We learnt five songs on Monday, eleven yesterday, and another four today. Some of them I already know, or have at least heard before, which makes it easier to pick them up. Others are a bit more challenging with lots of verses, and complex melodies that change with every verse to fit to the words. Everything is taught by ear, and Christine likes to tell stories about the songs, the people who wrote them, and how life was at the time they were written. A lot of the songs are relatively old – from the 17th or 18th centuries, and have been passed on orally since then.

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
Àrainn Ostaig – the older part of the college / am pàirt as sine den cholaiste

On Monday night there was a pub quiz, which was good fun. The team I was in didn’t win, but we were only one point behind the winning team.

The people who study here and work here come from many different places and speak a variety of languages. I try to speak as much Scottish Gaelic as I can while I’m here – that’s one of the reasons why I come here – and I’ve also had conversations in French, Irish and Mandarin Chinese, and spoken odd bits of Welsh, German, Portuguese, Japanese, and even a bit of English.

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
The views from here are quite nice / Tha na seallaidhean às an seo gu math snog

Last night there was a concert featuring Eilidh Shaw and Ross Martin, a husband and wife duo – he plays the guitar, and she sings and plays the fiddle. They write interesting songs and lively tunes in a traditional Scottish style and sounded great. It was also a nice way to celebrate my birthday.

We have a bit of time off today, and there’s a music session in the bar tonight. I was planning to go for a walk, but it’s raining quite a lot, so I’m spending my free afternoon relaxing in my room, learning a bit more Gaelic, writing nonsense like this, and reading.

Giving Up

By Simon

I have some news – I’ve had enough of learning languages and am giving up, throwing in the towel, putting the fiddle in the roof, throwing a spoon, and throwing the axe in the lake.

Giving up

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I like speaking other languages, at least sometimes, but the process of learning them can be a bit tedious. I already speak some languages reasonably well and don’t currently need to learn any more, so maybe my time would be better spent doing other things.

My other main passion is music – I like to sing, to play instruments, and to write songs and tunes. I’ll be spending more time doing this, and will maybe even focus on one instrument, at least for a while, and learn to play it better.

The question is, which instrument? I have a house full of them, including a piano, harps, guitars, ukuleles, recorders, whistles, ocarinas, harmonicas, melodicas, a mandolin, a bodhrán and a cavaquinho.

The instrument I play most often at the moment is the mandolin, so maybe I should focus on that.

If you’ve noticed the date, you may realise that this post is in fact an April Fool. I’m not giving up on learning languages, and actually do enjoy the process, most of the time, and while I do want to improve my mandolin playing, I also want to improve my playing of other instruments.

Incidentally, let’s look at some ways to say that you’re giving up.

In English you might say you quit, you’re calling it a day, you’re calling it quits you’re throwing in the towel or the sponge or the cards, or you’re throwing up your hands.

Equivalent phrases in other languages include:

  • hodit flintu do žita = to throw a flint into the rye (Czech)
  • jeter le manche après la cognée = to throw the handle after the axe (French)
  • leggja árar í bát = to put oars in a boat (Icelandic)
  • do hata a chaitheamh leis = to throw your hat in (Irish)
  • gettare le armi = to throw away your weapons (Italian)
  • 匙を投げる (saji o nageru) = to throw a spoon (Japanese)
  • подня́ть бе́лый флаг (podnjat’ belyj flag) = to raise the white flag (Russian)
  • leig an saoghal leis an t-sruth = to let the world flow (Scottish Gaelic)
  • baciti pušku u šaš = to throw a gun into the sedge (Serbian)
  • kasta yxan i sjön = to throw the axe into the lake (Swedish)
  • rhoi’r ffidl yn y to = to put the fiddle in the roof (Welsh)

More details of these phrases can be found on Wiktionary.

Do you have any others?

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Interlinguistic Conflicts

By Simon

Is it a good idea to study two or more closely related languages at the same time?

dominance

Perhaps. If you can devote more or less the same time to each one, and are able to keep them separate in your head, then there are certainly advantages to doing so. However, if you spend more time with one of them, it might interfere with the other(s), and they could end up fighting for dominance.

Many years ago, I started learning Irish and Scottish Gaelic. At first, I listened to songs in them which I tried to sing, even though I didn’t understand most of the words. Later, I started studying the languages, on my own at first, then I took some classes.

From 2005 to 2019, I spent a week or two every summer studying, speaking and singing in Irish in Donegal in the northwest of Ireland. I’ve also taken part in short courses in Scottish Gaelic songs at a college on the Isle of Skye in Scotland quite a few times between 2008 and 2022.

Until recently, I felt more fluent and confident in Irish, and it was my default Gaelic language. When I spoke Scottish Gaelic, I tended to fill in any gaps in my vocabulary and knowledge with Irish, which often works, as the two languages are closely related.

Over the past year though, I’ve been learning more Scottish Gaelic, and now feel a lot more confident with it. When I started brushing up my Irish this month, I realised that Scottish Gaelic is now the dominant form of Gaelic in my head, and Irish feels like a slightly deviant relative.

This happens with my other languages as well. Especially with closely related languages like German and Dutch (Dutch is currently winning), Swedish and Danish (Swedish is dominating at the moment), and French and Spanish (they’re fairly evenly balanced, although I feel more confident with French).

I studied (Mandarin) Chinese and Japanese at university, and became fluent in Chinese during the 5+ years I spent studying and working in Taiwan. However, I only spent one semester studying Japanese in Japan, and didn’t become as fluent in Japanese.

When I tried to read Japanese texts, I could recognise many of the kanji (Chinese characters) and knew what they meant and how to pronounce them in Mandarin, but not necessarily in Japanese. Recently I’ve been learning more Japanese and am getting better at reading it and speaking it. When I see kanji know, the Japanese pronunciation often comes first rather than the Mandarin pronunciation. I haven’t forgotten my Mandarin, but it is not as dominant as it was.

Are there interlinguistic conflicts in your head?

Roses (薔薇)

By Simon

The Japanese word 薔薇 (bara) means rose. If you asked random Japanese people to write these kanji (characters), many would struggle. However, they would be able to read them.

Rose, バラ,

The word for rose is normally written with katakana – バラ, and the kanji version 薔薇 is not in everyday use, so it’s not surprising if people cannot write it. These kanji can also be pronounced shōbi or sōbi.

薔 (mizutade) on its own means Persicaria hydropiper, water pepper or marshpepper knotweed (see below). It is also known as 柳蓼 (yanagitade) in Japan, and can be used as an ingredient in various dishes such as sashimi, tempura, sushi and wasabi.

2012.08.22_17.29.38_IMG_9439

薇 (zenmai) means Osmunda japonica, a.k.a. Japanese/Asian royal fern (see below). Parts of the plant are used as a vegetable in parts of China and Japan.

Osmunda japonica

Other words that Japanese people might struggle to write in kanji include 忍者 (ninja), 肘 (hiji = elbow), 挨拶 (aisatsu = greeting), 帽子 (bōshi = hat) 餅 (mochi = sticky rice cake), as you can see in this video:

This phenomena is common among Japanese (and Chinese) speakers who use computers, phones and other devices to type and input text rather than writing it by hand. You could call it character amnesia or kanji amnesia, or perhaps 漢字忘失 (kanji bōshitsu = “forgeting kanji”) in Japanese. I just made this up. Is there an official/standard term for it?

This doesn’t happen in languages with alphabetic or syllabic writing systems. Even if you do most of your writing on computers and other electronic gizmos, and your handwriting is poor, you don’t forget how to write any of the letters. You might forget or not know how to spell particular words, especially in languages like English with inconsistent and eccentic spelling systems, but you can at least have a go, and spell check and auto correct help.

People in Japan are apparently starting to realise that it is more important to be able to recognize kanji rather than learning to write them all by hand, at least according to this article on Tofugu. More kanji have been added to the everyday use list as they are easy to input on phones and other devices, even if they are hard to write by hand.

Perhaps the ability to write kanji by hand will become something that only calligraphers and other specialists do, while other people just input them on electronic gadgets.

When I was learning Chinese and Japanese, in the pre-interweb / smartphone age, I spent a lot of time writing the characters by hand, and found this helped me to remember them. I still write them down sometimes and enjoy doing so, but I mostly write them on my phone or computer, often using voice input.

By the way, here’s a rose-related song by Deai, a Russo-Japanese duo, called 百万本のバラ / Миллион алых роз (Million Scarlet Roses):

Rumbling Carts

By Simon

The Japanese word 轟々 / ごうごう / ゴーゴー (gōgō) means thundering, roaring, rumbling or booming. The kanji 轟 (gō/kō/todoro) is made up of three carts (車), and is also used as a surname, which is pronounced Kuruma, Gō or Todoroki.

Rumbling Carts 轟轟 (gōgō) - thundering, roaring, rumbling, booming

This kanji also appears in words like:

  • 轟音 (gō’on) = thunderous roar, roaring sound
  • 轟く (todoroku) = to roar, reverberate, be well-known, be famous, palpitate, throb
  • 轟かす (todorosu) = to make a thundering sound, to make (one’s name, etc.) widely known, to make (one’s heart) pound
  • 轟然 (gōzen) = roaring, thundering, thunderous, deafening, ear-splitting
  • 轟き (todoroki) = roar, peal, rumble, booming, beating, pounding

In Mandarin Chinese the character 轰 [轟] is pronounced hōng and means explosion, bang, boom, rumble, to attack, shoo away, expel.

It appears in words like:

  • 轰动的成就 [轟動的成就] (hōngdòng de chéngjiù) = a howling success
  • 轰动全世界 [轟動全世界] (hōngdòng quánshìjiè) = to set the world on fire
  • 轰隆 [轟隆] (hōnglōng ) = to rumble
  • 轰轰烈烈 [轟轟烈烈] (hōnghōnglièliè) = vigorously, grand and spectacular, fiery
  • 轰赶 [轟趕] (hōnggǎn) = to drive off, shoo away

I like these compound characters that are made up of several duplicated characters. Other examples include

  • 林 (hayashi – wood, forest), and 森 (mori – forest) which are made up of several 木 (ki – tree, shrub, bush, wood, timber). Put them together and we get 森林 (shinrin – forest, woods).
  • 炎 (honō – flame, blaze, passion), which are made up of two 火 (hi – fire)
  • 品 (hin – elegance, grace, article, item), which are made up of several 口 (kuchi – mouth)
  • 龖 (tà – flight of a dragon), 龘 (tà – the appearance of a dragon walking) and 𪚥 (zhé – verbose) which are made up of several 龍 [龙] (lóng – dragon).

The dragon examples are rare and in Mandarin, the rest are in Japanese.

Sources: jisho.org, mdbg.net, Line Dict CHINESE-ENGLISH

Falling Apples

By Simon

A friend asked me to look into the origins of the saying An acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. I can only find a few examples of this saying online, but lots of examples of the apple never falls far from the tree and similar sayings. It refers to the idea that people inevitably share traits with or resemble their parents or family.

Apple Tree

According to The Phrase Finder, the origins of this saying are uncertain. The earliest known example of its use in English appears in 1830 in Benjamin Thorpe’s translation of Rasmus Rask’s Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue:

Traces still exist in the daily language of the Icelanders, for instance in the proverb, eplit fellr ekki lánt frá eikinni the apple falls not far from the tree (the oak!).

In a letter by Ralph Waldo Emerson published in 1839, he quotes the German proverb ‘der Apfel fällt nicht weit von Stamm’ – “As men say the apple never falls far from the stem.”

In 1843, The Bible in Spain by George Henry Borrow includes the line:

“The apple”, as the Danes say, “had not fallen far from the tree;” the imp was in every respect the counterpart of the father, though in miniature.

According to English Language & Usage, a Welsh version of this saying appears in A Dictionary of the Welsh Language, Explained in English:

Ni fell zygwyz aval o avall
The apple will not fall far from the tree

The spelling here is unusal and non-standard: z = dd and v = f, so in modern standard spelling it would be “Ni fell ddygwydd afal o afall”, I think.

There are also versions of this saying from Turkish – Iemisch agatsdan irak dushmas (The apple does not fall far from the tree), and Old English – Se æppel næfre þæs feorr ne trenddeð he cyð hwanon he com. (The apple never rolls so far that it does not make known whence it came.)

子狐

I also found an idiom with a similar meaning in Japanese: 狐の子は頬白 (kitsune no ko wa tsurajiro), which means “fox cubs have white cheeks” [source].

Do you know of examples of this saying in other languages?

Musical Fun

By Simon

The Japanese word 曲 (kyoku) means a composition, piece of music, song, track (on a record), a tune, melody or air, or enjoyment, fun, interest or pleasure. Which is quite appropriate as music is enjoyable and fun for many people. It also often appears in the comments of the videos I watch that feature Japanese bands [source].

Lovebites 2019

The same kanji when pronounced kuse means wrong, improper or indecent, or a long segment of a noh play forming its musical highlight​. In the verb 曲がる (magaru) it means to bend, curve, warp, wind, twist, turn, be crooked and various other things, and as 曲げる (mageru) it means to bend, crook, bow, curve, curl, lean, tilt, yield and various other things.

曲 also appears in words like:

  • 曲線 (kyokusen) = curve
  • 曲がり角 (magarikado) = street corner, bend in the road, turning point, watershed
  • 曲目 (kyokumoku) = name of a piece of music, (musical) number, (musical) program(me), list of songs
  • 曲がりくねる (magrikuneru) = to bend many times, twist and turn, zigzag
  • 曲芸 (kyokugei) = acrobatics
  • 曲がりなりにも (magari nimo) = though imperfect, somehow (or other)
  • 曲面 (kyokumen) = curved surface

曲目 (kyokumoku) sounds really nice to me, and something I struggle with is remembering the names of pieces of music. I can play quite a lot of tunes, but only know the names of some of them. I even forget the names of tunes I have written myself.

Here’s a little tune I wrote the other day called The Tower of Cats / Tŵr y Cathod.

In Chinese the character 曲 has several meanings: when pronounced qū it means bent, bend, crooked or wrong, and can also be a surname. When pronounced qǔ it means tune or song [source].

It appears in such words as:

  • 曲子 (qǔzi) = tune
  • 曲调 [曲调] (qǔdiào) = melody
  • 曲折 (qūzhé) = winding, complicated
  • 曲直 (qūzhí) = right and wrong
  • 曲线 [曲線] (qūxiàn) = curve, curved line, indirect
  • 曲解 (qūjiě) = to distort
  • 曲别针 [曲別針] (qūbiézhēn) = paper clip

Sources: Line Dict CHINESE-ENGLISH, mdbg.com

By the way, the band featured in the photo is Lovebites, a Japanese metal band who I really like.

This is their most recent video:

Kenchiku

By Simon

A Japanese word I learnt recently is 建築 (kenchiku), which means architecture or construction and just appeals to my ears.

旧済生館本館

Related words include:

  • 建築家 (kenchikuka) = architect
  • 建築学 (kenchikugaku) = architecture
  • 建築物 (kenchikubutsu) = building, structure
  • 建築中 (kenchikuchū) = building, structure
  • 建築業 (kenchikugyō) = building/construction industry
  • 建築業者 (kenchikugyōsha) = builder, constructor

The charcter 建 means to build, and also appears in such words as 建物 (tatemono – building), 建設 (kensetsu – construction, establishment), and 建てる (tateru – to build).

The charcter 築 means to fabricate, build or construct, and also appears in such words as 築く (kizuku – to build, construct, erect, amass), 築山 (tsukiyama – artificial hill), and 築後 (chikutē – landscape gardening).

Source: jisho.org

Over the past week or so there has been some building work going on in my house, so it’s been a bit chaotic. The central heating system has now been replaced and I finally have a warm house, which is very nice. It’s all running on electricity (before I had a gas boiler) and is powered partly by my solar panels. Next I’m having a small bathroom installed downstairs, and the kitchen roof needs replacing.

Are there any words you’ve come across recently that appeal to your ears?

Werifesteria

By Simon

I came across the word werifesteria the other day on TikTok, which means “to wander through a forest in search of mystery”.

Shinrin-yoku (Forest Bathing)

Another definition of this word is to “wonder longingly through the woods in search of mystery or magic” [source].

According to World Wide Words it appeared out of thin air in late 2014, and nobody seems to know who coined it. Rumours circulating on social media that it comes from Old English are apparently untrue [source].

Perhaps someone who was indulging in some 森林浴 (shinrin yoku)* came up with the word werifesteria. In case you’re not familiar with 森林浴, it’s a Japanese term that means forest bathing, forest therapy, or peaceful walk through the woods for health benefits​ [source].

Are there any other interesting forest-related words that you know?

Pedestrian Paradise

By Simon

Many towns and cities have areas that are for pedestrians only some or all of the time. I discovered recently that in Japanese such areas are known as 歩行者天国 (hokōsha tengoku) or literally “pedestrian paradise” or “pedestrian heaven”, which sounds pretty good to me.

歩行者天国

The kanji in this expression can be broken down as follows: 歩 (ho) = step, stride; 行 (kō) = going, travelling, journey; 歩行 (hokō) = walk, walking; 歩行者 (hokōsha) = pedestrian, walker; 天 (ten) = sky, heaven, God; 国 (kuni) = country, state, region; 天国 (tengoku) = paradise, heaven [source]

Such areas are rather boringly known as pedestrian zones, pedestrian malls, auto-free zones, car-free zones oe pedestrian precincts in English [source]. Other names are probably available. It would be much more fun to call them pedestrian paradises though, don’t you think?

Bangor High Street is partially pedestrianised, although delivery drivers and people with disabilities are allowed to drive on the pedestrian part between 4:30pm and 10am each day. These restrictions are rarely enforced, and anybody who wants to seems to drive along it and park wherever during those times. A pedestrian precinct is known as a man cerddwyr in Welsh, by the way.

Do you have such areas where you live? What do you call them? Do they have interesting names in other languages?