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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 8, 2015 4:20:58 GMT -5
Here's where to share the joys and sorrows of trying to deal with Nihongo, as someone who didn't have it driven into them with a mallet throughout the first 18 years of life.
Or even if you did!
✌︎
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 8, 2015 4:54:20 GMT -5
To lead off: on her tour blog, Naoko was bragging a bit about the satisfying tone of her fellow string-player, Naru. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ベースのなるちゃん、リッケンバッカーをブイブイ言わせて重厚なプレイを見せてくれました。 Be—su no naru-chan, rikkenbakka— o buibui iwasete jyoukou na purei o misete kuremashita.On bass, Naru-chan displayed kickass playing and a massive sound from her Rickenbacker. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — What were those big fat adjectives Naoko used? 重厚 (じゅうこう, jyoukou)Profound; deep; grave; solid; dignified; stately; solemn; massive; composed. Individually, the kanji read, "heavy, heap up" and "thick, heavy, rich". Naoko chose those primary readings when she worded her own thought in English. What about buibui then? Buibui isn't in online dictionaries, so you need to find out from competent speakers. Fortunately, there are plenty of those on the "teach me" pages at the goo.ne.jp web portal. Japanese natives are mystified by buibui, too. One of them asked for a definition after hearing the term from a sports radio announcer.He got a spate of answers, including... [Buibui] (adverb):(1) kogoto (scolding, fault-finding) (2) hauhi no oto (sound of a fart) "The Ukiyo Bath", Bunka 10 (1813) cited in The Edo Language Dictionary, by [ ] Maeda. Not really so helpful. [Buibui-buibui] (adverb):(1) Being erasou (self-important, important-looking, proud) (2) Being ibatte (putting on airs, acting like a big-shot, acting bossy or pushy, being arrogant or boastful) The Encyclopedia of Osaka Words, Shiyou Makimura, ed. One poster offered: Well, in Osaka "buibui" is a Yankee-kei (slang: delinquent youth style) manner of speaking. By no means refined speech. It's as much as to say, "acting proud to be in a position or have a status that others cannot defy." Someone else wrote:I was born and grew up in Tokyo, and it's my first time hearing this expression. I don't want this to catch on. Elegant it's not. So, to sum up, buibui is the domineering manner of a swaggering gang kid who thinks he rules the neighborhood. And it's street language, not a polite or graceful characterization. it looks as if Naoko is using her blog to teach people to talk like punks from Osaka. Corrupter of youth!
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Post by Egg_Crisis on Jul 12, 2015 8:31:53 GMT -5
When I've seen videos of Jpop singers posing for photos and making the V-sign, sometimes I've heard them say "Bwee Bwee"! Because in Japanese the letter V is pronounced something like "Bwee". Maybe it's connected?
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 12, 2015 11:52:00 GMT -5
I dunno, good thought.
EDITED
Forget a bunch of that earlier nonsense. I looked around, about: what is the real deal with all the V-signs? They're happy good-wishes right?
Yes, but they hark back to Winston Churchill's V-for-Victory. The word is that, V-ing declares or wishes for victory in life — success, health, happiness. But it's a bit of rainbows, daisies, and unicorns. Is that what you look for in your hard-rocking bassist? I just don't understand.
It'd be easy to get if she had said, "BUBU."
That's a well-referenced word for going grumble-grumble-grumble, and is a comic-book sound marker for any rumbling noise.
That's just what I want from Naru!
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 16, 2015 17:36:15 GMT -5
Statistical translation algorithms, I love you. ♥ Every so often, OK daily, I check Bing's output to see if Microsoft is catching up at all to Google. Don't laugh, it can totally happen. Google Translate actually seems to be getting wackier recently. They're always tuning things and trying things. But this is Bing's fault, and it's so ridiculously stupid. Look what they did to Naru's innocent blurt of joy. They made it naughty. That's psycho. All Naru wrote was, "Chanrio——☆", the name of her new toy followed by a little magic wand. Bing didn't read. It doesn't know about Chanrio, because not enough examples have gone into its maw yet. All Bing saw was [O--☆] and it immediately thought OPPAI, boobs, because Bing is a dirty-minded codebase. It spends all its time on the Internet, god knows where. Google jumps to no such conclusions. Its guess is "Contact The - ☆". Google has learned it's better to be dumb than an epic, epic failure.
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Post by Egg_Crisis on Jul 18, 2015 14:32:22 GMT -5
I just tried Bing translator - www.bing.com/translator/ - and it doesn't work for me AT ALL with Chrome! As a test I tried translating from English to Japanese and whatever English phrase I write, it puts the exact same phrase for it's translation. Whatever I put in I get the exact same thing for the translation! Google translate - translate.google.com/#ja/en/ - translates "ちゃんりおーー☆ " as "Chanrio ☆" but you seem to be using some version that does it on the actual page you're viewing - and that version doesn't look like it's working as well as the dedicated page. It's the "ー" symbol that's causing the messup, because you'll know that symbol is used for elongating vowel sounds rather than being a meaningless symbol which the translator can ignore. Athough おーー is a million miles from oppai so I don't know what it's thinking! That's why I always switch off any in-page translators and use the dedicated page as it makes far less mistakes. Google translate even allows you to paste in a url if you want to translate an entire page although sometimes it rejects a page (perhaps if it's overloaded with too much flash/java/bullshit.) A tip for translating when pasting stuff into the translator is delete any symbols such as those stars, emojis, "wwwwwww"(the Japanese version of lol or lolllllllll, the w itself is from the word warau/waratte). There's a whole bunch of little things you can do to get better translations using web-translators, being aware of which kanjis are peoples names(translators love to mess those up), joining sentences back together that have been split in half by a carriage return(because the translator treats them as 2 seperate sentences), looking out for those weird katakana abbreviations(translators often mess those up), etc... I translated an entire 2 and a half hour Japanese musical using just a web translator and a tiny bit of knowledge!
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 19, 2015 3:03:02 GMT -5
Mephistopheles, I mean Microsoft, made a deal with Facebook and Twitter to embed Bing translation links right into people's tweets and posts, when they are fed to your browser to be looked at. That's what made a little horror out of Naru's tweet. I hope nobody's relying on those quickie translations, they're usable around 1 time out of 5. To state the obvious, Bing has seen a lot of people delicately not spelling out the O-word, so it naively parsed the phrase as <chan> <ri> <o––> <☆> Then the really stupid stuff started. It made chan or chanri into a possessive pronoun, and it thinks all o–– are big o––, apparently. Like all children are above average? Hey buddy, can you help a robot out?I don't really blame a big, dumb neural net for not getting a marketing department joke, but a couple of days later, while Bing has learned nothing, Google has wised up about the English for Chanrio. It still completely muffs the romanization, interestingly. And it just can't fathom Unicode text doodles. I do use Google all the time. It's an awesomely fast kanji dictionary. My life would suck without it. Tips on how to give Google jobs it's good at is an excellent thing to explore here!
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Post by thegl0r on Jul 19, 2015 10:52:00 GMT -5
He-he-he. I'd also received a translation result that said "Her big titties", and I'd tried again and had been careful not to include (what I'd assumed to be) the text doodle at the end. I still got her big titties. That translation was from Microsoft. Other translation software gave ChanRio which certainly seemed to fit with the picture. But this is just one line from a conversation between two people who presumably know each-other quite well, and who are both likely to know the others sense of humour and they may well have certain long running "in jokes" together. So perhaps both the translations are correct, and the writer may well have been aware of the double meaning. Especially when you look at this pic that was also posted as part of the conversation. "Wow! Superb." Big coconuts! Did someone mention needing to go on a (high milk) diet? But hey, computers are stupid kids and are just playing at being translators. Presumably they are trying to force any translations into the "Official Japanese language". As has been said before, the dialect spoken in the Osaka region is not identical to the Official Japanese which is taught as being the language of Japan. There are differences in word usage and word meaning. Kansaiben (関西弁) and Oosakaben (大阪弁) But I don't speak Japanese and have to rely on those pesky computer kids to do the translations for me. I also went to the chanrio maker site and had a play. I've got an apple for the teacher. So keep giving us tips and any insider info - even if we don't know what to do with it.
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Post by mikado-AKA-Shoknifeman on Jul 19, 2015 13:21:28 GMT -5
I tried to use it, but, my Nihongo is seriously too poor to understand the instructions
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 19, 2015 13:33:37 GMT -5
...So perhaps both the translations are correct, and the writer may well have been aware of the double meaning. Especially when you look at this pic that was also posted as part of the conversation. I also went to the chanrio maker site and had a play. I've got an apple for the teacher. So keep giving us tips and any insider info - even if we don't know what to do with it. Bing being correct about this: DUDE... NO WAY. Nice Chanrio-self in school uniform. If I saw you coming with an apple in hand, I would definitely duck behind my desk.
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 19, 2015 13:52:03 GMT -5
I tried to use it, but, my Nihongo is seriously too poor to understand the instructions I don't know if I should encourage this. After all... you, Mikey, can actually draw things. But regardless. - Head for chanrio.com
- Click big red [Hajimeru / Start] button
- Click big red [Unconditional Surrender / Hajimeru] button
- Click gigantic red [Hajimekara tsukuru / Edit mode button
- Are you a boy or a girl? If unsure, you're a girl.
- Enter a name for your Chanrio. Ordinary Latin characters, no funny business.
- For the last time, click [Hajimeru / Start]. It's not too late to change your mind about this.
- Wait a *long* time for all the parts to download from Sanrio
- Click to pick from the tabbed galleries!
- Save your image and show it!
The last page lets you download your finished work as a PNG file, or by hitting the gray [ Shiru kaeru / change] button, you can back up and, well, change stuff. The rest of the instructions on that page are about how you can assist Sanrio with their marketing goals. At your option, in Step 4 you could have uploaded a photo to use as a base for your Chanrio. Photo mode is fun but dicey. First, Chanrio will attempt to sex you like a baby chicken. Based on its intuition, it will ask, "Are you a boy (男の子)?" or, "Are you a girl (女の子)?" You can answer either question with YES or NO, but "Are you an immature adult?" is not a question. You don't get different character materials this way, but you do get a head start. You can edit away at will from there. Here's what Chanrio did with a couple of uploads of mine. The BOY option is on blue, the GIRL option is on red. How about let's start with a stripped down Chanrio as a base?This lucky girl has held position #20 on the list of Hottest Mugshots Ever
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 19, 2015 18:54:45 GMT -5
筆画Kanji Characters in JapaneseNon-technically, what is the deal with kanji? And how much time do you have? Let's just get to the nub of it. Each kanji character represents a cluster of concepts. Not originally a word or words in spoken language. Only somewhat incidentally do kanji symbols point to the literal words we happen to use to talk about things that fall under the represented concepts. It's not a water-tight relationship. Clear? Yeah... I thought not. So, imagine if the logo of Apple, Inc. — , the stylized Apple with a bite out of it — were a character in the English language. It is a character in Unicode, the codepoint corresponding to the decimal numeric code 0174377. On a Macintosh, you can type it conveniently by pressing Shift+Option+K. Now imagine it's got millennia of associated meanings crusted onto it. In the biblical Book of Genesis, the bitten or divided apple originally represents the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that Eve gave to Adam, so its core meanings are as follows: forbidden knowledge, betrayal of trust, loss of innocence; desire of things that are not good for you; untoward influence of a hot girlfriend. Later, it acquires further meanings. - From the fable about Sir Isaac Newton: universal attraction, gravity
- From the folk tale of Johnny Appleseed: liberality, fertility, natural abundance
- From John & Yoko: hidden symmetry, mysterious beauty at the core of Life
Then Apple picks the device for its corporate heraldry and re-draws it. A bit like Mao Zedong's program of language simplification. All of those meanings stuffed under a character you can type on a keyboard, named "Applelogo" or "Fruitwithabite" or "Gizmo/thingy" depending on where you live. But imagine that, in standard business English, we usually want the bitten-apple to mean breach of contract, and we usually pronounce it "default." Now imagine that, if you mash in the highway department's symbol for food service, it means apple pie with coffee. Or, if you add the symbol for public washrooms, it means regular bowel movements. And so on. Kanji are a lot like that. Only, not so easy to type. There are somewhat above 10,000 kanji according to the experts. There's no exact count, AFAIK. You can get along day to day with only a couple of thousand, though, whew. However, the single kanji character 鬱 is written with 29 separate brushstrokes. It means primarily, "gloom, depression, melancholy". Don't try to tell me that's an accident. Duly constituted committees are working on proposals for new kanji. Wish them luck.
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Post by tangerinesun on Jul 19, 2015 20:40:39 GMT -5
I dragged you through all the kanji stuff so we could talk about a post in the Budo Grape thread in J-punk/J-Pop. The title of Budo Grape's tune, Zankokuna Yasashisa, can be written a number of ways using kanji. All the ways get pronounced the same, and represent the very same expression in spoken Japanese. But just which kanji you select to write the Japanese phrase will influence the shade of meaning conveyed by your written version. In spoken language, no difference, obviously. Or rather, you can't tell what's intended with as much precision. So, Budo Grape, Zankokuna Yasashisa, ざんこくなやさしさ.If you write that out as 残酷優しい, it means approximately "Cruel Kindness(es)". But I wasn't forced to write it that way. 易しいさ is pronounced yasashi, and means easy, simple, plain. Not the most attractive interpretation. But good for poetic flavor. 優しいさ is pronounced yasashi, and means tender; kind; gentle; graceful; affectionate. Now this might be getting interesting! You tack on さ, sa, at the end to convert either version of the word to a noun. What about Zankokuna, now? Well, it always signifies being mean, but there are 50 shades of mean. 残酷, zankoku, is defined as cruel or harsh. The kanji are remainder/leftover/excess + cruel/severe/atrocious/unjust. Excessive disregard for wellbeing of another. Might be the most common kanji form, and it's the one the subtitler used on the video. 残刻, zankoku, is pronounced the same, is actually the same word, but the second character is about cutting: engrave/cut fine/carve/chop/mince. Exquisitely, pointedly cruel. 惨酷, zankoku, is pronounced the same, etc., but it's written: wretched, disaster, cruelty, harsh + cruel, severe, atrocious, unjust. Double cruelty. You might need more adjectives to make the previous written expressions feel quite this severe. No emphasis on due or excessive measure, just piling on the hardship. Add な, na, to make a noun out of it. Is this what a Japanese person thinks when they hear our proverbial phrase, "cruel to be kind"? No, that means making somebody suffer, but it's for their own good. This is more like, acting like you care about someone in order to torment them. So, the opposite. ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ Had enough yet? The tongue-twister lyrics consist mostly of attributes you would think are not too good. わざとらし, wazatorashi — unnatural, affected, studied, forced, contrived しらじら, shirajira — playing dumb, disingenuous あてこすり, atekosuri — being catty; using innuendo or snide insinuating remarks そらぞらし, sorazorashi — hypocritical, two-faced なげこわし, nagekowashi — ignoring something, acting casual わずわらし, wazuwarashi — troublesome, annoying In the chorus, subtitled, you hear さもありなんん, samo ari nan: "That's probably right; it stands to reason; yeah, that's what it really is." Also, 残酷 やさしさに, zankokuna yasashisa ni — cruel tenderness/kindness toward... something. Something like you! 勝ち目なし、 kachime nashi — it's no-win (you can't win; odds of winning: unacceptable) I'm sorry the band has been exposed to so much negativity, but at least now you have all the advantage for karaoke night.
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Post by tangerinesun on Aug 19, 2015 18:08:24 GMT -5
Followers of the Microsoft Bing Translator service might like to know that the website's working again. When it fails, which is usually, its mistakes are still screamers. But occasionally I'm surprised at how on-target it can be. Sometimes, many times, it comes up with better English idiom than Google does. One typical example: ねんね (おねんね、ねんねん、ねんねえ、ねね)Nen'ne (O'nen'ne, nen'nen, nen'nee, nene)If you ask the usual online dictionaries, you find this is the phrase for saying "night-night" to little children when you pack them reluctantly off to bed. It's more specific to bedtime than "bye-bye" or other similar farewells. As a noun, it means a very young child, or an older person who acts like one. "Esp. a young woman" says jisho.org. This is on my mind, because Gacharic Spin's No. 3 performer uses Nen'ne as her stage handle. She acknowledges that it's baby-talk. It might be an old nickname she resurrected or might derive from her real name. Anyway, - Ask Google about ねんね and you get Bye-bye.
- Ask Bing, and it returns Beddy-bye.
Bing has the absolute best choice I can think of. When it's right, it can be so much righterer. When it really hasn't got a match, its guesses are just the worst. So at Facebook and on Twitter, you're still just spinning the wheel and hoping for a red number.
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Post by tangerinesun on Sept 22, 2015 0:48:51 GMT -5
MARKETING POETRY CORNERI just finished fixing a wrong kanji reading picked by Google, so I thought I would share the bit of language foolery that foiled the neural net. It's the kind of too-clever stuff that people who write professionally for advertising and marketing make their careers on. Ibaraki Bakuon Fest was dreamed up as a combination music and craft beer festival. September 21 this year was the 4th or 5th time they've held it; in Ibaraki, a satellite town of the Osaka monsteropolis, on your way to Kobe across the bay. Motivation for the fest is really beer. The music part is free of charge, and gives you something to do between pints. Beer fans get complimentary tunes, the music fans get acquainted with a lot of beers. The come-hither copy on the festival website talks about an Iron Triangle of Beer, Sound & Food. No one can defeat the Iron Triangle. Commercial synergy for everyone! This is what good marketing is all about. But 6 or 7 years ago, when they would have been strategizing about this event, there would have loomed the Problem of the Name. So somebody got to work on what to call the music/beer fest. Needs to be catchy! Call in the pros. IBARAKI BEER & MUSIC FESTIVAL is so déclassé, it does not have artisan craft brewing in its soul. At this point, the poets have recourse to metonymy. 麦芽 Let the kanji for barley malt stand for beer. What's more beer than malt? 音 What will stand for music? Let's call it what audiophiles and engineers do, "sound". Malt Sound Fest. Bakuga-On Fest. It's better, but it still sucks. It sounds like a rural harvest party, but now comes the bolt of lightning! Bakuga-On is lame, but Baku-On is rock! Because bakuon is the sound of something loud, a bomb blast or a roaring motorcycle. BAKUON FEST! I love it. But how to write it? Simple, strip off the kanji for "ga" and "malt" becomes "grain" (wheat, principally). All alone, meaning "wheat", 「麦」is pronounced "mugi". But it's no problem! Just get people trained to pronounce what might be "mugi" as "baku" again, in this special case. Now you're home free. WHEAT+SOUND now equals KABOOM, phonetically. Throw some roman characters on the seal as a pronunciation guide. Make it look like a beer label. Let's print the t-shirts!! And Koichi-san — nice work. I'm sure the section chief will remember you when we wind up this year. 麦音........バクオン (Chinese On reading)...bakuon.............Literally, Wheat/Barley etc. + Sound 爆音........バクオン..................................bakuon.............Explosive sound (KABOOM or ROAR or...)
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