Originally posted by jonb@Jan 25 2005, 10:39 AM
Here's a good (albeit incomplete) Japanese dictionary. The nice thing about it is that it's ISO-Latin-1-compatible.
http://kanjisite.com/
Oh, and a word useful for this group would be chinpo.
[post=277088]Quoted post[/post]
jonb, where were you when I needed you? I'm about to leave Japan, and suddenly appears one of the best Japanese learner's sites I've seen. It sure beats the textbook I used,
Japanese for Busy People I, the officially sanctioned textbook of the All-Japan Language Teachers' Association, and thus guaranteed to be useless.
Have you studied Japanese, jon? Because yours is generally better than mine, and I've lived here for over four years. Mind you, I suspect yours comes from a literary source (like
hentai, maybe?).
Mine is learned from cab-drivers, dry cleaners, an elderly neighbour's housekeeper--my building has a slow elevator and it gave time for some great lessons--and barfly pals who use a smattering of Japanese to get laid.
Effectively, I don't speak Japanese in any real sense. I live in a little cocoon of English. My utterly efficient and thoroughly obliging secretary deals with the gas company, the phone company, the tax office (total pussycats) and the DMV. Thanks to her, I have a Japanese driver's license without speaking a word of Japanese--though I did have to sit through a perplexing road safety film, which the authorities seemed not to care that I didn't understand.
My Japanese boyfriend has zero patience for my faltering attempts. Early in our relationship, we were getting out of a cab, and I was paying (BTW
ni-sen haku-yen deshita--let all you
nihongo smartypants figure it out) and as the driver told me the fare, I replied with
arigato gozaimas-SHITA. That's "thank you", but in the past tense. The past tense kicks in early in Japanese; you never say "I understand" in reply to an instruction, it's always "I understood." Anyway, he berates me. "You can't say that! He was still giving you the change! You had another round of thank-you's to give! Don't EVER embarass me like that again! Just let ME do the talking!"
After that, I gave up. Masa does cab drivers, and Junko-san does the gas company.
But there are a few bits of usage where I might offer a man-on-the-
dori opinion.
jonb, hentai fans need to know that
ore is male slang for
watashi.
ore wa...desu is a male way of saying "I am..." So my opinion of my state of mind was that I am (as you correctly identified) a load of crap. Lots of female Japanese teachers (including mine) teach the
watashi wa.. usage, and that's the grammatically correct term. But only girls use it. NEVER say
watashi wa... unless you want to be taken for a girl. One of my favourite gay bars is called
Ore Ore; not even nancies use
watashi.;
DMW,
moshi mohshi actually means "I'm speaking, I'm speaking". There's an annnoying (to westerners) habit throughout Asia for the person who picks up the receiver not to speak first. Many Vietnamese, for example, pick up the reciever and wait for the person who's initiated the call (who, after all, is the party with something to say) to say something. I think
moshi moshi is a modern habit adopted in a world of mobiles and answering machines, where one actually needs to know that a real person has answered.
Matte doen't actually mean "stop" but "wait". Hence, when you're in a shop and the salesperson goes out to the back room to check if what you want is in stock, s/he says
chotto matte or "a little wait".
And
mendokusai is a very common and versatile Japanese word which means "tedious". Often used for people who are, in English, insufferable. I found my hangover quite insufferable, and thus used the word. By the way, did you know that the word for hangover in German is
tomcat?
And
ne simply means "isn't it?" or the Canadian "eh?". A habit I picked up from my Kobe-jin boyfriend--it's particularly common in
kansai-ben, the dialect around Åsaka.
I was going to buy into this discussion when it was raised in another thread, where everyone was talking about
haiku, the dullest form of poetry on the planet, IMHO, but I never did.
doubltless_mouse needs to contribute his ¥2 on this subject, I think. He's the lifer.
hb8, or ï¾-ï¾ï½¨ï¾
P.S. jonb, maybe
Åki-chinpo is a better word. Yes, whenever you westerners walk up to your Oki photocopier, you're using the BIG brand.
I've been in one before, lasted 3 years without even meeting, but eventually we went our separate ways (only because we were young, not saying the love ran out or whatever) But we still talk. Distance, of all things, shouldn't be able to break wreal love, and it seems like you two have it all set! Just my say on the topic.
