tonari no shibafu

IKanji

The Unofficial Apple Weblog announces next week's release of IKanji.

iKanji is a tool for anyone learning Japanese, and combines meaning, reading and writing training and tests. Over 2,000 Kanji characters and 20,000 example words are included. This is an app for advanced learners who already have a grasp of the hiragana and katakana characters (which are covered in Rory's existing iKana app).

The meanings test drills you on kanji meanings, randomly selecting kanji similar to the one in question to make the questions a little trickier.

The readings test displays 8 possible kanji readings (the reading type displayed is selectable) and you must identify all the readings for the kanji that are displayed.

The writing test shows you up to four variations on the stroke drawing for a given kanji and asks you choose the correct one.

I haven't tried this yet, but it seems like a useful and versatile study aid.

Just found some cool,

free Japanese fonts. One of the links that I found on this great Japanese font resource page.

Language lesson

雲泥の差

Literally 'the difference between cloud(s) and mud.'

Used to describe things that are very different from each other. Similar to the English 'apples and oranges.'

Language lesson

畳の上に死ぬ。

Literally 'To die on tatami.' This phrase means to die of old age or in a 'normal' fashion. I heard it in the negative (彼が)畳の上に死なない. 'He won't die on tatami.' It was used to describe someone who is considered by his friends to be a bit off and also likely to piss off the wrong person and therefore come to an ignominious end.

Amy Walker

verbal chameleon.

via the one and only Tony Pierce

Steven Pinker at Google

A talk that I think all you wordsmiths out there will find interesting.

Poll

Something has been bothering me and I'm curious to see what people think. If you saw

She apologized profusely that they couldn't come to the party, due to her husband being under the weather (read too drunk to drive).

would you pronounce it 'red' or 'read'?

Japanese Proficiency Exam

In about an hour I'm off to take the test. I'm relatively confident that I can pick up the 2% that I missed it by last year and thence move on with my life. Of course, I won't get the results for a few months, but I'm hoping that I at least come out of it with a better feeling than last year.

Time for a languid bath and some food and then I'm out.

Posted without comment

An interesting post about gendered language in Japanese over at Language Log.

Kotowaza

憎まれっ子世に憚る。
にくまれっこ、よにはばかる

Mean (or bad) people flourish.

Neither here nor there but...

I found out a few months back that Adam Smith's concept of the Invisible Hand is translated into Japanese as 「神の手」.

Hmmn...

Today's vocab

The Jubako

A Jubako is a square-ish box, often multi-tiered that holds food. Sometimes that foodstuff is rice -- usually with something on top -- and the square construction makes getting the last grain out difficult. From this, there have come a few idioms having to do with detail.

重箱の隅につつく。
Lit. 'Pick at the corners of a Jubako'
This expression is glossed as splitting hairs in my dictionary, but I don't think that it has the negative nuance that hairsplitting conjures for me.

重箱の隅は杓子で払え。
Lit. 'Swipe at the corners of a Jubako with a (rice)ladle'
To do something sufficient to get the job done, without worrying about it being perfect.

重箱の隅を楊枝でほじくる。
Lit. 'Pick at the corner(s) of a Jubako with a toothpick.'
To stick one's nose into an affair. To meddle.

Today's vocab

不知火型 (shiranu igata)

Shiranu igata is one of the ring-entering rituals performed by a yokozuna at a sumo tournament. It is named for the 8th Yokozuna: 不知火型右衛門 (shiranu igata uemon). Hakuho, after his second straight tournament championship yesterday, and on the cusp of his all-but-sure promotion to Yokozuna referenced this and I had no clue what he was talking about.

Today's vocab

矜持 (矜恃)- kyouji or kinji
pride stemming from belief in one's abilities; pretense; ego

The first character has pride (or to be proud) as one of it's meanings, and the second character means to have/hold/possess.

Online flashcard maker

Wow this is cool. Cueflash is a site that allows you to create flashcards (and group them) online. I just checked it out and it has no trouble displaying kanji. Also, you can see other users flashcard sets and add them to your own library. Smooth.

via Lifehacker

To be clear

It's pronounced INfluenced, not inFLUenced.

Heso

The latest issue of Heso magazine is out. My boy Ry is one of the contributors and an all around cool guy. You can check it out for yourself, tell me, who's not interested in Food and Sex?

Any of you arty types that are interested in contributing should go to their contact page.

Next year tell 'em I'm coming...

... and hell's comin' with me.

Turns out that I didn't pass the proficiency test. I scored a 275 (out of 400), but needed 280 to reach the 70% level which is a pass. Not so bad considering the rarefied nature of some of the stuff, but annoying to have gone through a full day of testing and not quite get there. Since I went in with very little studying, I'm going to devote and hour or so each week and shoot for 90+ next December.

Object+participle constructions in political discourse

An interesting and thoughtful post over at Language Log about how conservatives have come to own a particular rhetorical tool.

An excerpt:

The subtitle [of his book] was adapted from the ad that the Club for Growth ran during the run-up to 2004 Iowa caucuses, when Howard Dean was still the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. An announcer asks a middle-aged couple leaving a barbershop what they think of "Howard Dean's plans to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year." The man responds, "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." -- and then his wife picks up the litany -- "... body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

<snip>

Of course there's no intrinsic reason why the right should have a monopoly on those compounds. Back in the day, people played just as fast and loose with stereotypes in depicting poor white Southerners as cross-burning, Bible-thumping, sibling-shtupping primitives -- not just Northern liberals, but white-shoes Republicans and "genteel" Southerners, too. You still see this sort of thing coming from liberals from time to time -- writing in the Chicago Sun-Times just after the 2000 election, William O'Rourke described Bush's America as "Yahoo Nation":

    It is a large, lopsided horseshoe, a twisted W, made up of primarily the Deep South and the vast, lowly populated upper-far-west states that are filled with vestiges of gun-loving, Ku-Klux-Klan sponsoring, formerly lynching-happy, survivalist-minded, hate-crime perpetrating, non-blue-blooded, rugged individualists� which contains not one primary center of intellectual or creative density.


<snip>


But actually liberals rarely talk this way. On the Web, Volvo-driving liberal outnumbers pickup- or truck-driving conservative by around 50 to 1, and when you do encounter a phrase like beer-guzzling redneck it's almost always offered either as a conservative caricature of liberal speech or in the spirit of a reclaimed epithet (as in, "...and proud of it, son!" In fact the word redneck turns out about 20 times more likely to appear in the pages of National Review or The American Spectator than in The American Prospect or The Nation, almost always set in the mouth of some imaginary liberal.

Whatever they privately believe, most liberals know that this sort of culture-stereotyping is counter-productive for the left, not just because it puts them on the wrong side of the faux-populist divide, but because it excludes from consideration the bowtie-wearing, port-sipping Yalies who are sitting around the National Review office cooking this stuff up in the first place. And even when they restrict themselves to purely political attributes, liberals can't really use those cadences nowadays without implicitly acknowledging the right's ownership of them. In the course of praising the cleverness of the Club for Growth ad, for example, Kurtzman suggests that liberals might think of responding with an ad "telling Bush to take his deficit-creating, war-mongering, gas-guzzling, corporate criminal-coddling, election-stealing, Rush Limbaugh-listening, civil liberty-seizing, Bible-thumping, right-wing dictatorship back to Texas, where it belongs." But that comes off as nothing more than a strained tribute to the right's mastery of this syntax, in something like the way anti-war Democrats' "lie and die" seems to validate the right's "cut and run" as the basic pattern for Iraq War sloganeering.

The great rhetorical achievement of the right, as I argue in the book, is to have reformulated distinctions of class as bogus differences in consumer culture. So it makes sense that conservatives should seize on the object+participle construction, whose function to turn activities into attributes -- politically speaking, that is, you are what you do (or more accurately, what you drive, drink, or otherwise consume). Whereas when people on the left are of a mind to make sweeping generalizations, they tend to draw the distinction characterologically rather than culturally, which is why they favor extended bahuvrihi compounds like narrow-minded, hard-hearted, and mean-spirited.

Another valuable Japanese learning tool on the web

Quinlan clues the rest of us in to a great web-based tool: Reading Tutor.  Paste Japanese text into a box, hit one button, and the site looks up the compunds for you.  The words in the text become linked to a sidebar with the defintions and it really is a breeze to use.

Some things I've picked up

I posted ages ago about my desire to put up new words and phrases here when I come across them.  Don't think that I've done that even once, but I have been stockpiling them in my electronic dictionary.

Here is a sampling:

自画自賛 - To praise one's own work.

位牌 (ihai) - The mortuary tablet on which a deceased's (Buddhist) name is printed.

回忌 (kaiki) - The memorial services held after someone's death.  It is short for 年回忌.  If my dictionary is accurate, there are observances held during the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 12th, 16th, 22nd, 26th, 32nd, 49th, 99th anniversaries of someone's death.

I don't consider myself particularly morbid, but my friend Terada-san went to a wake a few months ago, and I felt like this was an aspect of Japanese culture that I really needed to know about.

三十六計逃げるに如（し）かず - Means roughly, discretion is the better part of valor. 

猫の手も借りたい - Lit. 'I want to borrow the cat's hand(s) also.'  Is an expression meaning to be very busy.

One of my favorite new expressions:
嘘も方便 - Which means roughly, even lies have their place.

And this one really stimulates my inner warrior:
血で血を洗う - Lit. 'Wash blood with blood.'  It has a rarely-used meaning of a feud between relatives, but basically means 'an eye for an eye.'

斜めならず (naname narazu) - means extreme (used of mood, happiness, etc.)

有無を言わせず - Lit. 'To not allow [someone] to say yay, or nay', means roughly 'to run roughshod over'.  To force [an issue].

船頭多くして船山に上がる - Lit. 'If there are many captains, the boat ends up in the mountains.'  Similar to 'too many cooks spoil the broth.'

Internecine

I really dig the word internecine, and used it quite a bit in my MA thesis.  You see, my thesis was a translation of a text written by a guy in the midst of a war with forces led by his relative, for control of the Kanto.  And internecine seemed so much more high-falootin' than 'family feud' or any other words I could have come up with at the time. 

Who knew that the meaning that is most often ascribed to the word, is the result of a mistake?

Not me.

via Languagehat

Japanese Laws in English

Was checking out Language Blogger today, which is a site that I only check from work.  Just never got around to adding it to my newsreader at home.  Which, of course, is no big shakes because the posts are fairly light and twice a week is more than often enough to check in.  Today, I found a post from a few weeks back about some business related laws/terms being translated into English by the Japanese government to aid international commerce. 

excerpt:

The Japanese government intends to translate business-related technical terms and phrases from 14 major laws and whole texts of some of these laws.

Seems like a good idea to me because at my job I often have to translate terms and wonder whether there is an established/accepted translation.  Here's hoping that this happens sooner rather than later.

ps. - The link to the Yomiuri in the post has expired.

UPDATE: Link to the story in Japanese

Hanzismatter on NPR

NPR has a feature on Tian Tang, of Hanzismatter, which is a website that I check out fairly often.  His website is dedicated to badly translated and/or written chinese character tattoos.  I haven't listened to it yet, but I will once I get home from work.

guy nod in Mark's general direction

One more reason to use Mozilla

I mentioned a while back that there was a Rikai XUL plugin for Firefox that provided for the functionality that some of us were used to over at rikai.  Now it seems that even more cowbell functionality has been added to help people learning kanji.

I'm gonna download them now and try them out.

via Hmmn...

Pronuciation pet peeve

I was watching a clip on the Newshour over at Crooks and Liars and became aware that for some reason it ticks me off to hear someone stress the second syllable of the word 'confluence' rather than the first.

Just had to get that off my chest.

Lightening my load

I'm one of those students of the Japanese language that nearly always carries my trusty electronic dictionary.  When I first got here I would pass the hours on the train reading the advertisements and looking up characters that I didn't know and also it usually came in handy when talking to people.  As my vocabulary has grown, I need the dictionary increasingly less (outside of studying), but I get a little pissy when I don't bring it and there is a word that I would like to look up.  Still it is not always reasonable to carry it with me, and, to be honest, I always feel a little vulnerable without it. 

Now I am sure that most of the Japanese language students among you know about Jim Breen's dictionary site at Monash University.  Professor Breen is truly a pioneer in that he created his site with free and easy access.  I've noticed for a while that there were cell phone (keitai) accessible portals, but never thought to use them.  Well, I just bookmarked his Japanese->English and English->Japanese portals on my phone, and am going to try those out when I get stuck.  For sure, the packet charges will make all but the most important use of his site a  waste of money, but if something is really important I can look it up even when I'm not lugging around my dictionary. 

Beginner English Videos

Some of you that I went to school with probably remember the Jan and the Japanese people video that we watched in our lab sections.  We watched one installment each week -- the most memorable of which was the one when he found out that the girl he was crushing on had gotten engaged to someone else, leading to Jan-san getting VERY drunk -- as listening practice.

All of that is neither here nor there, but I am looking for a video to show to my English conversation class.  Almost all of the people are at the super-beginner stage and I am looking for video that shows things like self-intros and other beginner-type dialogues.  I am combing my bittorrent archives for something a little more introductory and less fast/pop-culture-reference-laden than the Gilmore Girls, The Simpsons, or the Family Guy. 

Any suggestions are welcome.

Game on!

Rikai XUL

The excellent site Rikai.com has launched a new service called Rikai XUL.  I have been using Rikai.com for years now.  If one surfs to Japanese pages via the Rikai portal, moving the cursor over any kanji, brings up  in a text box the English meaning for the character(s).  The site also has Englsih ~ Japanese capabilities.  This has been an enormous help in reading Japanese newspapers, and also is a quick and dirty way to learn vocabulary outside of one's specialty.

Well it seems that they have addressed my only serious complaint with the site: having to go to the site.

Via AchiKochi

Via Japundit.com:

    "Rikai XUL is probably the coolest Japanese language learning tool, although you’ll need to be running the Firefox browser to make it work. After installing the program onto your browser, just right-click on unfamiliar kanji to get a definition."