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Japanese topsy-turvy words

Topsy-turvy… Yeah. Sounds dumb. IDK maybe there’s proper term for this. What I mean is a pair of words consisting of the same 2 kanji (with the same readings, mostly), only in a different order, like this:

日本 「にほん」 Japan 本日 「ほんじつ」 today

花火 「はなび」 fireworks 火花 「ひばな」 spark 

一万 「いちまん」 ten thousands 万一 「まんいち」 unlikely event, one in 10.000 chance 

会社 「かいしゃ」 company 社会 「しゃかい」 society

女子 「じょし」 girl 子女 「しじょ」 sons and daughters

父親 「ちちおや」 father 親父 「おやじ」 one’s father, old man

途中 「とちゅう」 on the way, midway 中途 「ちゅうと」 in the middle, half-way

階段 「かいだん」 stairs 段階 「だんかい」 level, phase

会議 「かいぎ」 conference, meeting 議会 「ぎかい」 congress, parliament

現実 「げんじつ」 reality, true fact 実現 「じつげん」 realization, materialization

海上 「かいじょう」 marine, by/at/on sea 上海 「しゃんはい」 Shanghai

苦痛 「くつう」 pain, agony 痛苦「つうく」 anguish

関連 「かんれん」 relation, relevance​ 連関 「れんかん」 relation, linkage​

形象 「けいしょう」 shape, figure 象形 「しょうけい」 hieroglyphics

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my favorite thing i’ve learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like “the eight winds cannot move me” blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes “FART” (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says “wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake”

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FUTURE IN MANDARIN

When we are quite certain that something is going to happen, we use 要 yào.

When we wanna express the chance (potential, probability), we use 会 huì.

This is a correction of a visual that I posted some time ago, where I translated 我要去 as I WILL GO, which isn’t as accurate as this translation. Sorry for slightly misguiding you.

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Screenshot of a tweet that reads, “In case of volcanic eruption, you will hear mermaids. Do not ignore the mermaids; they are there for your safety.”

Underneath it, a quoted tweet: “Perils of Google Translate no 44a. People seeking greater warning of volcanic eruptions want sirens, not mermaids.”

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My life in Taiwan was like this…

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feeling this lately…

yoko meshi [yoh-koh mesh-ee] (noun)

"As an untranslatable, this one ranks high on my list of favorites. I could not improve on the background given by commentator Boye Lafayette de Mente about this beautiful word, yoko meshi. Taken literally, meshi means ‘boiled rice’ and yoko means ‘horizontal,’ so combined you get ‘a meal eaten sideways.’This is how the Japanese define the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language: yoko is a humorous reference to the fact that Japanese is normally written vertically, whereas most foreign languages are written horizontally. How do English-speakers describe the headache of communicating in an alien tongue? I don’t think we can, at least not with as much ease.”

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ぐるぐる - guru guru - round and around, spinning

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I'm not totally sure what's going on because I have been doing almost no active study and only a bit of passive study (reading a few manga I'd already read before, talking to a friend for 5-10 minutes a day or less, going to tutoring sessions once a month or so, watching anime with subtitles), but my Japanese seems to have leveled up while I wasn't paying attention. Which is hard to describe, but I'm just noticing it's significantly easier to comprehend things, I'm relying less on using rikai or google translate for online navigation, if I see (smaller) blocks of Japanese, I'm much more likely to say "eh, it'll take ten minutes to 'read'" and do it than go "maybe later when I have more time". It seems insignificant when I write it down, but internally it's felt like I went through a magical transformation sequence. Still require a lot more work on vocab, but I've been ...not wanting to deal with any SRS, so not sure how that'll go. I did finally get the Kindle Paperwhite to access a J-E dictionary without jumping through excessive hoops (when I did it that way it was overwritten when the Kindle updated), but I keep getting bored with HP when I have to read it slowly. JLPT in the US finally has a testing center where I live this year, so I am for sure going to attempt the N3, though, vocab or no.

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I HATE JLPT THEY’RE LIKE “YO TELL ME HOW TO WRITE ‘BASHO’ IN KANJI” AND I’M LIKE SURE DUDE NO PROB THAT’S SUCH A COMMON WORD

AND THEN THE ALTERNATIVES LOOK LIKE THIS

OK FINE JLPT YOU’RE SUCH AN ASSBUTT

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small psa

Not sure if anyone else has run into this before, but I set up my Amazon.com account to link to my Amazon.co.jp account a while back and put a Tenso address in to buy ebooks. I hadn't really bought many books, just a couple of cheap children's picture books, since my reading wasn't really good enough to get through a novel without a dictionary, and I didn't really realize that I could get a J-J or J-E dictionary on the Kindle app until today. So I bought the first HP off Pottermore in Japanese, but I linked Pottermore to my Amazon account to send it to the Kindle, and apparently that was a mistake. Well either that or buying a dictionary off the Amazon app store was, I'm not sure which part raised flags on my account.

Either way, shortly after the purchases, I got an email from Amazon telling me they needed to see government proof of my residence in Japan in order to continue buying Japanese ebooks. I'm pretty sure they can't do anything about me buying HP off Pottermore, since those options are available in the Pottermore store seemingly regardless of region. But given I can't provide proof of living in Japan, I've set my address on Amazon back to the US and won't be able to get ebooks off there in the future unless I move, it looks like.

On the bright side, having an inline dictionary is pretty awesome. I think what's actually most useful for me is really the pronunciation help-- sometimes I can get the gist of the word via kanji, but if I don't know how to say it it'll never really be part of my vocabulary. So the inline dictionary often can help out there without breaking up 'flow' too much. Looking up anything via radicals takes so much time, it's impossible to really read that way, and while the dictionary does still make for more pausing than strictly extensive reading, it's easier to just check quickly and return to the text.

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oops.

I haven't posted here in forever. Basically I got a new job and have been kind of stressed out and tired lately and writing posts was kind of low priority, especially over taking the times I had enough focus to do anything besides vegetate to just study instead. So I've still been studying Japanese, though I've also been taking breaks and doing less than I was before, but I'm kind of slowly getting back into a new routine. This year my goals are (yet again!) to improve my reading-- I picked up all of Trigun, and I've been reading those with enough comprehension to enjoy it at least, but I really want to read a novel by the end of the year. Even if it's only a short, for-kids novel. Not really sure what's going on with the Super Challenge, last I heard there was a break before a new one started anyway, so I might check back soon and see if/when that's starting up again to join. I didn't really 'win' this last round-- I did hit something close to 100 films, 50 hours of conversations, and something like 800 pages of reading and some writing, I'm not even sure how much of that. But I still felt pretty good with what I did accomplish. I didn't finish Core 2000 of iKnow yet either, but I'm really close? I doubt I'll finish Core 3000 this year at the pace I'm going, but I should be able to get at least halfway through. I'm also almost introduced to all the N4 kanji via Read the Kanji, so that's cool, too. Ideally I'll get through N3 by the end of the year. I can work on that at work occasionally, when we end up in meetings where I don't have to pay full attention. I'm also using Skritter sometimes when standing in line or whatnot, since I put it on my iPod. And getting close to finishing first-runthroughs of all the Japanesepod101 Lower Intermediate lessons. I'm debating whether or not I will actually listen again while not in the car to take advantage of the lesson notes, or if I'm just going to start on Intermediate. I kinda gave up on Anki for the moment. I feel like it could be a useful tool for me, but I have to learn how to best utilize it first, and right now it makes more sense to take that time to use other available tools instead. Finally picked up the Beginner to Intermediate Shadowing book, which arrived today, and I'm hoping will help my speaking. I'll probably write a review after I've used it for a while. Unit 1's early sections are super simple-- it really is for beginners. The book says the aim is to take three months practicing each unit, and there are five units so that would take you over a year normally. But I kind of expect Unit 1 to go by a bit faster than that for me, so I have a vague goal of trying to finish the book by December. Unit 4 and 5 say they are meant to be around N2 level, though, so we'll see? I've stopped doing sessions at JOI mostly because I don't have time and I'm still doing sessions with my other tutor, though between us both canceling last minute for weather or work we only meet once or twice a month right now. We met today, though, and did a set of N3 practice questions together, which was ... enlightening, hah. I mean I was kind of about where I expected to be. I failed it, even though we went probably slower than I'd be able to afford to on the actual test, with a whopping 10 correct out of 23. Though in a lot of cases it was between two potential answers, and I picked the wrong one first and my tutor could see why I would think it would be the other one, so it's good that I'm at least able to narrow it down on most of them rather than simply blindly guessing. We'd gone through some of the same questions a year ago, and it's really interesting to feel the difference in comprehension. I vaguely remembered a couple of the questions from before, but mostly didn't remember anything about them, and still at least had 90% comprehension of the context sentences, even if I wasn't certain about the answer. It's a little ridiculous that every year I end up thinking "Okay this year by the end of the year I should be able to read Harry Potter/pass the N3" and every year those things pass me by. But having actually done practice questions, I definitely see that I'm close to N3 level and there's really no reason I won't be at a level where it'd at least be worth to attempt the N3 by Nov/Dec unless I stop studying entirely. Anyway, this is super long, apologies to anyone actually reading? I really need to learn to write shorter posts, but I kinda wanted to get a general "this is where I'm at with everything" out for myself.

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More of a bookmark for me, but: place to get random generated images when you're mocking up things.

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This isn't particularly fascinating as far as vim commands go.  It's just a basic installation of NeoBundle to manage plugins/addons. But I was intrigued by the usage of に乗り換える for changing from the vundle addon to neobundle, which implies they're thinking of plugins as something similar to a vehicle that you ride?  Instead of 代わる or something, which is what I probably would have used.

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Something that's obnoxiously difficult for me is pacing myself, apparently. I always am inclined to try to cram as much as possible into the longest 'marathon' session possible, and then I don't touch it for days/weeks/months. It does mean progress, sort of, but it's ironically less than if I just do a little every day, because a low-intensity daily repetition often means more than a high-intensity session every once in a while in terms of memory retention. Still haven't quite got the hang of doing less per day to keep from burning out, though. I'm still only in Step 8 of Core 2000 for iKnow, because I kind of haven't been doing much with it lately aside from very slowly working through my immense backlog of completed course reviews-- I finally am down to 0 on that, and I'm going to try to keep it low while also getting back into new vocab. Also haven't really been reading lately. Basically life went sideways for a bit, and I'm starting a new job on Monday, and there's a lot of other things I'm working on, so languages have been taking a backseat. I did start using Skritter, though, after hemming and hawing about it for a long time since you have to get the subscription. Mostly I like it, though sometimes it doesn't seem to want to recognize my stroke even if I do it correctly, which I can't figure out why not. And I finally got a better podcast subscription app for my iPod, so I've been listening to Jpod101 lessons again (auto skipping 20-30 seconds in is brilliant, so I don't have to listen to the intros all the time). Anyway, I just haven't updated in a while, and I may not update for some time again since I'm not really sure how the new job is going to affect my schedule, and I still have some outstanding things that need to get done asap before I can return to my regularly scheduled slow crawl to fluency. But I do want to get back to that, because I'm finding myself a little disturbed by how difficult it is to speak again, and I also just need to do more reading because I want to pick up something easy like manga to read without thinking "Ugh, this is going to take longer than I'd like" so much.

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From a while ago, but these turned out really well, actually, so I definitely will do this sort of thing again. I also ended up getting a tuna-mayo onigiri a bit later, ahah, though it was from a Korean store and thus... not exactly what I was expecting. Still tasty?

Finally made rice wet enough that I could make onigiri in the morning after putting it in the fridge overnight. (Katsuo fumi furikake, because that’s what I had closest.)

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熊 bear

Do you see the character in the image? Cool, huh? There are more here.