#this is what happens when you try to base romanisation off a language that is in reality 50 languages in a trenchcoat

[lurkingteapot]

When I say I wish popular romanisations of Thai were less ambiguous and more consistent, it's stuff like this:

Phupha and Pat (and Pa!) have the same initial consonant sound. Pran's is different—it's the same as Kampung's "p" sound. Pran, Pa, and Phupha share an "a" sound though—the same "a" sound Kampung also has (though it's written differently (*)). Kampung's "u" sound and Phupha's "u" sound are not the same. Kampung's "p" is the same sound as the initial in Pran. Kampung and Korn share an initial. It's the same sound the names Gunn (MSP) and Gun (Atthaphan) and Kan (KPTS) start with. All three of those names are pronounced identically. Kan (KPTS) is not pronounced the same as Kan (The Eclipse). Tian does not share an initial with Toto, but Toto (BBS) and Tinn (MSP) do. If the romanisation of BBS given names and ATOTS place names were consistent, we'd have Phut and Pha and Pran (or Pa Pan Dao). (Pa the person and Pha the word for cliff do not sound the same because of tones, but that's another topic.) I could go on.

And all this is just based on consonants and vowel quality and lengths, not even going into different glyphs for the same consonant. I don't have a solution to offer for this. I 100% think authors or subtitling teams (or, y'know, REGULAR PEOPLE who just want folks who don't speak Thai to be able to put their name in writing) choosing a romanisation that looks good to them is valid. But I'm also a language nerd, so I can't quite stop thinking how much harder this makes it for folks trying to learn more about the language, or pick up more about it, either.

(Name examples and corresponding official romanisation taken from real life, A Tale of Thousand Stars, Bad Buddy Series, KinnPorsche The Series, My School President, and Our Skyy 2)

(*) Edited 2023-06-16 to add: this was a mistake stemming from too many unchecked edits and I'm sorry. Kampung's "a" is neither long nor short whereas Pran, Pa, and Phupha have long "a" sounds and Pat has a short one.

[twinhood-2dot0]

My adventure into J-Pop

My music taste is very multilingual. As an Indian living in another state, there's of course 4 default languages, although eh I only have like 2 or 3 Bengali songs, so let's go with 3, namely Malayalam, Hindi and English. But I have very little interest in lyrics, and don't have the listening skills to understand what they say, so that may be why I prefer EDM and songs in other languages. This past month however, I decided to try out J-Pop, after listening to all the stellar tracks from Attack On Titan. Seriously, you can't tell me there's a better soundtrack than AoT. So, what better song to try out than uh um the most popular Japanese song to ever exist. Yeah dw I'm not the kind of person who actively goes out to seek the most popular things, I just happened to fall in love with this song that happened to be the most popular J-Pop song.

Note: There's gonna be a lot of addendums. I wrote this post a while ago and watched a lot of the movies mentioned here.

夜に駆ける/Yoru Ni Kakeru/Racing Into The Night/Into The Night

Kanji (I think?), Romanised, Translated, and English release respectively. Yoru Ni Kakeru is the debut single of duo Yoasobi. Their slogan is "Novel into music". Already pretty intriguing for an avid bookworm and music...worm..? Although, it kinda disappointed because I couldn't really like too much more of their songs, wish it was otherwise. Haruka is decent, and a few other songs that I forgot to check the romanization for, but other than that, they were pretty meh. Okay, I listened to more, they have some pretty good songs, but none compare to this though. Okay anyways, onto why this song in particular became my favourite song. Damn, my favourite TV Series and comic series and movie and song are all Japanese. I might undeniably be a weeb now.

Go on, listen to the song, I'll wait. The whole thing, not the preview. I love this song so much I'm doing a part by part breakdown.

Done? Sounds peppy, doesn't it? So uh well, it's about suicide. TW for the rest of the section where I explain backstory lyrics etc.

Lyrics :P IDK how else to denote subsections better.

This song is based on a short story called An Invitation From Thanatos (translated). Read it here. If you wanna. It's pretty cool.

The basic premise of the story is that there are two kinds of people. People controlled by Thanatos and those controlled by Eros. You know who those are. Anyways, the former are destined for death, and the latter for life. The protagonist falls in love with a woman standing on a rooftop prepared to jump, and she does that a lot after their first meeting and texts him so he arrives. By the fifth time, he admits to himself and her that he doesn't want to live, and jumps off with her. It's left ambiguous as to whether she was real or a manifestation of Thanatos.

The song's lyrics are basically a retelling of the story in music form.

Here's a direct translation.

That's the direct translation. There's also the official English version of the song.

The English Version

The English version of the song is probably the best translated version of a song to exist. Don't believe me? Listen to this.

Use a headset, it's stereo.

See what I mean? They didn't just directly translate it, they also went to the trouble of using words that match the Japanese ones, while also keeping the meaning, although sometimes they're gramatically incoherent.

The song begins like

Jap (Romaji, that's what the Japanese called Romanization. It's also shorter, so that's what I'm gonna call it too.)

Shizumu you ni tokete yuku you ni Futari dake no sora ga hirogaru yoru ni

Eng

Seize a move, you're on me Falling, and we were dissolving You and me, skies above and wide It brings on the true night on me

Yeah, "Seize a move" has no meaning in English, but it does match "Shizumu". There are some egregious examples where they take liberty with grammar like "What can "night" for you mean, infinite?" and "Locating, never tough when I'm with you" and the rapped verse

She's gonna try to me, she's gonna lie Got to force a belief and trust to keep on.

The chorus is also a work of art.

Romaji

Sawagashii hibi ni waraenai kimi ni Omoitsuku kagiri mabushii asu o Akenai yoru ni ochite yuku mae ni Boku no te o tsukande hora Wasurete shimaitakute tojikometa hibi mo Dakishimeta nukumori de tokasu kara Kowakunai yo itsuka hi ga noboru made Futari de iyou

Eng

Saw what got seen hid beneath, and louder nights keep beating I'm going to you, and giving brighter shiny tomorrows What can "night" for you mean, infinite? You could run with me Place your hand in mine, you gotta stay, hold up Want to leave it behind, dark cruel days In deep, you may have hid before I'm embracing you until more heat dissolve what is caught up Sun will soon rise up into a day you're no more too afraid Keep all of me in you

(Damn English is a really inefficient language. Oh well, I'd take less letters to memorise over really short words too ig.)

The Intro

My favourite part of the song, for some reason. It's starts with a vocal solo, then a quiet piano sets in, vocals pause, vocals start, piano intensifies, and is joined by drums and bass. I especially love the tiny bass solo after the vocals end and the piano starts.

Verse 1

The first verse is nothing much of note, except for her voice being awesome, and the instrumentals are stellar too. I have a thing for a prominent bass and piano melodies and repeated melodies.

Pre-Chorus

I love the piano that play after the first part of every line, like "Itsu dakke"-piano + "chikku takku to".

Chorus

Ah, the part that made me fall in love. Nothing much to say here tho, except for oh my lord eargasm. The piano (drop?) that follows is also awesome.

Rapped Pre-Chorus

I usually despise rapped parts of most songs, be they rap songs with a few sung parts (Like so many awesome Adam Levine verses. Oh my lord, I love his verses in Stereo Hearts and Locked Away so much, I would honestly loop them if it were just him, but the rest of the song is just insufferable.) or a pop song with an inexplicable rap part (Like See You Again and Like It Is by Kygo. That song has Zara Larsson and Kygo, could it be any more perfect? Yes, as it turns out, because some dude called Tyga is also on it for some reason. Sorry about the angry rants, I hold an intense grudge against rappers). But this one however with her great voice and Ayase's production is perfect.. I miss my laptop so much, I had spicetify installed with an extension that let's me just loop a section of any song, would have been so useful for this song, literally every section is so loopable.

This song also spawned various hilarious parodies.

Of course you have no idea what Bing Chilling is or who that guy who vaguely looks like Mr. Beast is (if you even know who Mr Beast is lmao) so here's a more familiar one.

Okay, that's it for this song, I have a lot more to cover, so let's get a move on. Huh. Is that what "seize a move" means? Welp, no idea.

Your Name and Weathering With You

Your Name (Romaji: Kimi No Na Wa) is a 2016 anime romantic fantasy film created by Makoto Shinkai. You may be asking, why am I talking about a movie on a post about music, and most importantly, why a romance??? Well, uh, I may have watched it and uh um l-ummm okay I'm saying it, I loved it. I stumbled upon RADWIMPS' Sparkle while discovering music on YouTube. Yes, I discover music on YouTube, I hate Spotify recommendations, that's one and probably the only thing YouTube does better. Anyways, the song starts with a enchanting piano performance. So, I was intrigued and discovered that it was composed for a movie named Your Name. So, I immediately closed the tab. I believe music in like movies, games, series are very impactful, so I didn't want to spoil that experience. I don't think like all the soundtracks would have the same impact had I not experienced the main work itself. So, knowing nothing about the movie except for it has one track with an awesome intro, I watched it. It was BEAUTIFUL! I went in expecting nothing more than idk typical Freaky Friday stuff (if you don't know what that is, don't look it up! I already regret spoiling this much) and typical romance. Oh boy was I wrong. I won't spoil much except for saying that it was so much more than that, and it's the first time, well, anything, has made me tear up. I cannot understate how good this movie was. I still have it downloaded so that I can go back and watch scenes and I do that like every day, so much so that I have the timestamps memorized by now. (Dream Lantern-1:36, Zenzenzense-29:50, Kataware-Doki-1:18:20 (hands down the best scene of the movie btw), Sparkle-1:22:00, Nandemonaiya(movie edit)-1:37:37, Nandemonaiya (movie ver.)-1:40:50. Thank me later. Actually, this is an idea for a website I had, a wiki for soundtracks and its timestamps. There's tunefind, but that only has a description of the scene. Maybe I could contribute to tunefind with timestamps. Idk.). And yes, all of the soundtrack is equally epic, and I'm so glad I put off listening to it until watching the movie. The chills when listening to them again, like wow. Best movie soundtrack ever. Sorry The Batman, you're a close second now. Okay, I need to stop talking about this movie, before I end up ugly crying.

Here's the album, although I recommend watching the movie first. I know you hate romance even more than I do, but this movie is an experience you can't miss. (The song was Sparkle btw)

Oh, and here's my jp-origin songs playlist, before I forget (Yes, Yoru Ni Kakeru is in it 4 times :P).

Also, the director behind Your Name, he's apparently a big deal. 3 out of the top ten highest grossing anime films are all his, and you know about my tendency to obsess over everything made by someone who's made something I loved, so I am probably gonna watch all his movies.

Addendum: I just finished watching Weathering With You. Like, right now, I'm watching the credits lmao. It's an awesome movie, did not disappoint, although not as good as Your Name. The songs too, when the movie just started I was kinda disappointed but it picked up real quick by the penultimate uh arc?

Here's the album.

I can't link because there's a 10 audio limit for some reason? so uh I'll just mention them by names.

There are five lyrical tracks, namely Voice Of Wind, Celebration, Is There Still Anything Love Can Do?, Grand Escape, and We'll Be Alright. I'm too lazy to find the other non-lyrical great songs, all of the lyrical ones have "(Movie Edit)" appended. My favourites are Grand Escape and We'll Be Alright. Okay, well, I loved all of them, except for Voice Of Wind. When I heard it in the movie I was like "Noooooo RADWIMPS you can't do this to me" and then everything was fine after the intro.

Fireworks

On the topic of anime soundtracks, Fireworks is another one I discovered, although I listened to the whole thing before finding out it was a movie song :P. Anyways, it's another one I really loved.

Addendum: The movie was pretty meh :P. It wasn't terrible, but was pretty ick at the starting but the rest was not so bad. And the song was just a credits song and not an awesome heartwarming moment song. The other songs were also pretty good but I'm too lazy to find them.

Yuika

Nothing much special, but really cutesy catchy songs. She's also apparently in high school??? As if I wasn't already wondering what the hell I'm doing with my life 😭. Damn, Windows emojis are very ugly. Also, I have no idea how any of these are pronounced, except for Sukidakara.

Attack On Titan

Attack On Titan was my first exposure to Japanese music, okay well, manga and anime as well :P. But Attack On Titan has a mishmash of languages. There are German songs, English songs, German and English songs, German and Japanese songs, sometimes all of them. So the first purely Japanese song I heard was Akuma No Ko (Child Of Evil) by Higuchi Ai.

It was the ending/credits song for Season 3 I think. Aside from having symbolism (akin to literally everything Attack On Titan), it's a really great song to listen to. Awesome piano, chorus you get the jist. There are more AoT songs in my playlist, you can find them, the cover art makes them obvious.

(Damn oops I forgor Shinzo Wo Sasageyo! :P I thought it had German parts. Anyways awesome song, check that out too.)

Sukitte Ii Na Yo

It's um another romance anime. Look, it's not particularly good, but it's the first manga I ever read but didn't get to finish so I'm watching it all over again because completionist. What is good, however, are the opening and ending songs.

Wow, I think I crossed like 2300 words :P. Guess that's what happens if you write it over like 3 weeks and don't cut out the rants. You seem exhausted, here, have some water🥤. Don't worry, the next post has been heavily cut down on rants. See you next week!

[travelworldnetwork]

By Mithila Phadke

11 February 2019

As a newly minted Beijinger, there were certain things my brain quickly scrambled to make room for: the exact time I needed to leave home in the mornings to avoid being squashed into human dumpling filling on the rush-hour subway ride; the location of the best spots for mala xiang guo (a stir-fried version of hot pot); to never flush toilet paper; and to never, ever attempt eating a soup dumpling by putting it straight into your mouth (poke and slurp, people!).

One task, though, seemed impossible: remembering my QQ number, a string of randomly assigned digits that served as the user identification for the QQ messaging service our office – and many others in China – used.

It seemed living in China meant being constantly bombarded by numbers

As the only foreign employee in my department, I was also clearly the only one with this problem. My Chinese co-workers had no difficulty rattling off their own 10-digit, or in some cases nine-digit, IDs. No-one else felt the need to run over to his or her computer like a total idiot to check every time someone asked them. In case you didn’t realise, that idiot was/is me. Since that day two years ago, when a colleague helped me set it up, I’ve never once signed out of my QQ account, nervous that I’ll not be able to log back in at all. If you asked me what my QQ ID was, after more than 104 weeks of living in China and using this messaging service, I would not be able to tell you.

I once asked the British guy working in the office next to ours if he remembered his. He did not. Neither could my two American friends. “What do those numbers mean?” we’d whined to each other. “There’s no order of any kind to them. Why not just use letters?!” I had been tempted to place the blame squarely on our collective terrible memories but turns out, there was possibly more to this. None of the locals we’d asked seemed to find anything unusual about remembering not only long strings of QQ digits, but also various other sets of numbers in other areas of their everyday lives. They turned up in website domain names. They were part of internet slang. Certain numbers assumed significance in cultural beliefs: some were auspicious; others were to be fled from at all cost. Once I started looking, it seemed living in China meant being constantly bombarded by numbers, much more so than in other countries and cultures. And none of my Chinese co-workers or friends were quite sure why.

View image of Upon moving to Beijing, writer Mithila Phadke noticed the prevalence of numbers in daily life (Credit: Credit: jeremy sutton-hibbert/Alamy)

“I’ve heard the train fares on the CTrip website are kinda high,” my Sichuanese roommate Panbi told me, back when I first moved here, as we discussed my Chinese New Year travel plans. “Why don’t you try 12306?”

You may also be interested in: • How India gave us the zero • Japan’s unusual way to view the world • The country that can’t slow down

“Um. Is that a helpline number?” I’d asked, adding that I wasn’t sure my Mandarin skills were up to scratch yet. Turns out, no, it wasn’t a helpline. 12306.cn is China Rail’s official website and app. You know, just like email service websites 163.com and 126.com. While trying to find out exactly why all of them were named thusly, I found a very puzzled (non-Chinese) user’s post on a software company’s forum. “Are 126.com and 163.com fake email addresses?” he asked, with some consternation. “I noticed a number of email addresses for our members with [these] domain [names]. From what I've been able to tell via limited research, these domains could potentially be fake.” Other users quickly clarified that they were legitimate addresses. No-one, though, explained why.

Or wait, almost no-one. Turns out the reason was likely the same as the one behind every one of my life choices: it involved the least effort. As Frankie Huang, a writer and strategist based in Shanghai, told me over email, numbers are far easier to type for purposes like websites’ names, as compared to pinyin, the Romanised system for Chinese characters.

“Not everyone in China has perfect grasp of pinyin. If websites have pinyin names, it might actually be difficult for some people to figure out which letters to write,” she said. A string of numbers is easier to commit to memory than words in a foreign language.

Also, because numbers involve just a single keystroke, you can type much faster. “This was a particular advantage back when phones had real keypads and you had to hit number keys multiple times for letters,” Huang added. “Nobody has time for that.”

View image of Numbers often appear in website domain names as they are easier to type (Credit: Credit: Lou Linwei/Alamy)

Unlike the QQ IDs, the digits in a website name usually aren’t random, explains Christopher Beam in his New Republic essay. For instance, 163.com is the website address of Chinese internet company NetEase. It’s a throwback to the days of dial-up, when customers had to enter 163 to go online. “The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply re-appropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and 10010.cn, respectively.”

This is also where homophones get involved. Among e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba’s various platforms is 1688.com, with the numbers pronounced ‘ee-lio-ba-ba’ in Mandarin. Get it?

Some, like McDonald’s (phonetically translated in Mandarin as ‘Maidanglao’, until they changed their name in 2017) decided to get more creative. You can order your McMuffin online by typing 4008-517-517.cn because ‘517’ in Mandarin is ‘wu yi qi’. Almost like ‘wo yao chuh’ or ‘I want to eat’ (‘chuh’ is the closest phonetic spelling for ‘chi’, the actual word for ‘eat’). Website 51job.com sounds awfully close to ‘I want a job’, and the ‘6’ in video-streaming site 6.cn’s address is a near-homophone for ‘to stream’, writes Beam. All Chinese digits are monosyllabic, making them easier to remember as sounds, or a short, catchy chant.

View image of McDonald’s allows its customers in China to order food by typing 4008-517-517.cn (Credit: Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy)

While this societal fascination with numbers truly becomes apparent once you have lived in China long-term, it’s often something tourists might notice too. The first time I encountered the cultural quirk was years ago, on my first trip here. I was in the city of Taizhou, spending a few days with my dad. He worked there, flying back and forth between Taizhou and Mumbai every couple of months. On my way up to his apartment, I noticed the lift panel had no fourth floor. There was 1, there was 2 and then there were 3A and 3B. Months later, when I had moved to China myself, I kept coming across elevators that had resolutely decided to not acknowledge 4.

The reason is that the pronunciation of the word ‘four’ in Mandarin sounds way too close for comfort to the word for ‘death’. Which, in the case of the more-orthodox Chinese people, necessitated banishing the number entirely. A co-worker gently suggested I remove one of the four hand-painted coasters I had brought from India for my boss before presenting them to her. My real estate agent informed me, strictly off-record, that often, apartments numbered 4 or 44 tended to be rented out to foreigners. “Many times, the local Chinese people don’t want to live there,” she said, instantly making me remember house 44 inside Qianmachang Hutong in Beijing, where my very American ex-boyfriend had lived.

Huang says her apartment building in Shanghai is “an extreme example of numerical superstition”. It ascribes to not only Chinese, but also Western numerology. Along with leaving out floors 4, 14, 24 and 34, it has also done away with 13. “Once, I was looking at our building from the outside with my husband and we tried to figure out which floor was ours by counting up,” Huang recalled. “[We then realised] that the floor numbers are meaningless as they're all wrong.” 13 was actually 14; 23 was actually 20.

View image of Oftentimes in China, apartments numbered 4 and 44 are considered less desirable (Credit: Credit: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy)

Number 8, on the other hand, is the luckiest, as it sounds like the Mandarin word for prosperity. Car number plates with multiple 8’s have likely been paid a fortune for by their owners, and the ornate ‘88’ building number outside Mr Shi’s Dumplings in Beijing is essentially an announcement to any potential competitors that they are doing very well indeed, thank you very much. If you happen to get an 888 in your phone number, you could likely sell it for a pretty good price.

Numbers also lend a sense of solidness, apparent from the government’s fondness for incorporating them into official policies. There’s the ‘Four Comprehensives’ put forth by Chinese President Xi Jinping, another heartening moment of redemption for the number 4 after Chairman Mao advocated for the ‘Four Olds’ – Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, and Old Habits – in the 1960s. Because official policies are kept separate from cultural superstition, it’s irrelevant how “lucky” a number is. Former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Jiang Zemin had the ‘Three Represents’. Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao had the slightly more bluesy-sounding ‘Three Supremes’, but then made up for it with the very serious ‘Eight Honours and Eight Shames’ – also the title of the lecture my Indian parents gave me the second I hit puberty.

View image of Numbers have also become engrained in Chinese internet slang (Credit: Credit: Education & Exploration 3/Alamy)

Then there’s the wide, wild world of Chinese internet slang, where dodging censors (or just nosy parents) means homophonic numerals are popular. So 748 is telling someone to go to hell, 555 basically means a crying emoji, 233 means you’re laughing, and 520 is ‘I love you’. And if you wanted to really kick it up a few notches, there’s 2010000, which means ‘I love you for 10,000 years’. How’s that for your Valentine’s Day Instagram hashtag?

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