kanji seems scary but it helps so much with understanding things. in my lesson last night i struggled with some of the practice questions because a lot of words i was used to reading in kanji were written in hiragana and i was just like ???? i stg i've never seen these words in my life. but then my teacher wrote the kanji and i was like OH YEAH NO I HAVE LEARNED THESE WORDS.
禅 “zen”
The above artwork is available on my Etsy shop here.
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The Unique Challenges of Renting in Japan - Part 1
Thinking of living in Japan?
A friendly warning: renting an apartment in Japan as a foreigner is TOUGH.
Before you find yourself immersed in an eternal hellscape of bureaucracy, check out my latest Medium article on this subject.
In this article I explain:
- Common reasons why Japanese landlords may reject you. Spoiler: it’s not all racism (although obvs some of it is!)
- The number 1 reason why renting in Japan is difficult for foreigners.
- Why you are probably better off (at least in the beginning) renting a room in a share house with about 10 other gai(koku)jin.
愛は勝つ (ai wa katsu) “love wins”
I created this as a commission for a friend who wanted to give it as part of a gift.
Before writing, I double checked the Japanese with my Japanese teacher to make sure it sounded natural (I *always* do this - it saves embarrassing mistakes!).
She said that as well as sounding natural, it is also:
- a well-known pop song
- the name of a charity campaign to raise money for survivors of the Fukushima earthquake/tsunami disaster.
My friend also wanted some parts of the characters in red.
Can you see the significance of the red parts?
The 心 in 愛 (love) on its own means “heart”.
The 力 in 勝つ (win) on its own means “power”.
Japanese kanji are pretty awesome that way :)
If you’re interested in surprising a friend with a unique gift, why not consider commissioning a calligraphy work?
夢 (yu-mé) “dream”
The above artwork is available on my Etsy shop here.
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Little bit of seal script today! Lovely. 山縣 is read Yamagata.
山 is read yama, san, or sen, and it means mountain.
縣 is a variant of 県, meaning prefecture, which we sort of covered the other day. Both are read か.ける or ケン, while 縣 also has the meaning of county, district, or subdivision. The difference is that 縣 is what's called a 人名用 jinmeiyō kanji, a variant used for names rather than everyday vocabulary.
Ooh, never seen this version of 県 before!
罠英語・Trap words pt 2
Part 1 had some satisfying explanations for the etymology of trap words. This time it’s the opposite - we’ll be looking at some trap words that have unclear origins.
コーンフレーク → cornflakes ✅… but also → any breakfast cereal ✅
Though the word コーンフレーク is used to refer to cornflakes specifically, it is also used more generally to refer to any breakfast cereal at all. Researching to find evidence of this usage was difficult, despite its widespread usage. Every Japanese dictionary defines コーンフレーク as cereal made of flakes of corn, without so much as a mention of the common “misconception”. You get a hint of the reality of the common usage when you google 「コーンフレーク 意味」— three of the results on the first page are variations of 「シリアルとコーフレークの違いは何？」.
The best I can do for evidence is this video from Kevin’s English Room where they refer to various cereals like Froot Loops and Reese’s Puffs as コーンフレーク.¹
非常に代表的なアメリカのコーンフレークでございます
"This is an extremely typical American breakfast cereal."
Part of the silence here is due to Japanese speakers being generally a bit more linguistically prescriptivist than English speakers, especially when it comes to loan words. There seems to be this notion that the original English definition is the “correct” one - but this isn’t the case! The “correct” use of a word is simply one that conveys the intended meaning. That’s just how language evolves. It’s why “nonplussed” has come to mean “unconcerned” instead of its original opposite meaning. Not to mention, when a word is borrowed into another language, it is now a part of that language. It goes through phonetic changes to match the language's phoneme inventory and syllabic structure, gains its own meaning, and can play by the unconscious sound and grammar rules of the new language.² The Japanese word コーンフレーク and the English word cornflake are not the same word! And it’s ok for them to mean different things! I don’t think this sentiment is widely accepted by Japanese culture, which explains why it’s so hard to find a Japanese dictionary definition that defines コーンフレーク as “breakfast cereal”. (Jisho does though!³)
As far as its origins are concerned, I believe this is a simple case of genericisation (though I can't find any evidence to support that), similar to how we call all hook-and-loop fasteners "velcro".
ハンドル → handle ❌ → steering wheel ✅
This word is was also hard to find any etymology on. Even the best articles I could find are unsure about its origins. There are a couple of theories but nothing solid.
The word ハンドルバー for the handlebars of a bike may have been misinterpreted to mean “steering mechanism” rather than “horizontal pole to grab” and applied to cars as well.⁴ Then in standard Japanese fashion, the word was trimmed down to four morae, becoming ハンドル. Another article suggested that it originally came from the “handling” of a car. The wheel controls the handling, so 「ハンドルを操るホイール」 may have just been shortened to ハンドル.
テンション → tension ❌ → excitement ✅
テンション is often used in phrases like 「ハイテンション」 「テンションを上げる」 「テンションを下げる」, to mean the energy or vibes of a situation. This graph might help:
ALTI did a lot of digging on this, and I couldn’t find any reliable sources or actual records of how テンション came to have this meaning. The best explanation I could find came from an unsourced yahoo answers question (lol), but there does seem to be a consensus: It seems to come from musical tension, specifically tension chords on guitar.⁵⁶⁷ The first use of テンション in this way may have come from bands playing at live concerts. “Tension” in a chord is an extra note that’s not a basic part of the chord.⁸ Apparently adding this extra sound causes a feeling of anticipation - it feels like the music is building up to a resolution, which gets people excited at a concert. Musicians would use the phrase 「テンションコードを上げる」, meaning “build excitement with tension chords”, which became simply 「テンションを上げる」, and this phrase was then adopted by the general population and taken out of its musical context, becoming a trap word!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tROynQjSSVc
[2] https://www.tumblr.com/javerend/702780060197879809/these-are-all-good-thoughts-im-going-to-borrow?source=share
[3] https://jisho.org/search/コーンフレーク
[4] https://nihon5-bunka.net/jinglish-handle/
[5] https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q13195893143
[6] https://kimini.online/blog/archives/22851
[7] https://dhits.docomo.ne.jp/feed/10004705
[8] https://hubguitar.com/music-theory/chord-tensions
Japanese often uses English words but uses them in slightly different ways.
One reason this causes confusion is because of the “scope” of the word.
As the above article mentions, the Japanese word 「コーンフレーク」 (from the English “cornflakes”) is used to mean any type of breakfast cereal.
This can be confusing for Japanese people learning English.
But perhaps not quite as confusing as the time I informed one of my Japanese English-learning students that an obi is sometimes described as a “belt” in English. She refused to believe me until another student informed her that I was correct.
罠英語・Trap Words pt 1
和製英語（わせいえいご）are Japanese words that have some origin in English, but have been appropriated by the Japanese speaking community. Often, if converted from katakana to English, they won’t be real English words (which can sometimes lead to funny mistranslations on signs).
- シャーペン → shar-pen?? ❌ → mechanical pencil ✅
- トランプ → trump?? ❌ → playing cards ✅
- ベビーカー → baby car?? ❌ → stroller/pram ✅
However, there is a subcategory of 和製英語 which is particularly insidious, as a japanese learner. I’m gonna call them 罠英語 - trap words. They appear to be a normal English word simply converted into kanakana, but although they look like a regular old loan word, they are actually a Japanese misinterpretation or reinterpretation of an English word.
マンション → mansion ❌ → condominium/apartment ✅
The most well known example is probably マンション. Each of these words has a history which explains how they became trap words. In マンション’s case, it was business. In the 1960s, Japanese developers were building luxury housing complexes, but wanted to differentiate them from other housing complexes that had a low-class image, like public housing.¹ As far as I can tell, it wasn’t just one company, and マンション wasn’t a brand name. They created a whole new word, borrowing from English. Since then, the word マンション evolved to have a wider and wider scope, now including not just luxury housing complexes but any housing complex.
ALTジュース → juice ❌ → juice/soft drink/sports drink/mixer ✅
This one drives me up the wall because of how different it is from English. ジュース is a huge umbrella term which includes Coke, Aquarius, ramune, flavoured milk(!!), and actual orange juice. It does NOT include coffee, tea, anything with alcohol, or lemon juice(!!). Why not lemon juice? Because ジュース kinda means “beverage”. You don't usually drink lemon juice straight, so it’s not ジュース. Instead, you call lemon juice レモン汁. There are plenty of recipes on the japanese recipe sharing website Cookpad for レモンジュース, and most of them involve diluting actual lemon juice in carbonated water and mixing it with sugar or honey.²
Apparently, up until the 1960s (〜昭和40年), the word ジュース was not regulated, which meant Japanese brands were free to label fruit flavoured drinks as ジュース, even if they had no actual fruit juice in them. This changed in in late 1967, when, thanks to pressure from consumer groups, the Japanese Agricultural Standard Law (JAS法) was revised to include a regulatory definition of the word ジュース: 「果汁100%のもの以外は、『ジュース』という名称で販売できない」(100% fruit juice).³ Even the wikipedia article for ジュース defines it using the JAS definition.⁴ However, the word ジュース had already entered common usage before the law came into effect, and it’s still used today to mean any non-coffee, non-tea, non-alcoholic, sweet beverage, especially ones sold from a vending machine. I believe the prevalence of vending machines may have led to the spread of this word. Another reason ジュース has not been adopted in common use may be that Japanese already has a word for fruit juice - 果汁. Languages dislike redundancy, so it’s natural that one of the two would have changed to have a different meaning. Many native Japanese speakers are unaware of the regulatory definition⁵, (and even then, regulations shouldn’t and don’t dictate how language is used in everyday conversation) so it’s important to be careful!
ノート → note ❌ → notebook ✅
In Japanese, it’s rare that a common word will be longer than 4 kana sounds long (aka morae). Similarly in English, we don’t end to use words that are over 4 syllables long very often. In English, the word “notebook” is 2 syllables, nice and short. But when you convert it into Japanese, it becomes ノートブック, a whole 6 morae! No one has time to say all that! Since English can fit multiple consonants into a single syllable but Japanese can’t, when converting to Japanese, lots of additional vowels get added in, which extends the word. That’s why loan words in Japanese tend to get abbreviated: ビル for building, リモコン for remote control, ティアキン for “Tears of the Kingdom”.⁶ It’s only natural that ノートブック would get abbreviated to ノート. It’s just an unlucky coincidence that “note” happens to be an English word as well. The word for "note" in Japanese is メモ!
This is why the Death Note is called a note, even though it’s not a note, and also gives us this slightly おかしい translation.
ALTI’m keen to post more about these trap words since dictionaries are often quite prescriptivist about the meanings, and it’s hard to get a good idea of what the word means without talking to Japanese people. I also find the histories quite interesting. Let me know if you’re interested! I have a feeling these words (besides ジュース) may be kinda common knowledge, but I hope the explanations were interesting! I think next time I'll talk about some ones that are less commonly known.
[1]: https://www.homes.co.jp/cont/buy_mansion/buy_mansion_00137/
[2]: https://cookpad.com/search/レモンジュース
[3]: https://www.meg-snow.com/customer/center/communication/pdf/center12.pdf
[4]: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ジュース
[5]: https://macaro-ni.jp/36654
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contracted_words
Fascinating and useful stuff!