Nihongojouzu

Japan's New Year Get a Mac ad

Another offering from Apple Japan、this time with the Mac and PC characters discussing making nengajo 年賀状 - New Years cards - the Japanese equivalent of the Christmas card. The video is subtitled courtesy of Coal, naturalised Japanese citizen of English extraction and the man behind the blog Offering Booze to a Deity in Kowloon (where he posted about the ad ages ago!)

For keen beans - here's the transcript of the ad (prizes if you can spot any errors!):

Mac: どうも、マックです。

PC: こんにちは、パソコンです。

Mac:　なんだかあっという間年末、もうすぐ正月だね。どうしたの？

PC: はい。。。一週間も仕事できないなんて、つらいです。

Mac: ええ？空いた時間ですきなこと楽しめばいいじゃない、年賀状作ったりとかさ。ほら。

PC: ええ？

Mac: マックならiPhotoで写真を使っていろいろかんたんにつくれるんだ。

PC: これ、かわいいブタですね！

Mac: いのしし。

Nengajo are sent out in the last week of December, held by the Post Office and delivered en masse on January 1. They typically feature the Chinese zodiac animal for that year and in Japan 2007 is Year of the Wild Boar (inoshishi), which sounds a lot cooler than the actual Chinese version - Year of the Pig (Oh Apple, you are so clever!)

More katakana movie titles: Casino Royale

Once again I have been perplexed by that most ancient of foes - the katakana movie title (see my post about the katakana-ization of Narnia). I sought linguistic relief in the Honyaku list, a wonderfuI brains trust of E-J and J-E translators:

Dear All

I just finished perusing the handbill for the latest Bond flick, Casino Royale (picked it up at the cinema a few days ago) and noticed that the title had been rendered as カジノ・ロワイヤル

I have always wondered why Koushun Takami's Battle Royale became バトル・ロワイヤル　and not バトル・ロイヤル　but figured it may be a quirk limited to that book.

Now Bond has jumped on the bandwagon.

BTW Enamdict throws up these renderings of royale:

フロントロイヤル  (p) Front Royale
ロイヤル  (u) Royale
ロイヤル島国立公園 [ロイヤルとうこくりつこうえん]  (p) Isle Royale National Park

So my question is, does anyone know why royale become ロワイヤル and even if you don't actually know, any ideas? (after all, it isn't a simple ガラス／グラス　distinction - there is a whole extra sound!)

Cheers

Will

A helpful Francophone set me straight - ロワイヤル is the katakanafication of the French pronunciation of royale. My anglocentric arrogance meant I didn't even turn my mind to the fact that Japanese doesn't just borrow from English, it borrows from all manner of languages. I felt chastened, but wiser.

Anglophones are fortunate that so many Japanese words of French origin are also borrowings or even cognates in English, so リムジン, グルメ　and アンコール are recognisable as limousine, encore and gourmet. When the katakana borrowing doesn't have a dual existence in English deciphering it can be a real pain in the derriere. For example ピーマン、アンケート　and デッサン will thwart most anglophones on first meeting and even rendering them in their original forms - piment, enquete (actually enquête) and dessin - doesn't necessarily make them any easy to work out. Sometimes learning Japanese means picking up a little French.

Finding out where a katakana word came from can be not only enlightening but a lot of fun. I know that guinea pig is モルモット　but only when I looked it up did I realise it comes via the Dutch word marmot (which is a different animal but of the same family). 　Walrus is セイウチ　which sounds nothing like walrus because it comes from the Russian sivuch.　A part time job is アルバイト or even just バイト, from the German Arbeit ("work"). Country names are one area where Japanese often opted for the wholesale rather than retail and adapted the native pronunciation, thus ドイツ　for Deutschland and not ジャーマ二 (although I did have some ジャーマンポテト　at a restaurant the other night).

The conclusion of my research is thus - if you encounter a katakana word you can't decipher there are three broad possibilities:

1. You have a very small vocabulary in English
2. The katakanification has rendered the word unrecogniseable.
3. It's French (German, Russian etc etc)

Bon chance!

(You can find a list of katakana words of non-English origin here at Japan Reference)

Death Note and approaching material from multiple angles

I was channel surfing the other night when I happened upon a movie in which young actor Tatsuya Fujiwara (藤原竜也) was walking down a suburban Tokyo street with a dirty great black demonic creature floating along beside him. The demon turned out to be a Death God (死神) called Ryuk and the movie was Death Note (デス・ノート) - a manga adaptation in which the protagonist Light Yagami (Fujiwara) comes into possession of a book with a nifty power: write someone's name in the Death Note and that person keels over from a heart attack.

The movie turned out to be the TV broadcast of the first of two movies - Part 2 (Death Note: The Last Name) was released in Japanese cinemas on November 3 (I was going to gloat about having seen a movie before everyone else in the world but then I remember the delayed releases in Japan of LOTR and the Star Wars prequels and it made me feel like crying again).

What is the connection with Japanese study? I think Death Note can be used to illustrate  two principles of language learning (which I do not claim to have invented or discovered, merely expounded upon), namely:

1. Find subject matter you are interested in
2. Approach material from multiple angles

Let's start with No.1. 

I like the idea of otherwordly beings with hellish visages just as much as the next guy but throw in a book which lets you kill without leaving a clue and I was hooked. I did a spot of internet research and found out about the mangaic* origins of the films, and that an animated series was being broadcast weekly on Japanese TV. I popped into the local bookshop and picked up the first three volumes of the manga. A caveat - I am no rabid manga otaku, nor even a slighty frothy-mouthed one. I own Crayon Shinchan, GTO and Detective Conan and I have a friend's copies of Nausicaa on loan but most of my Japanese reading is non-fiction with the occasional novel. But I simply had to have this manga.

Finally I visited YouTube and found the animated series.

And then I read, and I watched.

The point is that because Death Note piqued my interest I wanted to understand the material. It didn't even feel like study, but hey, if you hear a cause of death repeated enough times you remember it (OK, I confess, heart attacks are not the only way you can die.....).

Now for No.2. The idea behind approaching material from multiple angles is that you get all the benefit of revising the same vocabulary, grammar etc without the monotony of reviewing in exactly the same way each time.

The Movie
-listening practice
-new vocabulary
-boost in motivation

The Manga
-has kanji for the new vocab I heard in the movie
-has the words I heard but didn't recognise/didn't catch
-provides me with a script so I can practise reading out loud (if I so desire)

The Animated Series
-almost exactly the same as the manga, so I can shadow what people are saying
-slightly different to the movie so its is still fun to watch both.
-more listening practice

At the very least I am going over the material three times. In fact I went back and watched the movie again (praise the ability to record TV digitally), this time with the benefit of having reviewed the vocab using the manga.

Each angle reinforces the others. The vocab I read in the manga now comes alive when I hear the movie or animation characters say it. The words in the manga now have an aural memory - I can picture the characters saying them. The vocab I hear in a second viewing of the movie/animation I can often affix a kanji to. I can keep repeating the cycle of movie-manga-animation until I get sick of it (unlikely!) or until I know it all. And by know I mean:

-I can read new vocab when I see it
-I can understand new vocab when I hear it
-because I have learnt vocab in context I can use it in conversation

If I grabbed the novel adaptation I could add another angle.  I could even rip the audio and listen to it on my iPod (but then I wouldn't get to see the Death Gods....) Hell, come February 2007 I will be able to play Death Note: Kira Game on my Nintendo DS!!!!

There you have it.
1. Find yourself subject matter in Japanese you are really interested in.
2. Study it using different media

*I just coined this word - yes! - but I will acknowledge that it does exist with an independent etymology as the name of an area of the Waitotara Valley in New Zealand.

Haikuplanet

The first offering from new Tokyo web startup jonkenpon is Haikuplanet, a gem of a site where users can create, vote on, save and send haiku! As explained by one half of the jonkenpon team, Jon Yongfook Cockle:

Using a rather nifty AJAX-ified panel to create your haiku in real-time, users can choose from a number of different themes and font-styles, with which to create a visual style that best represents the context of their haiku

The site requires a simple sign in and then presents you with an intuitive interface where you not only type in your haiku but also select themes and fonts, previewing in real time before  you publish them to the site.

Not only is it attractive, well designed and fun to use, but Haikuplanet is a wonderful way to practice your Japanese. To whit:

1. The site is monolingual Japanese so your reading skills get a workout just from navigating about.

2. Lots of amusing haiku to read. At 3 lines of 5-7-5 mora (Japanese syllables) even the laziest student of Japanese has no excuse.

3. Most of the contributors thus far have opted for the writing brush font which means the kanji look cooler but they can also be harder to read - but hey, if you can read brushstroke style kanji you will breeze through normal fonts.

4.  You now have an excellent excuse to write in Japanese, remembering that writing is the least developed skill for foreign learners of the language.

5. Writing haiku teaches you to count the mora (syllables) of the words you use - in other words it forces you to think about the readings of any kanji, and by default has you analyzing the sound structure of each of your creations  (no one wants the shame of screwing up the simple 5-7-5 scheme).

6. It is a lot of fun! (Check out the Wii haiku)

There is one last point for Japanese learners. Haikuplanet was put together by the two directors of jonkenpon, both of whom are twentysomething former JET Programme ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers), which just goes to show that if you put the effort in your language  studies one of your career options is that of a bilingual entrepreneurial web developer!