Unsolicited Advice

There are some unpleasant truths you learn very quickly when you get to the reading-real-things part of Japanese. 1. The Japanese consider spaces to be optional. Corollary: People are lazy. If something is optional, it won't be done. This is one of the few things that gets better when you learn kanji. Before that, it's one long string of kana where you just have to sort of insert breaks at random and test to see if it makes any damn sense. Once you start throwing kanji in, you can at least start by figuring that character +  okurigana  (kana used for grammatical endings) means it's a verb. This also, incidentally, makes me uncertain why case markers in Japanese are taught as separate particles rather than inflections. There are short tags that come right after nouns to indicate nominative, accusative, genitive, etc. Left to their own devices, Japanese people will attach them to the end of the preceding noun. English-speakers will slap a space in between the two, to se...

One of the things that takes a while to grasp when you learn Japanese is how to spot equivalents in the various fonts. Japanese has different typefaces just like Western languages do, and they're even grouped into families the same way. You've probably read English long enough that you don't think about it anymore, but imagine being a Japanese kid and being presented with a a a a g g g g and being told that all the characters on any given line were supposed to be the same thing. You would think you were losing your mind. The first font you learn to read in your Japanese class is the one in your textbook, which is going to be unfairly legible. It's usually a printed minchou  『明朝』style, which is the equivalent of a serif font in Latin alphabets. The name comes from Ming-chou, as in Ming Dynasty, the period during which they nicked it from China. (The characters mean "light" and "morning", which goes to show you what the Ming ...

As you all know by now, I am physically incapable of putting down any video game that involves crazy puzzles, big gay lawyers, or both. I've found out that there are Detective Conan games, because of course there are, and that they are not available in the US, because of course they aren't. This is why I have a flashcart. My Japanese is, by my own standards, not fantastic. This is because my standards are based on English, a language that I learned to read so early that I do not remember what it was like to see marks on paper and not have them mean things. By the standards of normal Americans, who took two semesters of Spanish in high school and have long since purged it from their brains, my ability to hammer my way through games like this in Japanese is some kind of crazy magic power. The level of incredulity in Boston is much lower than in Flagstaff, where I would get people walking up to me when I had my nose jammed into a not-English book specifically to ask, "Ca...

Finally figured out what the hell that kanji was meant to be. Ryuuichi's using the construct 父親,  chichioya , which literally says "father parent". I've never run into it before. He's also using it without the formal o-  or any honorific suffixes, when talking to Mitsurugi about Mitsurugi père . No dictionary will tell me definitively what that one means, but he is definitely doing it on purpose -- when explaining to Mayoi in the office, he drops back and uses otousan , as she has been. The oya  part is also used in other constructs for people who are seen as parental figures, like oyakata  (親方), a "coach" in martial arts, or oyabun  (親分), "Boss" of a gang, or the don of a crime family, in a very tightly-knit sense. The implication is that this is someone you look to for guidance. The character is also used with a different pronunciation in a collection of adjectives and expressions that describe intimate relationships, with overtones of gre...

Finally gotten to Case 1-4 in Gyakuten Saiban . You know, the interesting  case. Lotta's name in Japanese is Natsumi, mercifully in katakana. She has one of the heaviest Kansai-ben accents I've ever tripped across. If you've ever seen Meitantei Conan  in Japanese -- she's worse than Hattori, who is hamming it up at least half the time. It's not incomprehensible, but I'm guessing at a lot of slang based on context and vague impressions. Manfred von Karma is Karuma Goh. He is equally creepy. His speech is distinctive. It's common in Japanese to double up on imitative noises and non-word sorts of descriptions; a heartbeat, for instance, is dokidoki , and zuruzuru, zuruzuru  is the equivalent of "dilly-dally". Karuma uses a lot of them, especially with -o endings, which in Japanese tend to be considered evocative of rolling or booming noises. (The "Goron" in Zelda games is from gorogoro , the noise of an avalanche or rock fall.) A lot of ...

Still happily playing through GyakuSai games in Japanese. I only get to do these things in fits and starts, and can't play games and fix my lingerie at the same time, sadly. I only have so many hands. Two, to be precise. Although I do tend to cache pins and needles in my mouth when those are insufficient -- you clamp the pin in place using the bottom edge of your top incisors, pushing up with the tip of your tongue and letting the part outside your mouth push against your bottom lip, but apparently if you don't sew you don't know this. The cringing the first time David saw me do it was rather funny. The middle two cases in the first game, the ones that are Ryuuichi vs Mitsurugi, are enlightening. There's a noticeable sliding scale in the way Edgeworth speaks in English, going from "delivering opening statement to the Judge" to "hammering on the desk demanding that the witness give their name and profession for the third time", but the difference i...

Further random cultural notes: I would like to point out that the yobisute style of speaking occurs in languages other than Japanese, although it's most explicit there. It had a prominent place in English up until, oh, fifty years ago or so. The BBC's Sherlock  plays with it in the modernization; the protagonists call each other 'Sherlock' and 'John' in the modern day, because this is the appropriate localization (...chronolization?) of the two of them calling one another 'Holmes' and 'Watson' a century prior. Strangers address them both with titles, as 'Mr Holmes' and 'Dr Watson', to pay them the proper respect. First names are only for family and lovers -- the Holmes brothers, note, call one another 'Sherlock' and 'Mycroft' -- but the precise relationship of the detective and his doctor is more in the nature of a close friendship than anything involving professional distance. Hence, dropped titles as a sign ...

Following on the previous post about bludgeoning my way through Gyakuten Saiban  in not-English, it occurs to me that most of my audience probably doesn't speak any Japanese. Give it a shot. It's fun, for a certain highly-contrived, lunatic value of fun . I learned it because I wanted to read manga. I also learned French because I have a thing for Dumas ( père  and fis ) and for Victorian policiers , of which Maurice Leblanc wrote about a billion, and German because I like math and Michael Ende. It's not so much a matter of whether  I can pick up a language, as it is a matter of if I've run into anything I care to read in it, and how far down I am on the list. I touched before on the complexity of formality and respect in the Japanese language. It's worse than you think. There are entirely different sets of pronouns and verbs for different degrees of respectfulness. There are some sets that elevate the person you're speaking to, and some that humble the speak...

I am nothing if not a masochist when it comes to hammering Japanese into my brain, and lately I've needed things to think about that are not related to insurance and paperwork, so I have re-started poking at the Ace Attorney  games -- or, more properly, the Gyakuten Saiban  games. The DS games are remakes of the GBA games and conveniently also contain an English script if I get too fed up with things, although you can't switch back and forth in the same save file, and the English text in the Japanese release has enough typos to rival some of Taito's classic 'quarity tlansration' efforts, from back in the day. Still. It's interesting. The localizations were done astonishingly well, considering Capcom basically released the first one in the US on a whim. As expressive as the English is, though, there are a lot of things in Japanese that just don't come across, because there simply do not exist any equivalents. One of the most basic ones, and usually very r...

Man, Pinterest just ticked me off. It won't accept non-alphanumeric characters for board names. I wanted to call the 'random pretty drawings' one 色々のイロ and it wouldn't let me. The literal meaning of [色],  iro , is "color"; the second whatzit in [色々] is a "repeat last kanji" mark, and iroiro  means "various and sundry"; and the katakana [イロ], also iro , is short for irosutoreeshon , or "illustration", used often when talking about artbooks. I could transliterate it to "iroiro no IRO", but then it just looks stupid, and it loses a couple layers of pun. Spoilsports. Continuing on the theme of horrendous puns, and my obsession with puzzle games, I'd like to take a moment to note how much glee Ace Attorney  things give me every time I play them, and I realize the translation doesn't blow. It's almost like they hired someone competent to do this. There are other good localization groups out there -- Working Desig...

The Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney  series that I've been poking at is basically made of terrible puns. The Japanese, if you haven't noticed, love these things. Both spoken and written puns are much easier to construct in Japanese than in many other languages -- although the visual ones don't always work when read aloud, and the aural ones don't always work in text -- for a number of reasons. First and foremost are the borrowed Chinese characters. Called kanji  in Japanese and hanzì  in Mandarin (both written 漢字), they came into widespread use back in the ancient court days, when the high-ranking men would keep official records in Chinese script, mostly as a status symbol ("behold, I have to do so little physical peasant labor that I can learn an entire other complicated language without starving") to prevent the plebs from getting into them. I can't swear that women were never taught Chinese, but educated women wrote in the vernacular, using hiragana , wh...

I mentioned before that Miyavi has a tendency to fold, spindle and mutilate language to suit his purposes; a lot of Japanese musicians do, particularly when they speak decent English. Gackt likes to spell things funny and use the LEGO method of building his own verbs, for one, and Amuro Namie flips back and forth between rhyming English words with either their native or their Japanese pronunciation. Miyavi is one of the worst -- or one of the best, depending on how you look at it. Below are the lyrics to a song of his called "Señor・Señora・Señorita". Right off the bat, you may notice that A) the title of this song is not technically in English or  Japanese, and B) those dots in between the words do not exist in your boringly standard alphabetic font. (They're part of the full-width katakana character set, in the Windows IME.) This happens a lot. Miyavi is not actually incomprehensible, but he believes that typographical conventions are for boring people. The people who t...