[Multilingual Monday] Kanji stylisations and "feminine" accusations

Nov 05, 2012 22:47

Our first topic: this link, with 50 flags used by various towns and cities in Japan, that feature stylized kanji. I'm not sure about you, but except for a few, it was really hard for me to "see" the character in many of the designs, even after the captions explaining what the characters are supposed to be. This is a similar problem to my lack of ( Read more... )

multilingual monday, kanji, japanese

Leave a comment

Comments 3

pne November 6 2012, 05:28:12 UTC
I could see about half of the characters in those flags, but only after reading the explanations! Half of them I couldn't see even when I knew what character to be looking for.

I often complain, that I hate not having someone local with whom to discuss languages, and I know very few people that are fellow linguaphiles?

And I know *that* feeling, too.

Also, good job on being able to talk about the language point with native speakers!

Reply


bluebear2 November 6 2012, 15:27:10 UTC
The kanji logos are really nice. Much nicer looking than many communities' logos in this continent.
For example this one from Nanaimo:
http://www.nanaimo.ca/assets/Municipal~Hall/Images/CityLogo.jpg

One of the trippiest town logos is for Burnley:
http://burnley.co.uk/about/attachment/burnley-final-logo-small/

The bat one is neat. Reminiscent of Batman.

Yes, and true about getting a native speaker to be the final say as opposed to someone who knows a lot and has a big head about it. You see that a lot in Germany. People there learn English early on in school so they think they are experts and so don't feel they need to have their work checked before printing something and it's usually full of mistakes or false friends. Things that nobody ever bothered to correct them when speaking.

Reply


muckefuck November 6 2012, 15:36:59 UTC
IME, the Japanese language and insecure straight-identified American men are a bad combo. They "know" that the Japanese language is completely different for men and women and they're so terrified of sounding the least bit faggy that they go completely in the other direction. That explains the affection for Osaka-ben, among other things.

And I used to be one of those know-it-alls when it came to foreign languages. I like to think I've gotten a lot better. My default response has changed from "No one says that!" to "Maybe you could say it that way, I've just never heard it".

Reply


Leave a comment

Up