-
[Multilingual Monday] Don't Be A Taro
Are you familiar with Japanese prime minister Taro Aso? He's, unfortunately, he's become quite infamous due to his numerous blunders in vocally rendering Chinese characters in speechesFor those unfamiliar: up until around 700, Japanese had no writing system, and was purely a spoken language. At that point all things Chinese had been imported into ( Read more... ) -
[Multilingual Monday] Connotations, Plus: Engrish in Reverse!
Man, thank God for sites like JeKai!! Japanese can be considered by many to be vague -- あいまい, aimai. Toss in the fact that, like any other language, there are words that garner other connotative meanings outside of their book definitions (some of which may be used far more frequently than what the dictionary says the word means!), and it just gets ( Read more... ) -
Playing With Myself
... no, not that way. Not this time, at least. ^^;;;;
I mentioned looking at old Japanese books, which in turn had me looking at an old Hakunin Isshu card set; I was going to show Carl the game, which is still played to this day, and I found this page, featuring the "Hen-Tsukuri Karuta", and its modern variant Kanji Hakushi. The basic concept is ( Read more... ) -
[Multilingual Monday] Old hanzi, Missing you
Okay, a quick Multilingual Monday as I'm majorly sleep deprived:
- Okay, this Chinese character etymology page is VERY cool -- put in all sorts of hanzi (by either typing or pasting it into the window) and -- usually -- you will get pictures of the character's variants, in seal script to earlier bone script and earlier still oracle script. It's ( Read more... )
-
[Multilingual Monday] The Direction Chronicles, and More Idioms
Again, direction in written Chinese taunts me ( Read more... ) -
Create-a-Kanji Challenge -- No Takers?
I'm off to Atlanta soon, but I'd love to see people take me up on creating Chinese characters. You know, just for the fun of it.
( Something that resembles rules and my own contributions ) -
[Multilingual Monday] Creating kanji
Yes, I know, I've been talking far too much about Japanese -- it's, again, been my kick as of late. Next Multilingual Monday, I swear, I will talk of another language ( Read more... ) -
[Multilingual Monday] Foreign Locales In Chinese
My East Asian language has always been Japanese, and while I've gained (albeit very slowly) proficiency in other languages (Mandarin and Korean mainly), the fact of the matter is that I've been using Japanese for years. E-mailing in Japanese, speaking Japanese, translating porn from Japanese. Well ... surely you get the idea. :: koff ( Read more... )
