New iPhone App – 101 Japanese Idioms
Posted by harvey in Culture, Gadgets, Language on 27. Apr, 2009 | 1 Comment
Our friends over at TheJapanShop.com have released a new iPhone/iPod Touch application.
This application contains 101 Japanese Idioms and costs $1.99 on the iTunes store.
In case you didn’t pay attention in English class, idioms are expressions like, “shake a leg.” A phrase that means something other than what it literally means. (no worries, I think I [...]
Monster Hunter G CM with Kansai-ben speaking animals
Posted by harvey in Gadgets, Language, Media on 21. Apr, 2009 | 2 Comments
Fabulous commercial for Monster Hunter G for the Wii.
Why is it fabulous? Because a cat and a pig are speaking Kansai-ben.
I love Kansai-ben.
I would translate and transcribe it, but I’m really busy at the moment! Maybe I’ll do that for the next post if someone doesn’t preempt me first.
(via JapanProbe)
- Harvey
[UPDATE] If you’re interested in [...]
Lightning, The Wife of the Rice Plant
Posted by harvey in Culture, Language on 16. Apr, 2009 | 18 Comments
In Japanese kaminari 雷 is “thunder”, and inazuma 稲妻 is “lightning”. For a long while I think I was referring to both of them as kaminari… Anyway, I recently realized that inazuma is in fact the correct way to refer to lightning.
Then, like any good language geek, I checked it out in my dictionary.
The [...]
Quickie: JapanShop Sale till Friday Morning (EST)
Posted by harvey in Language on 16. Apr, 2009 | No Comments
Quickie sale alert for your Japanese-studying needs.
The Japan Shop is having a 10% off sale on everything in the store until Friday morning (EST).
That includes this nice collection of their popular $5 downloads on CD, which is on sale for $24.95 (retail $29.95). Take an additional 10% off that and get 12 of [...]
Twitter for your Japanese – Daily Waka
Posted by harvey in Culture, Language, Media on 11. Apr, 2009 | 4 Comments
I’ve been looking for Twitter folk who tweet about interesting things in Japanese, but haven’t found many yet.
One that I will be sticking with though is ‘dailywaka‘. dailywaka tweets bilingual Japanese waka poetry… “daily”. They’ve got a great spring theme going on now.
Here the latest tweet.
ほのぼのと春こそ空に来にけらし天の香具山霞たなびく dimly, spring has come to the skies above / [...]
Pizzicato Five – It’s a Beautiful Day
Posted by harvey in About, Media, Music on 08. Apr, 2009 | 4 Comments
I listened to Pizzicato Five CDs over, and over again while sitting at home in Iowa back in the mid 90s. I just put some on now, which gave me the idea to check YouTube to see what I could see. This was my first time seeing this video!
なつかしい〜〜〜〜〜
This particular song is on their Happy [...]
Getting Emotional with the Kanji
Posted by harvey in Culture, Language on 03. Apr, 2009 | No Comments
喜怒哀楽 (kidoairaku)
This Japanese four-character phrase (四字熟語) roughly means, “the range of human emotions.” Individually the characters mean…
喜 – happiness
怒 – anger
哀 – sorrow/pity (Love this kanji, it’s used in 哀れ. Very Japanese.)
楽 – pleasure
Together, these characters express the entire range of feelings that a person might have.
I can’t remember where I came across this phrase, [...]
