Ad Text in Japanese:

男の肌にもハリとツヤ。

Remember you can enable mouse roll-over Kanji look-up by clicking on the POPjisyo.com link in the upper right of the site!!!!
Okay! Let’s break down the vocabulary first.

「男」 means male. Easy right? We have seen this before! Even for people who shy away from learning Kanji, this is one to pick up. It will help you find the bathroom in restaurants if anything!

「肌」 means “skin”. There is a word, 美肌 (びはだ) which means “beautiful skin” that you might hear fairly often if you hang around females in Japan.

Now for the more difficult words.

「ハリ」Remember the word 「メリハリ」from the Cute Adults post? If you did, awesome. This is what it’s all about! Frequency will keep this stuff in your head. Also, this is one of those words that every Japanese person knows, but will be confusing to a non-native speaker if you look it up in the dictionary.

The Kanji for this, should be 「張り」, and it can mean “to strain, stretch, or tighten” if you go with a dictionary definition. Now, what does this have to do with a man’s skin?

See in the picture how his face looks, bight, young, smooth… and prim? Like if you pushed it in, it would bounce right back? That’s 「ハリ」。

「ツヤ」is a big easier. The Kanji for 「ツヤ」is 「艶」、a difficult Kanji even for Japanese. The meaning however everyone knows, and it is “glossy” or “glazed”, or like this guys face, shinny and glowing.

Bonus. The Kanji for 「ツヤ」is also used in 「艶かしい」(なまめかしい) which means “charming”, or “captivating”, in a usually sexual way. My electronic dictionary also gives “voluptuous” or “amorous”. Heavy.

This sentence wouldn’t be complete without a grammar explanation as well.

「にも」

You may know that 「も」usually means “also”. 「に」in this case has the sense of “direction” and feels like the English “to”.

To jump into translation, I would translate this as…

“Bounce(?) and Shine for men’s skin as well.”

The 「に」here, has the meaning that the ハリ and ツヤ is going TO the Men’s skin. The 「も」adds the “as well”, or “also”. The nuance here is that traditionally people only think that women need ハリ and ツヤ in their skin. Let’s let men have it too!

Other examples of this type of 「に」…

「友達にプレゼントをあげた」”Gave a present TO a friend.”

「植木に水をやる」”Give water to a plant.”
「世界の子供に教育を」”Education FOR the world’s children.”

「豚に真珠」 Proverb, “pig before pearl”, as in, giving a pearl TO a pig.

Got it?

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments as always!

We’ll give this part a shot in the next lesson. See if you can get a head start and figure it out!

PS.

I’m experimenting with fonts, to make the first Japanese ad text stand out a bit more. Maybe it will catch your eye so you can try to really read and understand before relying on the explanation below. Let me know what you think.

Also, does anyone think I should increase the font of everything on the page as well?

- Harvey