[Ad Text in Japanese]

「あなたのカゼはどこから？」

「私は鼻から」

「それなら黄色のベンザ」

「ボクはのどから」

「それなら銀のベンザ」

「私は熱っぽさから」

「それなら青のベンザ」

「ベンザブロックは、あなたのカゼのタイプで選べる黄・銀・青の３タイプ。」

Notice the girl in the lower left. This is Yukie Nakama, a Japanese actress from Okinawa. She’s not hard to look at… She is in a lot of commercials now in Japan, including car commercials, AU cell phone commercials, and is even doing commercials for JR Railway. She was also in a Japanese movie called TRICK. If you’re in Japan now you’ve probably seen her face once or twice…

You can even get a Yukie Nakama Calendar on J-List.

She was also in a movie called Shinobi from 2005 as well… Hrm. A lot of Yukie Nakama around these days… I hope that means her career is about to take off… Not that it’s on the way down…

I have a few more ads featuring her, and will be posting them later!

Anyway, enough about girls. Let’s geek-out and study Japanese. You know you want to.

「あなたのカゼはどこから？」
This is pretty simple actually. It means “Where is your cold (coming) from?” カゼ can be written in Kanji as 「風邪」and is only written in Katakana here for style points. The verb after 「から」has been removed, but it can be understood that it is implying 「来ている」as in, “coming from”.

This medicine sells a different type of cold medicine depending on where in your body you are first feeling the symptoms of your cold… More on that later.

「私は鼻から」
This simply means, translated naturally, “Mine is coming from my nose.” As in, this persons cold symptoms have originated in his nose. Poor guy. Again, the verb after 「から」has been dropped, but is implied to be the same as above.

「それなら黄色のベンザ」
This means “If that’s the case, then Yellow Benza” “Benza” is the name of the product. The “if that’s the case” is said in Japanese, 「それなら」. This is a very useful phrase I would recommend adding to your brain dictionary.

You can use it in cases such as…

A:「京都に行きたい。お金は気にしない、とにかく早く着きたい。」
B:「それなら、新幹線がベストだね。」

A: “I want to go to Kyoto. I don’t care about the cost. I just want to get there quickly.”
B: “If that’s the case, Shinkansen (the bullet train) is best.”

The other sentences are the exact same grammar pattern, just with the body part, and color of the medicine box swapped.

Just to ensure there is no confusion on the vocab, 「のど」can be written 「喉」and means “throat”. 「銀」is silver in color, and can also be used to refer to the metal silver as well. 「熱」is “fever”. Normally you would say 「熱がある」for “I have a fever.”

Ah, one weird thing here.

「熱っぽさ」

This is the noun form of 「熱っぽい」, which means “seems like having a fever.” This っぽい stuff is kind of fun. For example…

If you eat something, and are not sure what it is… But it tastes like chicken… You could say 「これ、チキンっぽい」to mean, “it seems like chicken”. Likewise, if eat something and it tastes a little too salty than it should be, you could say 「これ、塩っぽい」for, “it seems salty”.

You could also say 「安っぽい」for something that appears “cheap”, and “low quality”.

Get it? This 「っぽい」can be attached to almost anything. In fact, in colloquial Japanese you could say 「このウェブサイトはハービーっぽいね」, meaning “this website seems like Harvey doesn’t it?” Implying that it appears that the website was probably made by Harvey.

That’s it! Now you’ll know which color medicine to chose… Just remember where your cold started…

- Harvey