You know, I have been in Japan for five years now, but until now whenever someone asked me who my favorite Japanese actress or idol or whatever was, I would never have a definite answer.

Until now! Well… Actually you can see the same actress is in the previous post too… But I’ll say it again for good measure. This lady is Yukie Nakama (仲間由紀恵), and she’s a looker! I heard she even speaks English…

You can see other advertisements featuring Nakama Yukie at the Asahi webpage.

Okay, enough about Nakama-san, let’s get down to the Japanese.

Ad Text in Japanese:

「寒い朝はHOTです。」

I know the lower section is too small to read, but…

「朝専用缶コーヒー」

「ワンダモーニングショット」

Nothing to strange in this ad… Here we go.

「寒い朝はHOTです。」

寒い朝 simply means “cold morning”, remember in Japanese the adjectives go before the nouns they modify. Just like in the previous Hot Lemon ad, where we have “cold you” as 「寒いあなた」 , then after the 「は」which is the subject marker, we have English HOT。

So, directly translated, it means “the cold morning is HOT”. The nuance, is that in the cold morning, if you have this coffee you will be HOT.

「朝専用缶コーヒー」

Okay the key here is the useful word 「専用」this means “specialized” or “dedicated”, and is used quite often. For example… in IT you could say 「メール専用サーバ」which would be “a server specialized for doing email”. It also has the nuance that this server only handles email. Likewise, you could say 「女性専用車両」which, as you can see from that Wikipedia link, is the car of the train that is reserved during rush hour for women only. This way, they can be free from being hassled by the crazy chikan…

「ワンダモーニングショット」

This last part is just a drill in Katakana comprehension!

Got it?

“Wonda Morning Shot”

Gotta love a shot of coffee in the morning huh?

That’s all for now. More of Nakama Yukie later… I mean… More learning Japanese through advertisements later…

- Harvey