Friday, January 20, 2017

Jisho.org Kioku Extension - It Remembers Stuff

The Jisho Kioku is a Chrome extension that adds a number of features to the online Japanese-English dictionary Jisho.org. These features are: shows the last dozen kanji you've picked from radical search; lets you quickly filter radicals by their names; records the last hundred searches you've made; and lets you bookmark random vocabulary so you can review it later.


Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Gyakuten Saiban - Game Vocabulary

One very popular game that almost everyone knows from a certain meme is Gyakuten Saiban 逆転裁判, also known as Ace Attorney, where the lawyer Naruhodo Ryuuichi 成歩堂龍一, a.k.a. Phoenix Wright goes around lawyering miraculously. Since this is really fun game with a lot of Japanese text to read and that requires actually understanding the phrases to win, I decided to compile in this post some of the vocabulary you need to play the game in Japanese.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Raws

In English, raws are the untranslated manga chapters and anime episodes. A raw manga, or manga raw, is the manga as written in Japanese. A raw anime, or anime raw, is the anime without subtitles and in Japanese, as opposed to an English dubbed version.

The term may also be applied to doujinshi 同人誌, games, visual novels, light novels, etc.

あぶないっ!! ひっ!! 普通の人はそんなリアクションしない!! 違うっ! 私、まんがなんて読みません!!
Anime: Katte ni Kaizou かってに改蔵 (Chapter 7 of Volume 23, 今世紀最大の痕跡)

A lot of series are consumed through official translations or unofficial ones (scanlations, fansubs). A translation, no matter how well-done, is a creative process that changes what the original author intended to convey by mixing in the interpretation of the translator.

If a joke goes over the translator's head, for example, or if he can't translate the joke, it won't make it to the translation, so fans strive to read the raws and watch the raws in order to skip this middleman.

yahari 矢張り

In Japanese, yahari 矢張り means either "as I thought" or "are you really going to do it?" depending on its usage.

It's also spelled yahari やはり, without kanji, and yahari 矢張, without okurigana. Variants include yappari やっぱり, yappa やっぱ, and yappashi やっぱし.

メイド服・・・夢?やはり夢か
Manga: Kobayashi-san Chi no Meidoragon 小林さんちのメイドラゴン (Chapter 2, トールと出会い)
Monday, January 9, 2017

"Good" and "Bad" in Japanese

In Japanese, the words that mean "good" and "bad" are ii いい, yoi 良い, and warui 悪い. As you may have already guessed, these words aren't as simple as the words "good" and "bad" in English, because the article barely started and we already have a problem: there's three of them!
Monday, January 2, 2017

Kagiri, Kagiranai 限り, 限らない

Perhaps the word I had the most problem understand its meaning in Japanese was kagiri 限り, and later the verb it came from: kagiru 限る, specially its negative form: kagiranai 限らない. They often show up in already confusing sentences and only make them even harder to decipher. So here I'm going to explain what they mean.

Adjectives

Like (probably) every other language in the world, the Japanese language also has adjectives. But how do the Japanese adjectives work? How do you tell an adjective from another word? How is the sentence structure with adjectives involved? In this article, I'll explain a little about them.