I like to make word lists as I read/watch series. Here are the series I’ve posted about so far! Most are just partial lists from here and there, but others I’m trying for more complete lists.
Japanese in Manga:
Ajin
Akatsuki no Yona/Yona of the Dawn
Asobi Asobase
Boys Run the Riot
Deadman Wonderland
Fumetsu no Anata e/To Your Eternity
Gangsta
Gokushufudō/Way of the House Husband
Helvetica
Karneval
Lookback
Mushishi
Noragami
Nukoduke!
Ōoku
Ouran High School Host Club
Qualia under the Snow
Something's Wrong With Us
The Promised Neverland
Tonari no Seki-kun
generic list of manga words
Japanese in Anime:
Aggretsuko
Ajin (incl. drama CDs)
Beastars
Demon Slayer/Kimetsu no Yaiba
Dorohedoro
first episodes (various)
Non Non Biyori
Usagi Drop
I also have some vocab lists for use with anime clubs
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Today's name is 上飯坂 Kami-īzaka, Kami-īsaka, or Kami-izaka. It's unusual to have a triple-i sound like this!
上, which has about a billion readings, means up, upper, raise, above, on, etc. 飯 is read meshi or han, and it means meal or (cooked) rice. 坂 is a variant of 阪, which you might know from 大阪 Osaka. Both mean hill or slope and are read saka or han.
So what's the deal with this name, "up food hill"? There's probably a place somewhere named just 飯坂, and this family's ancestors came from the upper part of it. This is often the case if you see "up" or "down" at the start of a place name or family name. 上 in this sense is read kami, and 下 is read shimo, like the hip Tokyo neighborhood 下北沢 Shimokitazawa, for example.
Actually, yeah, you guys wanna see my favorite way a translator ever handled the furigana shenanigans in a manga?
Some background: Japanese is written with a mix of kana (which are phonetic characters that each represent a sound) and kanji (more complex characters which have both a meaning and often multiple possible sounds).
But little kids aren't expected to know every kanji yet, and there can be obscure words or names with oddball pronunciations that would puzzle any reader. So you can also put some small kana alongside the kanji to tell people how to pronounce it. Those are called furigana, and they're common in a lot of manga for youngish audiences.
As an example, here's the kanji 神 (meaning "god") with the furigana that say かみ (kami) in case you didn't know how to spell that one in kanji yet:
But at some point someone figured out that, hey, you don't HAVE to have the furigana match the kanji. There's nothing stopping you from just...
Using a foreign or made-up word but with a built-in definition: the kanji 祓魔師 (exorcise-demon-professional) pronounced as the English word エクソシスト (ekusoshisuto = exorcist)
Letting a character talk to himself really literally: 俺 (me) with the furigana おまえ (omae = you). You, by which I mean me,
Harping on the fact that you have a light themed villain this arc: 光 (light) but with the OTHER WHOLE KANJI 闇 (darkness) as the pronunciation. Darkness, but our darkness is Different because it's actually Light...
Clarifying what someone means like a little parenthetical statement: 俺達 (us/we) pronounced イルミナティ (iruminati = Illuminati). We, the Illuminati...
And many more. Those were just examples from Blue Exorcist that I already had saved to my hard drive. I cannot emphasize enough how much manga likes to create double meanings this way.
As you might imagine, this can be awkward to translate into a language that doesn't have even the slightest concept of furigana.
Usually you end up doing something that either ignores it (just pick the word that was most important of the two, or use the made up word but only define it the first time) or gets the job done but feels a bit like a cop-out (list both words, or put one in parentheses after the other)
But not always. Not in this one case from the first chapter of Blue Exorcist, translated for Viz by John Werry:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it:
物質界（アッシャー）に存在しながらにして 虚無界（ゲヘナ）の神であるこのオレの炎（ち）をひく
物質界（アッシャー）The material realm, Assiah (kanji say material realm, furigana say Assiah)
に in/at
存在する to exist
ながら during/while
にして despite (物質界に存在しながらにして = Despite/even while existing in the material world...)
虚無界（ゲヘナ）The realm of void, Gehenna (same deal as Assiah above)
の 's, of
神（かみ）god
である is
この this
オレ me, I (it's not weird in Japanese to say "this me." It just emphasizes the me. I, who am the god of Gehenna...)
の 's
炎 (normally pronounced ほのお) flame
ちをひく (normally spelled 血 for that ち) to inherit/be descended from (literally, to pull in their blood)
So we've got 炎 (flame) but we're pronouncing it ち (blood) here due to shenanigans
We've already defined Assiah and Gehenna earlier in the chapter, so we can just call them Assiah and Gehenna and not worry about the kanji. It's the 炎（ち）をひく that's a pain to deal with. Rin, our half-demon main character, has inherited Satan's flame in the same way that you have your ancestors' blood in you. Which means we gotta come up with a way to say bloodflames on the fly in English.
And this was a good way, okay?
You exist in Assiah, but the flame of the god of Gehenna runs through your veins!
Goddamn that was slick. You guys saw that, right? I'm not the only one who saw how smoothly that went, am I?
What a good use of the idiom "my blood runs through your veins." You've got word A as furigana on word B, so you find an English set phrase that uses word A and swap word B in instead. Reader expected A and got B, so now both words are in their head and you've gotten the unconventional double meaning across. It's as near a perfect solution as you're probably gonna get.
I'm sure it's not the first time a translator landed on that general solution to the problem, but it was the first time I saw someone do it and it left an impression y'all.
建具 たてぐ fittings that open and close (doors, windows, shoji, fusuma, etc.); fixtures
木造 もくぞう wooden; made of wood; wooden construction
全国 ぜんこく the whole country
庁舎 しょうしゃ government office building
基本 きほん basics; fundamentals; basis; foundation
被害 ひがい (suffering) damage; injury; harm
現状 げんじょう present condition; existing state; status quo; current state
進める すすめる to advance; to move forward; to put (a clock, watch) forward・to carry forward (plans, work, etc.); to proceed with; to make progress in; to further; to advance; to hasten; to speed up
The Imi Wa (Kotoba) app changed and I feel like a friend died or something... I've been using this longer than all of my full time jobs and since before I had a smartphone 😭
It appears to still be functional (thank all the deities) but it's a big change with no warning
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The Imi Wa (Kotoba) app changed and I feel like a friend died or something... I've been using this longer than all of my full time jobs and since before I had a smartphone 😭
It appears to still be functional (thank all the deities) but it's a big change with no warning
Because in ancient China they grouped everything like snakes and insects into 虫 without it really meaning "insect" but rather a garbage can term for anything not mammal, bird, or fish. So this has carried on through many other words, such as 爬虫類.
That's why you can write octopus (たこ) as 蛸 with the 虫 radical.
Some more info: https://bestiary.japanesewithanime.com/animals/mushi
[Image description: A photo of a newspaper ad for Kincho’s anti-mosquito products. At the top, the text translates to “(connect the flying mosquitoes in the numbered order)”. The person who took the photo has connected the dots and shown that the result spells out “Bored?”.]
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I do kinda feel like ppl who teach languages approach it not dissimilarly to drug dealers giving you that first hit for free. They tell you that according to science if you learn like 100 words or something you'll understand 50% of the whole language.
This is a lie.
Often if you don't know one word, you're lost, you're done for. If I'm reading a book and I only recognize 50% of the words, then I'm not reading a book at all. There's no story playing in my head, no sensible meaning I'm able to derive from the page.
If I'm reading about a research study that concluded that eating one packet of natto a day will help me live forever, and I'm suspicious of this conclusion but am willing to believe, but the one word I don't know is the *kind* of research that was conducted (double-blind test, or survey sent via email?), then I have no ability to assess whether I trust this study or not.
Yesterday I was in the doctor's office and she diagnosed my condition, but the diagnosis was the only word I couldn't understand. All the other words I'd ever learned in my life up to that moment were of no use to me at all.
Yadda yadda. Basically what I am saying is god dear god when can I stop needing so many words i am so tired help helpppp
Aligner is a free lightweight web tool for creating aligned bilingual examples and glossed linguistic illustrations. It is useful for language documentation, language-learning materials, translation pedagogy, conlang presentation, and general linguistics teaching because it makes word-level correspondences, reordering, and phrase-to-phrase mappings visually explicit.
Web-app link: https://aligner.tinygods.dev/
Repo link: https://github.com/tinygodsdev/bitext-word-alignment
License: MIT http://dlvr.it/TSxSdN
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✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
This month we’re reading 本なら売るほど 1. Join us for this read in Seitokai’s Discord!
This is a place where books and people meet once again. The secondhand bookstore "Jugatsudo" is run by a dour young man with close-cropped hair. Attracted by the owner's personality and his wonderful selection of goods, various customers visit the store today. There are book-loving regulars, high school girls who want to grow up, A man comes to throw away unwanted books, and a widow comes to sell her husband's collection. A book in one's hand leads to an unexpected connection. This is a gem of a human drama for all those who love books and whose lives have been changed by them!
ことわざ are Japanese proverbs, and I have listed some basic proverbs, their equivalents in English, and a rough translation of the meanings of the Japanese phrase.
There is a test for ことわざ called the ことわざ能力検定 (ことわざのうりょくけんてい) and these are some of the phrases that appear in level 8 or 8級 (10 being the lowest level). Try one or two of these out the next time you speak with a native Japanese speaker!
