Katakana-go

Japan has its own character set for words in Japanese: hiragana. It has also brought Chinese characters, kanji, and those two formed the vocabulary most Japanese had to handle for some time. (As a sidenote, in the meantime Chinese characters were also modified to the point many characters have a different drawing in Japan and China.)

When Japan started to open itself to other countries, especially Western countries, they had an interesting way to deal with foreign words. Using the Chinese as an example, they created new words. In some cases, as with countries, it was based on the sound of the word rather than the meaning of the characters themselves. Japanese had "katakana".

So, for foreign words, they adapted the sound of them to the Japanese language phonetic set and wrote them in katakana. For example, "computer" becomes "konpyuuta"（コンピュータ）; "banana" becomes, well, "banana" （バナナ）; and "United States" is... "amerika" （アメリカ）. I wonder how many actually know that name was created initially to define the whole continent.

Some people have the bad tendency to think katakana words are all derived from English. Although many of them are, my guess is that it depends a little on which country introduced the word in Japan first. So "Germany" is "doitsu" （ドイツ）, resembling a lot more the German word "Deutschland"; "bread" is "pan" （パン） derived from Portuguese (it deviates a little in the pronunciation, though); and "Oolong tea" is "uuron-cha" （ウーロン茶）, where the word from Oolong is, as its English equivalent, derived from Chinese.

Also, as it happens in many countries, in some cases the imported word becomes more popular than the original word. It's way more common to find "miruku" （ミルク） than "gyuunyuu" （牛乳） for "milk"; or "seeru" （セール） instead of "tokubai" （特売） in clearance sales.

Most foreigners who come to Japan with little knowledge of Japanese find shelter in katakana, since with some imagination and knowledge of English and other languages it's possible to guess what's going on. Chinese are exceptions, though. They deal marvelously well with kanji, but many have problems with katakana words. When studying though mock tests for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test I used to wonder why there were some simple questions related to words in katakana like "クレジットカード" ("kurejitto kaado") that were, for me, easily guessable. That was until I met a Chinese studying for the test and realised he actually had some problems in that part.

Anyway, although katakana words help foreigners to make some sense of Japanese language, they're not so friendly as they look.

First, some words get so distorted it's hard to guess where they came from. That happens especially with names, like "ホイヘンス". It's reading is "hoihensu", but it refers to "Huygens". I also had some problems figuring out that "オーライ" ("oorai") came from "all right"; and mistaking "サンキュー" ("sankyuu", meaning "thank you") for "39" (read "sanjyuukyuu", but becomes "san kyuu" if each number is read separatedly) is also classic.

Second, some imported words have their meanings altered when incorporated to Japanese. The German word "Arbeit" means "work", and it was incorporated to Japanese as "アルバイト" ("arubaito") and later shortened as "バイト" ("baito"). But in Japanese those words actually mean "part-time job".

Another phenomena is that some katakana words are being modified. In some cases, to include Japanese words as well (and I'm not just mentioning writing some Japanese words in katakana as it happens often with some words like ゴミ, trash).

One stage is the abbreviation. Foreign words that are too long get shortened. "Remote controller" becomes "rimokon" （リモコン）; "sexual harassment" becomes "sekuhara" （セクハラ）; "patrol car" becomes "patokaa" （パトカー）... and so forth.

Some foreign words also become "Japanized": サボる ("saboru") is a Japanese verb (for those who know some Japanese, note the "る" at the end of the word) meaning "to skip" like in "skipping classes". The サボ is derived from the French word "sabotage". Note also that the Japanese word also has a different meaning than the word it comes from.

Well, foreigners in Japan also use it in reverse, creating verbs like "to ganbatte" (from the Japanese word meaning "keep up!" or "try your best"). I have to say the Portuguese version "ganbatear" sounds better, though.

Also, combinations of original Japanese words and borrowed words also exist. In some cases the Japanese word is written in its original way, in others it's written in katakana. 電子レンジ ("denshirenji") unite 電子 ("electron") and レンジ ("range, stove") to become "microwave". カラオケ ("karaoke") became a new word of its own even abroad, but its origins are from "空" ("kara", meaning "empty") and オーケストラ ("ookesutora", or "orchestra").

A new variation are the words defined by the intials in roman characters, but linked usually with Japanese words. KY (read "keiwai") comes from 空気読めない ("kuuki yomenai"), meaning someone who can't read between the lines or intuitively understand a given situation and behave accordingly. JK ("jeikei") means 女子高生 ("jyoshikousei"), or "female high school student". Influence of the Internet on the way people communicate, perhaps?

Even though most of the things here may be categorized as gairaigo, many examples I mentioned may fool foreigners who try to make sense of Japanese through katakana.

Some foreigners (especially English teachers) don't like all those "katakanization" (refered as "katakana-go" as "go" here means "language") since it interfers with Japanese people's ability to speak English (most just stick to the katakana words, messing with the pronunciation). Still I think that's how Japanese language is evolving. Who knows, maybe someday there may be a Japanese version of Singlish around.

In that case, if Japanese become able to deal with standard English pronuncation, "katakana-go" may, instead of becoming a burden, actually become an asset, just as it was mentioned for hybrid languages like Singlish in this blog before.

The only thing I hope is that don't stick only to katakana. That would make it hard to read, in a different way. Believe it or not, kanji helps sometimes... especially when it comes to get meanings at a glimpse.

Below are some other articles that deal with the topics I mentioned above. Check if you're interested.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20080422a1.html
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20080715a1.html
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20080722a1.html
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20081125a1.html

Okayama Villa Trip

After refusing so many times (well, they always set those trips on days I simply couldn't go...), on November 15th and 16th I finally went to a Okayama villa trip with the Himeji Gang (although the group changed a lot since we used that name... I wonder if we can still use it).

Well, I just didn't know that there were a group of those villas... Check here for more information. This time we went to Takebe International Villa.

I said we went, but things weren't that smooth. Excluding the fact I had to go from Kyoto to Himeji before (there was another guy who came from Nagoya, though he used the bullet train), consider that we were in three cars going there for the first time and only one had the electronic navigation system (which in some ways made us more lost than without...) and I may not have to say that we got lost quite often.

That being part of the fun, we had bento lunch at a remote controlled cars race track while wondering if we could use our cars there (haha!), had to backtrack a couple of times, look for missing cars some times more and went through narrow streets occasionally. When I say "narrow" perhaps I should give an example


Note: this is a TWO-WAY road.

In the end, we arrived safe and sound to the villa. And gladly found out we had a part of the building only for us, kitchen and common room included. I wonder if it's not the part for foreigners... the other guests I saw were all Japanese (at least they looked like). Anyway, this way we could have fun without disturbing anyone.


It was cold, so that asks for onsen and nabe! Rested and with our tummies filled, fun went on throughout good part of the night with drinking, chatting and playing games. Someone brought a card game I liked a lot. The name is 二ムト (a.k.a. Category 5) and if I find it around I'm taking it!

Another weird event was when, before we decided to go to sleep, suddenly the clock on the wall just went crazy and accellerated until two hours beyond current time. Then it just stopped. We analysed the clock and couldn't find anything wrong. We ignored what happened and continued our preparations to go to sleep when it started to move rapidly again, this time until it reached the current time, after which it slowed down and started move in its the normal pace again... Weird...

Next morning, the girls wanted to go to the onsen again. Boys didn't care much, so we slept a little more. After packing, we went to see some autumn leaves at some place close to the villa. I actually forgot the name of the place so I can't dig up information about it, but it was nice.


Last, the group decided to spend the afternoon in Kurashiki strolling around the Bikan Historical District with its kura houses and weeping willows around the canal.

After that, we all returned to Himeji; and from there some of us had still some kilometers to go. In my case, around 120km to Kyoto.

Ah, and on the way to Himeji, we were playing a game where we took turns saying names of countries, cities or states starting with some letter. The last one to give up wins the round. I have to improve my geography, but I never imagined that being Brazilian would give me some advantage (names of Brazilian of Latin-American cities that no one else there knew... I might even had made up some... Didn't do that, though). Poor Japanese were the ones with foreigners saying the names of places in their country before them... We're in Japan, after all.

Life imitates art

Looking at some news from Brazil, I was wondering if it wasn't a Hollywood script...

A Brazilian teenager is held hostage with a friend in an apartment by her ex-boyfriend who wants to resume their relationship. Negociations with the police starts.

That last over 100 hours. In between, the friend is released... but returns to the apartment more a less one day later. It seems that the ex-boyfriend requested her return; it's also said that the friend didn't want to leave the girl alone... it looked like he would kill her. That move is criticised by some saying that the police shouldn't let that happen.

More a less one day later, it ends. The police invades the building after hearing a shot. The existence of the shot is something with good discussions in itself, with one TV channel showing a video demostrating there was a shot and another showing the footage with no signals of a shot being made.

Ex-boyfriend arrested, friend and girlfriend shot. The latter died.

There's a better script in Portuguese here for those interested (and who can read).

Not exactly a happy ending, but it's over. At least until the trial begins, right?

Could be... except that more stuff came after it.

The best ones: the ex-boyfriend's father, who's lost contact with him 20 years ago (the boy is 22) found him after the incident. That's what he claims... Also, it was found that the dead girl's father is wanted in another State for desertion from the police and homicide. He denies and says it's a plot to "erase" him since "he knew too much".

Life imitates art all right...

Another example on that is another petition for allowing a certain kind of marriage.

Well, with some parts of the world discussing same-sex marriage, it's not a big deal, right?

But this Japanese guy wants to marry a comic character.

You know, the first thought that came to me after reading this was "Chobits". It's a Japanese manga/anime that has as one of its topics relationships between humans and... "human-like things", maybe?

I'll have to explain a little, in the story there's something called パソコン (pasokon), an android used as a personal computer (and considering the japanese word is the same used for PCs, the substitution in some parts of the story is pleasant). And there's a certain discussion on how they can be better companions than "imperfect humans" and how relationships between humans and pasocon would be. There's a woman in the story whose husband start to spend more and more time with his pasocon to the point he forgot completely about her (and if you substitute the meaning of the word as I said before it becomes interesting...). There's also a guy in the story who married one of those androids... reason for what the news reminded me of the manga/anime.