In the subway station at Ikebukuro, Tokyo, market stalls come and go, flourishing for a day, then gone again. This one at the foot of the escalator was selling clothes. It seemed out of place there to me, but probably seems perfectly normal to the local commuters.
Notice the interesting English phrase indicating the huge discounts available…….”Big Off!”
Heroes Not Zombies 
Asian translations into English are often very funny.
Short story; a while ago, I bought a window cling for my car that has two Chinese letters on it and the word “gratitude” in English at the bottom. Not knowing a WORD of Chinese, I asked my daughter’s friends’ mother, who speaks Chinese as her first language, if that’s in fact what the sticker says (I didn’t want to put something that actually says “Capitalist American Pig” on my car. I can’t be a little suspicious sometimes…). Her translation of the characters was “very thank you.” Close enough!
Well, when it comes to Japan, all foreign words somehow become nouns, so “off” is just another noun meaning a whole phrase – “that the good is discounted”, or maybe something like the “act of discounting”, consequently Big Off is the “act of discounting” a lot. The word “big” here is used as an adjective, but in other contexts it may be used as a noun as well!
Thank you ez – I’ve dipped my toe in the water of learning a little Japanese – still trying to embed all the Hiragana and Katakana symbols into my head! Kanji, so far, is TOTALLY beyond me! Any tips for learning Japanese?
Ah, Bob, (if I may call you so, my name is Elena, nice to meet you!)
what a positive spirit do you have!
Learning Japanese! It’s really very difficult to master is well, and even the Japanese children do think so! My daughter is in the 5th grade now and ALL the students in the class struggle with Kanji! – So that you did not feel yourself somehow inferior!
But you really should leave the Kanji alone for the beginning and adopt a bit of a confucian attitude – “copy what the master – teacher – is doing” by practicing the katakana and hiragana actually writing them – what’s important is the order in which you write the lines that compose a character – is it possible for you to get a sort of a textbook, where the order – and direction – of the lines are marked? I started with these while back in Russia, our Russian (university) textbook of Japanese starts with this exercise, so it’s best to master the Gojuon (50 sounds) table, an analogy of the Alphabet (- I suppose you know that the signs exist only for the syllables, not for individual sounds?) written out in katakana first, it’s angular and easier, and then the same type of characters, but written in a slightly “rounded” fashion and almost without raising your pen/pencil – hiragana. Japanese children usually start with hiragana, but it’s because it’s universally used here, of course, they find it easy to remember, while historically katakana came first. Once you know the typical order of the movements of your hand while writing the characters you’ll be able to read any of those beautiful hiragana calligraphy – although to understand them you’ll need to study classical Japanese poetry, at least a bit.)
And when it comes to Kanji, it will be a good idea to find a book which explains what individual parts of kanji mean, I suppose you have noticed that they consist of several parts, some of which are the same for a number of characters, like : left part is the same, while right parts differ. So learning the meaning of each such part helps a lot. The biggest hurdle is that in Japanese – unlike Chinese, where the Kanji originate from, – the same Kanji character might be read in a (very) different manner – in Chinese it’s always the same reading up to the tone (4 tones in Chinese). THat’s where the young Japanese people have a lot of troubles too.
But the actual spoken Japanese is very easy! It’s the literary language which poses all the problems… And various polite forms that you have to use differentially depending on who you talk to (this is something I don’t particularly like, as I’m very liberal myself and think that all people are equal and should be treated with equal politeness).
I started to learn it because my father was fascinated by the Kanji, he bought a (Russian) self study book, and at the nearby University we had – not that this is typical – a teacher of Eastern languages who grew in Harbin (China) before the WW2 in a family of White Russian Army emigrants who were driven away by Lenin’s Revolution, and she went to Japanese elementary school while Japanese were still there before the war. She was kind enough to accept me as a listener to her Japanese seminar, so I just sat there listening to hiragana read out loud on a tape, while writing down the characters for exercise. And lo and behold! Now I’m already living in Japan for 15 years with my Japanese husband and 2 children… And studying homeopathy which almost noone knows here at that. That’s just a little note about how unforseeable our future is! At least, in my case.
But I do think that learning sometheing new is ALWAYS opening new perspectives, so please try to do some Japanese by all means!
THe only Haiku that I know, and I love it very much, is by Basho, which reads in Japanese
Furu ike ya,
Kawazu tobikomu,
Mizu no oto.
Transcribed in “standard English” spelling this would be something like
Fooroo ikey yah
kahwahzoo tohbeekohmoo
meezoo noh ohtoh
Which means
THere’s an old pond,
and you can hear the sound of water
as a frog is jumping into it
Which is supposed to mean that there is almost complete silence surrounding that old pond, and while you are lost in your thoughts you will only be reminded about it – and about reality – by hearing a splashing sound of water made by a little frog jumping into the pond while it lives its own life – well, it’s my interpretation largely, but that’s the closest that I could come to the image that these 3 lines create. That part about Japanese culture is really beautiful, I think. They are very image oriented, and very talented in this too. They think in images mostly, even to the point of dyslexia, it’s no coincidence that Japanese manga is now all around the world, although I do not like it personally, not as it is now, at least.
Well, I hope you were not tired to read my long post and did not find it too irrelevant.
Best of luck with Japanese, learning it might be worth the while!