Loan words

Japanese signage in Katakana. Photo: Sébastien Bertrand

Japanese uses a tremendous amount of loan words from various European languages. Katakana, one of the three writing systems used in Japanese, is used exclusively for this foreign vocubulary. 

Some loan words change meaning when adopted into another language. For example, Arubaito アルバイト taken from the German word for 'work', means simply 'part-time job' in Japanese. 

Some words retain not only their meaning, but also, largely, their pronounciation. Ex.: Kamera カメラ-- camera

Some words undergo sort of an extreme make-over. It can take a while to see/hear/read the connection between the borrowed word and their original language counterparts.

Ex.: Mishin ミシン -- sewing machine  ('Mishin' sounds a bit like 'machine', so there you go!)

German uses a lot of borrowed words as well. Like Japanese, the meaning of these words can either be fairly clear or not at all. 

To an English speaker, der Shitstorm (yes, it's in Duden), das Baby and der Computer make sense. Der Smoking, on the face of it, is a bit of a quandry. Der Smoking means 'tuxedo jacket' or (now an outdated word in English) 'smoking jacket'. I like to think that an image of James Bond smoking a cigarette was the inspiration for this loan word. 

German nouns have a certain solidity and all-encompassing feeling that one doesn't necessarily get from English nouns.  This is especially so when thinking of suitable equivalents to words like, 'Weltanschauung' and 'Zeitgeist'. To use the English translations of these two concepts, 'world view' and 'spirit of the times', just doesn't cut it somehow. 

'Sally is about to start school at the Garden of Children'. That sentence has kind of an eerie ring to it.  And, no, I'll not be sending my child there, thank you, but instead to a Kindergarten. 

Loan words in English from German that I especially like:

Pretzel (Brezel)
Weisswurst, Bratwurst, Knackwurst  (Sausage)
Sauerkraut 
Delicatessen (Delikatessen)-where to find all of the above, hopefully. 

Biergarten
Angst  (Thanks, Freud!)

Weltanschauung
Zeitgeist

Scheisse (can be spoken with or without the final 'e')

-any loan words you find yourself using that you especially enjoy?

にほんご Nihongo (Japanese)

If my cousin were still alive, I'd be able to show him what his surname looks like in hiragana. 

His name consists of four characters, each combining a consonant-vowel cluster. 

Na-ka-mu-ra ---> なかむら

With only very few mistakes, I've managed to memorize the hiragana alphabet since starting this course about a month ago. That's a whopping 46 characters. Some of the characters so very closely resemble each other, I am temporarily thrown when having to produce them on command like during a quiz.  

These characters look like pretzels, in a way, and I get them tripped up in my brain.

me 

め

nu 

ぬ

Actually, seeing them side-by-side helps me to distinguish them from one another. And 'me' looks way more like a pretzel (with a broken arm) than 'nu' does. :D

I took the bus through Japantown (Nihonmachi) today & managed to pronounce some of the words painted on awnings as the bus went by them. Understanding what I was saying is another matter entirely. Like German, Japanese is a phonetic language. One can say scads of stuff without actually knowing the meaning of what is being said. 

Words I like & have committed to memory in hiragana---

kumo  くも  (cloud) because it reminds me of cumulus. 

kaki     かき  (persimmon) I just like the economy of it. 

sushi  すし   easy to remember as we already have the word in our language 

Nihon にほん  (Japan) why don't we use this word or something closely resembling it? 



Alright, I've distracted myself enough for the evening. On to study for a chapter test! 

Nihongo, oh no!

Japanese is now officially super hard. I have memorized hiragana characters a-ho. That's 30 plus characters. While that's nice, that's sort of like memorizing only a sliver of the Latin alphabet. I can write simple Japanese words, but instruction takes place, at this early stage, in romajji--Japanese written phonetically in our alphabet.

ねこ becomes neko (cat)

いぬ becomes inu (dog)

borrowed words in Japanese are also written in romajji--

San Francisco becomes Sanfuranshisuko

Smith becomes Sumisu

engineer becomes enjinia


We're learning motion verbs, and two out of three bear no relation to anything in English (that I know of).

ikimasu--to go (away from the speaker) kinda like hingehen in German

kimasu--to return to the place where you currently are/to invite someone to your house this is some strange circular shizz that I can't plug into anything I already know

kaerimasu--to go home (whatever 'home' means to the speaker) sorta like kehren/zurückkehren in German


The negation of the these verbs, or any verb in Japanese, is pretty easy. The verb ending drops its -u and adds an -en.

ikimasu/ikimasen    (Watashi wa) Ashita Oosaka ni ikimasu. (I am) going to Osaka tomorrow.

kimasu/kimasen  I am at school now when I say: (I am) Asatte gakkoo ni kimasu. (I am) coming to school day after tomorrow.

kaerimasu/kaerimasen (Watashi wa) Korekara uchi ni kaerimasu. (I am) going home afterwards. 


I need to find a language partner, but, maybe more realistically, a language tutor given I can hardly say anything yet.

Nihongo

Kon'nichiwa!

a, i, u, e, o

I just started taking a Japanese course last week. It's a challenge, but a fun one. We're being taught both the romanji (Roman alphabet) and Hiragana (one of three alphabets used) writing systems at the outset. I've only a few short Hiragana words committed to memory. And if I had a Japanese keyboard, I'd show you! Writing the characters is like creating little, tiny pieces of art. Our Latin alphabet isn't so difficult to render, comparatively speaking. This is especially so if one is using block letters. Japanese, by contrast, looks as if it were still written by brush--there are little tales on many of the end strokes. One is meant to reproduce the characters in this way even with a pencil or pen.

Japanese sentence structure is also different from English.

English is: S-V-O or subject-verb-object.
Japanese is: S-O-V.
It also seems that word order in Japanese is less fixed than it is in English. For example, word particles sort of like our prepositions following the noun refer back to the noun, if that makes sense. It doesn't yet make a bunch of sense to me.

Bea (s) san* wa gakusei (o) desu (v). Bea (s) is (v) a student (o).

If one wants to ask if Bea is a student, then the question word 'ka' is simply tacked onto the end of the statement. That's pretty cool & not too difficult to remember.

Bea san wa gakusei desu ka?      Hai, gakusei desu. Yes, (Bea) is a student. The subject in the answer is omitted.

*san is an honorific

Anyway, it's all pretty interesting and full-on. We can already count to 100, use basic greetings & dabble in basic negations. Woot!

It's a good stretch for the old brain. I'm grateful to be there.