ホーム

houmu
train platform, (rarely) home

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the concept of a home is an old one, so you don't really expect it to be written in katakana, i.e., be a foreign language loanword. and in fact, it is very rare for ホーム to mean 'home', even though the pronunciation is close.
the more common meaning is actually an abbreviation of the word 'platform':
プラットホーム
purattohoumu
remember, not is there no 'L' in Japanese, there's no 'F' either. what about Mount Fuji?
the way I'd write it, it'd be Mount Huzi. The 'hu' sound (ふ in hiragana) is phonetically something of a cross between a 'fu' and a 'hu', but ふ is squarely in the 'H' column of syllables, surrounded by ha, hi, he and ho (は、ひ、ふ、へ、ほ).
back to the story...
why would translation software yield ホーム for 'home'?
once more, as with the Beatles and free love, it's the fault of the 1960s.
during that golden time of Japanese economic boom-growth, companies wanted to popularize big ticket purchases. the best way to do that? give them cool names that made them sound foreign.
so we had some ad exec who invented マイ・ホーム (mai houmu, for 'my home!') (and マイ・カー, for 'my car!' too).
I guess it sounded a lot cooler than 我が家 (wagaya). =)

帰る

kaeru
to return (home), to go (home)

we don't have a similar verb in English, so Japanese speakers often trip up when trying to communicate the notion (of going back to somewhere you once lived or belonged) in English.

you can specify a direct object with the verb:

• 家に帰る
  uti ni kaeru
  to go home


• 日本に帰る
  nihon ni kaeru
  to go back to Japan


• 故郷に帰る
  hurusato ni kaeru
  to go back to (my) hometown

but it's not necessary. on it's own (and in context, of course), it'd simply mean, I'm going home.
note the economy...
one word in Japanese versus four (a contraction counts as two words) in English.
of course, unlike English, it's grammatically correct to have a one-word sentence in Japanese that's a verb, an adjective or a noun. the most common way to have a one-word sentence in English is with an interjection, or a response to a question. (How old are you? Six. and that could be two one-word sentences in Japanese: 幾つ？六つ。ikutu? muttu.)
the more I do this blog, the more I realize how much I love Japanese.

喝采

kassai
acclaim, herald

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this was the word that convinced me that a friend was not actually fluent in Japanese but was using machine translation.
the story unfolds like this.
I'm addicted to the book of face. (Facebook)
I update my status with my cell.
yesterday, while driving toward the border during the afternoon, I complained about the snow in Burnaby.
several of my friends responded, including two that I know are fluent, and one who surprised me. I hadn't known he knew Japanese at all.
that comment was odd, but understandable. it seemed to be written by someone with a textbook (i.e., not a real-life) understanding of Japanese...
but then, the plot, like the snow fall, thickened...
(and don't I just love ellipses? they go so well with my e. e. cummings-esque avoidance of the uppercase.)
when I made it home after a harrowing drive on I-5, saving that rant for another day, I noted my relief on the book of face as well, and then my suspect friend posted something very odd in Japanese, including today's word:
私は嬉しい安全に得たホーム-喝采を
watasi wa uresii anzen ni eta houmu -- kassai wo
the best way to translate that would be to evoke Tarzan:
me happy. safely train platform gotten. acclaim!

I smell machine translation, don't you?

if we reverse engineer, I think that what my friend typed into Babel (or whichever auto-translator he used) was:
I'm glad you got home safely. Congratulations.
In normal Japanese, that'd be:
無事に帰れて良かった。おめでとう。
buzi ni kaerete yokatta. omedetou.
(leaving aside that Japanese don't normally congratulate one another in these instances...)

anyone notice the 'train platform' business?

more on that later...

取得

syutoku
to get, obtain, acquire

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pet peeve alert!
I see this word nearly every day in a work context. it's used to describe the action of computer functions that get some form of data or another. in 99 per cent of all cases, those computer functions even include the word 'get' in their title. yet there are some translators who obstinately refuse to translate 取得 as 'get'.
why?
the past tenses of the verb, to get, seem to be anathema to some people. heaven forfend we should use the word 'got', let alone 'gotten', regardless of how grammatically correct they are.
and they are grammatically correct.
the odd and truly annoying thing about the translator in question, whose 'obtain' I constantly correct, is that he also incorrectly uses 'to get' where the verbs 'to be' or 'to become' or 'to understand' are grammatically called for.
drives me 'round the proverbial bend.
when I'm not cursing the bad drivers, that is...

エロカワ

erokawa
an abbreviation/combination of two terms, エロッティック erottikku (erotic) and 可愛い kawaii (cloyingly cute, as in Hello Kitty), possibly meaning sexy/erotic in an adorable way

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don't ask where I encountered this term. =)
needless to say, the product it was describing was not something I found to be either erotic or adorable/cute. but I had never seen this word before and therefore had to report it. =)

w)

as far as I can tell, there is no reading of this, no way to pronounce it. it is a cross between an emoticon and （笑） (the character for smiling and laughing, which, as a verb, can be read warau, hence the 'w', and which, when enclosed parenthetically, is akin to writing LOL.
essentially, this is now Japanese for =) or LOL, in an online context. I've yet to see it in any print medium, of course.
there are other cool emoticons, my favorite of which is:
orz
I have to say it took me a while to figure out what this meant. it is a more recent version of an older, lengthier emoticon:
m_._m
still don't get it? let me explain...
the Japanese bow as part of their gestural language. the bow is a greeting, a sign of respect, even shorthand for saying yes. they (and I, when talking in Japanese) bow on the phone, too. bowing is that integrated into the speaking of Japanese. the deeper the bow, the greater the politeness. (and, as an aside, bowing is done with your eyes on the floor. always.) the most profound bows are performed when you are already seated (on your knees), and your head touches the floor, with both hands flat on the floor, aside your head. and so...
m_._m is an image of that, seen from the front, with the 'm's representing your hands, the '_'s, your downcast eyes and the '.' your nose.
orz is the same thing, except viewed from the size, with 'o' being your head, 'r' your arm and 'z' the rest of your body, in the kneeling seated position.
I've always liked these shortcuts.

まったり

mattari
relaxed, nonchalant, carefree, lazy

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like other adverbs in the syllable + glottal stop (っ) + syllable + り (ri) pattern, like ゆっくり (yukkuri) and ゆったり (yuttari), this word implies a drawn-out experience of time. according to Hiro, it's a recent addition to Japanese, and I suspect it was formed by combining the abovementioned adverbs with the verb 'to wait', 待つ (matu).
both Hiro and I are fond fans of the morning lay-about. it's a king-sized bed, so there's plenty of room for the two of us to stretch out on our own, to read, to play on the DS (I'm currently doing nothing but sudoku on that thing), or, of course, to spoon.
and it was in that context that Hiro sleepily said,
まったりできていいな。
mattari dekite ii na.
I love it when we get to be lazy like this.
the ironic thing about that statement is that, unbeknownst to either of us, once Hiro did go to work that day, he was laid off.
so now we get to be まったり for a bit longer. when not polishing CVs or browsing the want ads, that is.

ヒッキー

hikkii
(slang nickname for an) agoraphobe, someone who shuns society and prefers to stay at home with online friends for company

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an abbreviation of 引き蘢り屋 (hikikomoriya), which is a term for the recently common social tendency of Japanese adults, depressed by the lack of job prospects, to retreat into their homes or apartments, doing nothing but playing on the computer all day and eating either delivered food or food from a local convenience store. estimates say there might be upwards of 300,000 people with this condition in Japan.

齟齬

sogo
inconsistency, frustration, contradiction, failure, discord

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I was trying to find an old expression that I fell in love with when I first moved to Japan, back in 1988. I knew that the implied meaning was 'frustration', which is how I came upon 齟齬. I was instantly struck. two characters I had NEVER seen before, yet clearly related (they both have the same left-hand radical, which means 'tooth'). I looked them up.
齟 so is also used in the verb kamu (to bite), although there are other, more common, characters used for that verb as well. interestingly enough, it also means 'uneven' and 'disagree'... which makes me wonder who thinks these meanings up... =)
齬 go simply means 'irregular teeth' (think, Austin Powers).
so now I have a vision of being bitten by someone with a mouth full of odd-angled teeth. frustration and discord, indeed!

by the way, the phrase I wanted to find was:
地団駄を踏む
zidanda wo humu
stamp one's feet in frustration, literally, to tread the same worn ground beneath one's feet
for some reason, this phrase always makes me think of an angry turtle, stamping up and down on the same patch of mud but never going anywhere...

貶す

kenasu
to speak ill of

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another verb I had heard in use, but its meaning didn't hit home until I listened to Hiro go off on how the guys who do Top Gear (the English show for automotive geeks) were totally slamming Korean cars as junk. this verb came up quite often in Hiro's little diatribe, or perhaps homage, as Hiro is also a veteran hater of Korean-made products. it's a Japanese thing. defies logic sometimes. not that we Americans are ever logical to begin with.

リーマン

riiman
full-time employee, salaried employee

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the Japanese are known for shortening foreign loanwords down to four syllables. some of my favorite examples of this are below. the trend also proceeds for words which the Japanese themselves made up, including サラリーマン (sarariiman, a salaried employee), which has been shortened now to a four syllable (ri•i•ma•n, would be how the Japanese conceive of syllables) noun. the word probably arose in the 1960s, which would explain its sexism. the female counterpart from that time was (and remains, unfortunately), OL (which, when pronounced in Japanese is also four syllables: o•u•e•ru), an abbreviation for office lady, women who work full-time but as glorified clerical staff, if that. their responsibilities are to answer the phone, greet visitors, make tea for everyone, tidy things up...
as the Japanese economy has been in a long-term slump, and the once invulnerable life-time employment system came to a shocking end, the use of リーマン has declined somewhat, because people are beginning to think of careers as more fluid.

some other favorite abbreviations:

• モズレク mozureku: Mozart's requiem


• チャイコン tyaikon: the Tchaikovsky Concerto


• メンコン menkon: the Mendelssohn Concerto


• セクハラ sekuhara: sexual harassment

原色

gensyoku
primary colors

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I guess what I found interesting in this (admittedly very boring) noun was the first character.
原 (read as gen or hara, among other readings) can range in meaning from raw, primordial, original, to field, prairie, tundra and wilderness. I am guessing that this confluence of meanings arose after WWII when the number of characters used in Japan was reduced from over 40,000 to roughly 2,000, as a means to increase literacy, but there is something of a connection.
it is, after all, the wilderness from which all things arise. the universe, as the Greeks remind us, was born from Chaos.

天網恢々

tenmou kaikai
heaven's net is cast far and wide

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an aphorism, obviously, condensed into four characters. that last character, if you've not seen it before, is the equivalent of a ditto mark. it represents a repetition of the character immediately preceding it. I love the image of a celestial net being cast to catch the injust among us and bring them to retribution.

間接キス

kansetu kisu
an indirect kiss

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as far as I can tell, this is a uniquely Japanese concept. an indirect kiss occurs, usually with a blush of enlightenment, when someone accidently (or, rarely, intentionally), places their lips on something (like a straw) that someone else just had their lips on. real kissing is much more sexual in Japan. parents, for example, rarely, if ever, kiss their children. there is therefore a lot of romanticizing and tension around the possibility of and actual occurrence of a first kiss. hence, this notion that you could indirectly kiss someone like this.

賜る

tamawaru
to honor with, to dedicate, to grant

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this word came up in an argument I was having with Hiro about Japanese politics, specific to the controversial visits of Japanese politicians to Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto shrine established to honor the memory of the (Japanese) war dead.
although I've given the dictionary meanings above, I suspect that, given the way Hiro used the verb, it could also be similar to our verb, enshrine.
I won't go into the politics of the discussion, but that word struck me, as I hadn't heard it before, yet I knew, based on the conversation, almost exactly what it meant.

・（中黒）

nakaguro
a traditional part of Japanese punctuation. can function as either a blank space, which is not usually used in Japanese writing, or as a slash/stroke mark

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a writing system that functions without spaces to separate words from one another presents a challenge. what do you do when importing foreign terms that naturally incorporate a space? such as 'New York' or 'ice cream'. in Chinese, of course, the space is jettisoned, and you see that sometimes in Japanese as well, but the most prevalent form used to be to simply insert a nakaguro, meaning, literally, centered black [dot], between the two (or more) imported words. Japanese imports a huge number of words every year into its language, generally using the katakana script, a phonetic syllabary, for that, although adopting foreign words has been going on since at least the eighth century CE, if not before, when Korean buddhist monks probably began introducing Buddhist texts in Chinese and the Japanese adapted the Chinese writing system, referred to as kanji, for their language.
when the Japanese were introduced to Dutch (via merchants) and Portuguese (via Jesuits) language concepts, in the sixteenth century CE, they originally either used new kanji compounds that sounded somewhat like the loan words, such as tobacco and pan (for bread), or developed new compounds that had no aural connection, like 天文学 (tenmongaku) for astronomy, etc.

メシウマ

mesi uma
an abbreviated form of a longer aphorism, 他人の不幸で、飯がうまい (tanin no hukou de, mesi ga umai), literally meaning, food (or a meal) tastes better when others are unhappy, very akin to the German concept of Schadenfreude, happiness at the misfortune of others

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it's curious to me why we don't have an easy way to say something like this in English. it might be, on face value, a nasty sentiment, to exult in someone else's downfall, but that is a very human reaction.
on a personal note, I have been writing this down manually (and mentally) over the past week, as most of my work has been away from the computer. I find myself catching up all at once when it comes to computer entries...

モンガー

mongaa
an abbreviated of モンスター外人 (monsutaa gaizin), meaning, monster foreigner, or foreigner run amok

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a friend alerted me to this neologism, which appeared in a Tokyo weekly magazine. the article it headlined purported to detail all the recent attacks on Japanese mores perpetrated by non-Japanese, but, to my mind, what it did was exposed a lot of the typical prejudices Japanese people have. e.g., Koreans steal. Caucasians are disrespectful. most non-Japanese smell bad. etc., ad nauseam.

なるほど

naruhodo
I see, of course, ah yes

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this is the other typical Japanese utterance that seems to signal fluency. used to confirm the logic of what someone else has just said. it is sometimes repeated, much like we would mutter, yes, yes..., after hearing our suspicions confirmed.

やはり

yahari
of course, that must be it, I knew it

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yahari (or yapari, yappari or yappasi, all common variants of the same word) should be your response when someone tells you something and you:

• suspected it was true all along


• knew about it, but didn't want to say


• have a sudden flash of insight


• can suddenly form a conclusion because the new information is like the last piece in a puzzle

it's one of the words that identifies you as fluent in Japanese, because it signals that you understand how communication in Japanese works.
how does it work?
that's going to take a little bit more space than I have right now, but suffice it say that one of the keys to communication is the notion of shared information. what yahari does in that context is it informs the previous speaker, the person for whom you are having the yahari reaction, that you have already been thinking about what he or she was seeing. not only that, but that he or she just provided you with vital new information.
it's sort of akin to Archimedes' 'eureka' moment, except that ol' Archimedes was likely alone when he said it, and it was his own observation of his rising bathwater that prompted it.

矢鱈

yatara
random, excessive, especially common in adverb form, with a ni particle following it

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Hiro uses this word a lot, and it's one I've never formally learned. he pronounces it with an emphatic glottal stop in the middle: yattara. I suppose this is akin to the difference between yahari and yappari (meaning, I knew it! Of course!), where the glottal stop is used to give the word more oomph.
what I don't understand is what connection the characters have to the meaning, because, at face value, this word would mean something like arrow-cod. obviously metaphoric, or perhaps just atezi, which is when the Japanese assign kanzi to a Japanese word based on the sound alone.
another interesting note: I suspect this is one of those words that, when used correctly, signal true fluency (to a Japanese listener).
When I was studying Japanese, my professor, the author Eleanor Harz Jorden, stressed that there were a few words that, when used correctly, signaled a deeper level of language mastery. among the words that we studied that qualified for that distinction were yappari and naruhodo. I think I will give them both their own entries.

三日坊主

mikka bouzu
literally, a three day bonze, or Buddhist priest. figuratively, a jack-of-all-trades, a weathercock, someone who can't stick to anything

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I haven't had much in the way of work, and even found it hard to keep up with this, hence today's entry. truth be told, I'm writing this on the 5th, but I've dated it for the 2nd, so I can at least maintain an appearance of diligence, which I, obviously, lack.

風紀

huuki
public morals, mores, social conventions

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this word struck me as odd because it literally could be translated as 'chronicles of the wind'. which, in a way, I suppose is what public morals really are. they are a transitory notion that changes in the winds of time.