Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Kana override in titles

Recently, I've noticed a serious problem with romanized Japanese titles. It's something that may seems pretty straightforward, but so many Japanese learners aren't even aware of it after years of studying, and it's no other than furigana. Let's take a few examples:

Friday, February 21, 2014

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Radio calisthenics

While translating Josei Danshi 13, I came across a sentence that makes no sense to me even with the help of dictionaries and wikipedia. After asking my sensei, I've learned an interesting thing about what called ラジオ体操 in Japanese (read as ラジオたいそう), also known as radio calisthenics in English, that is currently not present on the English wikipedia, so I decided to share this information, because it's something you must know if you ever enounter this word in anything you read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS92XkVKM0Q
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ラジオ体操
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_calisthenics

Even though I'm posting the link to the JP wiki here, I'm too lazy to read the article with my current Japanese, so I'm not sure if it covers everything. As for the English wiki, I know for sure that it doesn't have that information by the time I'm writing this post. Without it, translating this following sentence is just impossible:
ギャラがおかしって…ラジオ体操の景品じゃないんだから…
The necessary information is as follow:
ギャラ means "pay" and it is basically the only word for it used in show business. ラジオ体操 means what any dictinary would tell you it means. If a kid participates in it for enough days during the summer recess, the community will give him a little present on the last day, which is usually August 31. In my town, the present was usually a notebook or pencils, but from this manga, it looks as though that the present can be candies or snacks in some communities.
"They pay you with candies --- just like the present you get for attending ラジオ体操 !"
(Smith)