Learning Japanese.

[Random]

Cool! I hate it.

So I guess in translation you'd just pick one and roll with it for the duration of the scene?

[Comun]

Pure third-person narration is effectively non-existent in Japanese prose, so first-person prose remains first-person prose and mixed prose becomes third-person with a decent deal of narration lines becoming thought bubbles.

[Random]

即死 isn't necessarily literal, right? Is it normal for it to be used in a hyperbolic sense?

[Comun]

即死 can and often is used as the reaction to seeing good posts online, yes.

[Nanashi(kari)]

I really hate words of chinese origin ending in 'o', 'ou' and others simliar to these. I'm always fumbling around those because I can't tell which one it is from pronunciation.

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I spent a really, really long time without noticing 回路 and 回廊 are different words.

[Kirishima]

Posting to let the apo thread rest in peace

How long did it take you to be fluent on it?

I'm far from fluent, I only seriously started this year, but I just meant that it's fun to learn. If you're interested if im any good, I can read children's books and understand everyday conversation pretty easily and read the latest FGO main story OC thing and understood most of it, with the help of a browser extension to help me read any kanji I didn't know.

[Cypher Attic]

How do Japanese names work? From what I've read online the meaning of names is important, especially for fictional characters, but I've never seen a complete breakdown of how names are actually constructed beyond listing the dictionary definitions of each kanji individually. That leaves a lot of unanswered questions:

• Is each character chosen in isolation?
• If not, why do so many (especially surnames) have vague or nonsequetur meanings. For example: 鈴木 means bell tree?
• What determines the order? Does the meaning change if characters are reversed? For an example: "美" appears at the beginning of some names and at the end of others.
• (The above question is also one that I have about compound words.)
• Can you just slap together any valid kanji to make an entirely new name? Or swap out the normal kanji just for shits and giggles?
• Et cetera.

I also have some questions about the cultural perception of specific names, just out of an awareness that (in English) every Billy is a farmboy and a small number of last names are normally associated with one or two social classes. This is a little off topic, though…

[Dullahan]

- Since the Meiji Restoration, Japanese names are (legally) constructed from a surname and a given name. The surname is written first. The Emperor and members of the Imperial family, who are officially mononymous, are the exception to this rule.
- Most Japanese did not have surnames prior to the Meiji restoration. Many Japanese surnames therefore only came into being in the last 150 years, which is why Japan has a more diverse array of surnames compared to China and Korea (where Wang (7%) and Kim (21.6%) respectively are shared by large portions of the population.) The most common surname in Japan is Satou, which is shared by only 1.3% of the population.
- Characters may or may not be chosen in isolation. It depends. There are certainly authors who name characters purely on the basis of the coolness of the kanji involved. There are others who use more realistic names.
- Surnames in general do not have vague and non-sequitur meanings. You are simply missing the context. Suzuki 鈴木 however is a special case. It is a very old native Japanese name which originated from the Kumano area sometime in the Heian period. But native Japanese did not have its own writing system. The Chinese characters that were adopted to write it down during the Heian period were adopted on the basis of their sound and not their semantic meaning. This is called Man'yougana. All existing hiragana and katakana glyphs are in fact simplified versions of Chinese characters that were used for their sound and not their meaning.
- Obviously order matters. Why would it not matter?
- There are some kanji which are not permitted for use in personal names under Japanese law. Fictional characters don't have to abide by that, of course, but in general they do.

[Nanashi(kari)]

By the way, samurai surnames are usually the place name of where their ancestor settled in.

[Cypher Attic]

Interesting. I didn't even know there were samurai specific surnames.

What determines the order of the characters, though? Is it solely based on sound? My first instinct was to assume that the first character functions like an adjective to the next, but that doesn't seem to be the case… maybe it's a genitive construction?
The theory also doesn't account for 3 character names.

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- Suzuki 鈴木 however is a special case. It is a very old native Japanese name which originated from the Kumano area sometime in the Heian period. But native Japanese did not have its own writing system. The Chinese characters that were adopted to write it down during the Heian period were adopted on the basis of their sound and not their semantic meaning. This is called Man'yougana. All existing hiragana and katakana glyphs are in fact simplified versions of Chinese characters that were used for their sound and not their meaning.

Okay, that explains it.

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Also, wow, 21% of the population sharing one family name seems like it would defeat the purpose.

[Dullahan]

If you are asking "how are multiple characters put together to make a single word" the answer is: it depends. There are some Japanese words which were adopted wholesale from Chinese, some which were adopted from Chinese but without retaining the original meaning, some which were created later once Chinese characters had become established in Japan itself, and some in which Chinese characters have been used for their sound without any regard to what they mean (sushi 寿司 for example). Even restricting yourself to the first category, asking "how does one character affect the meaning of another one next to it" is a question equivalent to "how does the Chinese language even work, actually" which is beyond the scope of answerability in forum posts. Some of the time, yes, character 1 acts like an adjective applied to character 2 next to it. Other times it is the opposite. It depends. A lot of the time you can explain it with reference to the grammar and syntax of classical Chinese (not modern Chinese, I mean the language the Four Books and Five Classics are written in) but not always.

[Petrikow]

One interesting anecdote about 佐藤 (Satou) that I now feel compelled to share now that Dullahan has brought it up, is that it's actually part of a wider family of names that are the most common ones in Japan. It's also related to this:

By the way, samurai surnames are usually the place name of where their ancestor settled in.

The 藤 (tou) in this name actually represents the 藤原 (Fujiwara) clan who dominated Heian politics. A lot of Samurai and other Japanese nobles are descended from the Fujiwara family, but tended to take new names (much like Cadet branches in Europe) when they became entrenched elsewhere. Hence the 佐 (sa) in 佐藤 (Satou) actually represents the place they come from. Still, in typical confusing Japanese fashion, 佐 (sa) can actually represent many different locales, since it's a common character to start a place name with.

There are tons of other of these types of names. The second-most common is probably 加藤 (Katou), but you also has 須藤 (Sudou), 東藤 (Toudou), 工藤 (Kudou), 五藤 (Gotou), etc...

It should be noted however, that these were still names adopted in the 19th century reforms where suddenly tons of people needed surnames who hadn't had ones before. Nobles generally already had more distinct clan names, so the majority of the people who adopted the 藤原 (Fujiwara) style names were actually commoners who were either using it to claim some sort of distant lineage, or alternatively just people who lived in that particular fief and wanted to show their connection to it. It wouldn't be so common otherwise.

[Deathhappens]

- There are some kanji which are not permitted for use in personal names under Japanese law.

You can't drop a gem like that and not expound further.

[Comun]

It's just basic "you can't use the characters for murder, shit, corpse, etc. in a person's name" stuff. The West also has laws like that.

[Dullahan]

Aside from the specific restrictions on characters with meanings that are deemed offensive, as Comun mentioned, there is a general principle that names should be able to be read by the average Japanese speaker. When you are choosing a name for a child you can only use the characters from the Jouyou [Common Use] kanji as well as the Jinmeiyou [Personal Name Use] kanji, which altogether amounts to about the 3000 most common characters in Japanese.

There is, however, nothing stopping you (legally, as far as I recall) from declaring a reading of those characters which is totally arbitrary. You would use furigana to show this. Girls with the name 月 read as "Luna" (of which there are about 1000 according to recent census data) are an example. It is roughly equivalent to being called something like Emmalee, Jaxson, Brytnneigh, or Jay-Z; not illegal, but probably ought to be

[Rafflesiac]

name your kid pikachu

[Comun]

Yazawa Pikachu should already be a working adult by now. I wonder if he changed his name.

[tsugumi]

Need a venn diagram of the lifestyles of people who give their children kira kira names and the lifestyles of people like this