Japanglish journeys: the 100 yen store
Not only are 100 yen shops a kind of messiah for tight-budgeted students, travelers and residents, they are an honest to goodness goldmine for top-quality Japanglish. I imagine some of the products they carry ended up there specifically because the maker realized their translation was rubbish.
Recently I made a trip to the Skyle building Daiso in Sakae, Nagoya… here’s what I came away with…
A few random shots
Sorry for the lack of updating but as I mentioned on Twitter, my parents are visiting for 10 days and I don’t have much time for the blog. Of course it’s also a chance for me to get out and about, so I’ve taken quite a few pictures that I’ll be putting here eventually.
For now, here are a couple random shots from my travels so far…
Japanese Proverbs: September 2009
Every day I tweet a new Japanese proverb with it’s reading, translation, and definition explained. Here is a roundup of all 29 proverbs that I posted in September 2009 (the first full month that I’ve been doing this…). If I had done one every day there would have been 30 but it looks like I forgot one on the 30th…
Japanese cheat sheet (old)
Alright, I so started this blog about a month ago. Posts are starting to build up and I’m starting to feel at home here lately. I decided it was time to start dishing out some real content, otherwise I’m just another ranting Japanophile. So for the last week or so I’ve been hard at work on a top secret project, and now it’s done!
I present to the world the Nihonshock Japanese cheat sheet!
Pizza Flavored Instant Yaki-soba
Japanese people are very good at coming up with flavors and combinations that no one else would dare to attempt. On this point, Japanese pizza is another post in and of itself… but today I just want to show everyone this interesting new product that caught my eye at my local convenience store yesterday.
Silver Week in Japan
Many of you may have heard of Golden Week, a string of Japanese holidays in early May that is a major time for Japanese people to go on vacation. But I doubt as many have heard of Silver Week! But there’s a good reason you may not have heard of it though: this year is the first Silver Week ever…
Jubeat: the most awesome game ever.
It was about one year ago that I first discovered this beautiful machine at a local ゲーセン (“game center” or arcade), and I fell in love at first sight. Those big, beautiful buttons, the soothing cyber-techno atmosphere… I felt like I was dancing in the future, with my hands. This was it. This was the music game to rule all music games, it was perfect.
Katakana Mysteries: 6 loan words Japan got wrong
Two minutes with a fashion magazine or computer manual is all you need to understand that loan words are all the rage in Japan. At book stores, you can find katakana dictionaries for every need, from technically oriented things automotive engineering or graphic design, to more simple katakana dictionaries for old grandmothers and grandfathers who simply want to…
Infectious Gastroenteritis!?
one of my old Japanglish pictures from a Tokyo hotel a year or so ago…
20 Similar-Looking Kanji
For this post I’ve collected 10 pairs of kanji that to untrained eyes might look almost or exactly the same. My intent is not to discourage learners by highlighting the difficult points of kanji (though there are certainly difficulties…), but rather to spark an interest in kanji…
More from Nihonshock…
