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My best Asian tatoo anecdote: I was at a party and chatted with a girl that had a five Chinese characters tatto. I deciphered it as "the mountain cat search a
by tasogare 7y ago
My best Asian tatoo anecdote: I was at a party and chatted with a girl that had a five Chinese characters tatto. I deciphered it as "the mountain cat search a family". The girl correct me on the first word which meant lynx (which was correct), but was otherwise super impressed.
« — You are the first person I ever met that understand it!!
— No big deal, I’m read some Chinese.
— It’s Japanese tho.
— Yeah, it’s Japanese... »
Then I walked away without telling her I was majoring... in Japanese.
- mstade 7y agoGreat story, thanks for sharing! Whenever I see someone wearing a tattoo with characters like these I can't help but wonder if it's actually what the wearer believes it to be, or if it's just items off a take-out menu...
- StavrosK 7y agoI don't understand, was it Japanese or not?
- dazhengca 7y agoProbably kanji, Chinese characters
- bsznjyewgd 7y agoIt was in Chinese but the girl thought it was in Japanese.
- StavrosK 7y agoBut then why would majoring in Japanese matter? Unless it was Kanji?
- irrational 7y agoBecause he recognized that she was wrong. It was Chinese and not Japanese.
- thaumasiotes 7y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20101124040141/http://spikedmath.com/335.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101124040141/http://spikedmath... On a radically different note, I find it kind of surreal that comics 334 and 335 have been silently excised from this comic's archives page, and #333 now links forward to #336.
- ddevault 7y agoThe two written languages are, to a small degree, mutually intelligible. But it's like translating by converting a sentence to a bunch of on-topic words in no particular order which convey ideas from the original, often including a few wrong ideas that leak from anachronisms. Example: "I went on a hike and saw a 'mountain dark fly alive thing' yesterday!" probably means an owl or something.
- StavrosK 7y agoAh, I see, thank you.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoIt was explained to me by a Japanese literature teacher this is why Asian people so readily took to and love emojis. Not because they’re cute but because they’re are semi-reflective of how they’re used to reading. Edit: HN won’t let me paste emoji examples :( they were pretty good I thought.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> 'mountain dark fly alive thing' 山暗飞生物? I'd be pretty shocked at a word for an indigenous species (like "owl") that was more than two characters.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ddevault 7y agoThe example was not meant to be taken literally.
- zhte415 7y agoOwl is cat-head-eagle 猫头鹰(Mandarin). :)
- tasogare 7y agoIt wasn’t. It was Chinese without any ambiguity[2] because of the word order[1]. Also, Japanese equivalent would have been longer and used characters specific to Japanese (hiragana) to write flexion of the verb, and casual particles. [1] One could argue it may have been kanbun, that is Classical Chinese read with Japanese readings, but I think the character meaning cat was written in its simplified form (which is the same in Japanese and Simplified Chinese) so this rule this out. And someone which that much knowledge would state it if it was the case. [2] Edit: the choice of vocabulary, while existing in Chinese, leaned a bit towards Japanese. I'm asking native Chinese speaker for confirmation. So, it was a weird mix, but not real Japanese. PS: as far as I remember is was written 山猫求家族 but I may be wrong.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]