A Quick (Beginner) Reading Exercise

Reading Practice for Beginners! Can you read each of the words? How many words can you understand?

Some backstory: I bought this shirt at the Ghibli Museum back before I learned to read Japanese. The picture on the shirt is a portrayal of how Miyazaki organized which color of paint to use for each of his drawings. Each code corresponds to a color. When I bought it I figured the words were super obscure, but I realized recently that they aren’t at all! Thought the beginners might enjoy some practice :blush:

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What a neat shirt! I was able to read nearly all of the words, but I didn’t know ヒゲ, whiskers! I wasn’t used to seeing words like 鼻 (nose) in hiragana, but I was still able to read them, luckily. I was also able to finally see something use 車内, which I thought was a super specific word when I learned on WK. Thanks for sharing!

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The only word I didn’t know was しま・しまもよう, which is apparently a striped pattern. In kanji that’s 縞模様. I know 模様 so I could tell it was indicating a pattern, but I didn’t know what pattern. I think previously I’d only seen 水玉模様 (polka dots), though I couldn’t remember the Japanese and literally just tried both 水模様 and 玉模様 before giving up and looking it up in English. :laughing:

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Very nyaice!
CatBus

That striped pattern is quite odd, isn’t it?

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I could only get a couple of words. :frowning:

but soon I will be able to read them all!

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Had a bit of trouble looking up 肉きゅう because it’s not in my dictionary in half-and-half, and I somehow forgot that にく is the on’yomi.

It’s 肉球, and it means “itsy bitsy smoosh buttons”.

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肉球 is so great in google images.

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=肉球

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ヒゲ means mustache as well! It becomes easy to remember if you know the band Official髭男dism (ひげだん). Great group with a great name!

PS I got really excited about 車内 as well haha

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Lol love the commitment! I just though “ah, しま must mean tail” and moved on haha. Thanks for the mini kanji lesson!

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Lol I love it! There are other dictionary translations of course, such as “paddy paws” and “little jellybeans”

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I honestly would have guessed “meatball”. lol

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“toe beans” is my favourite :blush:

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That’s a cool t-shirt. love that you are starting to understand things which were once indecipherable !

I ended up not buying anything at the Ghibli museum, because it was so expensive ! think the exchange rate was particularly bad at the time to add to the pain :roll_eyes:

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Interesting! I guess zebra uses this as well? しまうま for striped horse?

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Wow, I understood everything after racking my brain a bit. :astonished: This must be how success feels like!

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