Yes, Beijing was named as such because of the Ming Dynasty, to distinguish it from Nanjing.
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Wow, Now quickly tell me what do you call Saturday in JP?
One sec, allow me to refer to japanese days of the week: weekends edition line 32 of clause 2 from chapter 17 on page 534.
EDIT: 土曜日
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Thanks for the quick answer, In that time I enjoyed this song.
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Four minutes! That must be a world record!
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My most mind blowing fact a while ago was that mushroom literally spells out “tree’s child”:
きのこ
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This is almost the same as spanish’s “Kikiriki”!
About the day of the week, the link is even stronger in French, because we’ve kept the etymology from Roman mythology:
| English | French | Japanense |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Lundi | 月曜日 |
| Moon | Lune | 月 |
| — | — | — |
| Tuesday | Mardi | 火曜日 |
| ? | Mars | 火星 |
| — | — | — |
| Wednesday | Mercredi | 水曜日 |
| ? | Mercure | 水星 |
| — | — | — |
| Thursday | Jeudi | 木曜日 |
| ? | Jupiter | 木星 |
| — | — | — |
| Friday | Vendredi | 金曜日 |
| ? | Venus | 金星 |
| — | — | — |
| Saturday | Samedi | 土曜日 |
| Saturn | Saturne | 土星 |
| — | — | — |
| Sunday | Dimanche | 日曜日 |
| Sun | ? | 日 |
Hope it makes sense.
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The other week I found myself wanting to put だ (the copula) in the て-form for whatever reason. When I looked it up and realized it’s で, suddenly every usage and connotation of the で particle (e.g., when to use instead of に) made a LOT more sense.
I don’t know if that’s actually its etymology or if native speakers think of だ and で as the same word or not, but since this revelation I’ve yet to find a use of で that doesn’t make sense as テ形「だ」.
Kind of similar feeling as when I realized the explanatory の・んだ and the nominalizing の are the same.
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I have a revelation basically every level. I learned 君 recently and was surprised at both readings being a word I kind of already knew.
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I thought I would share this again here as it’s more relevant to this topic, but the original post was here.
I can’t stand these two…
I’ve reviewed the ‘Not yet’ 50 times and ‘The End’ kanji/vocabulary about 200+ times between them.
I only recently figured out a way I could remember them. If you focus only on the widest vertical stroke in both Kanji you can think of it making a journey heading upwards.
For 未 the widest vertical bar hasn’t reached the top of character, it is ‘Not Yet’ there.
For 末 the widest vertical bar has reached the top of the character, therefore it has reached ‘The End’.
As for memorised the readings, 未 looks like a MIG fighter jet (mi).
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These 2 are so incredibly frustrating that I often find myself having to stop and think about it every time I read one.
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Yesterday I discovered an interesting phenomenon. Japanese pronouns あの and その are also used as filler words at start of a sentence, for example: あの… 行かなければならない 。Um… I must go.
In English, we use words such as “err”, “um”, “well”, etc. to fill in sentences instead of e.g. “This… I must go”. However, in Croatian (and possibly other Slavic languages) we use the same words as pronouns, as well as fillers, e.g. “ovaj” (この) or “onaj” (あの). So, in Croatian something that literally translates to “This… I must go” would totally pass in everyday conversation.
Does this occur in any other languages you speak?
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I don’t know how I never realised before but somehow I never made the association between the reading for 三日 and the Katakana character ミ.
I probably never made the connection because the Kun reading is written in Hiragana (み), I feel so stupid now…
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There’s one thing I’d call a mind blow and two things that I just find funny. Mind blow: When you see a word consisted of kanji you know, and they magically are pieced together in their meaning in your head, without using words, like you are perceiving knowledge of an alien language (like in arrival),
aaand the fun stuff: kemushi - fur insect - for caterpillar just lifts my mood everytime,
and netptune as sea-king-star is just great! 
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Indeed, all the katakana and hiragana come from kanji originally.
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I feel it’s worse knowing that I originally learned that particular Katakana character by remember that it looks like the Kanji for 3.
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I think there’s actually two distinct particles. Many of them, such as ではない are, but I don’t think all of them are the same. Keep in mind the copula hasn’t always been だ but the other particle で has existed.
Mind blow of a different sort for me here:
I went to Taiwan over the holidays and met my girlfriend’s 90 year old grandmother. She was born under Japanese occupation and was not just educated in Japanese but brought up to believe she was Japanese until she was nineteen. Mandarin is still like a second language to her and we spent several hours sitting with her and chatting in Japanese. She said she was so happy to be able to use the language since it had been years since she’d had an opportunity to speak for so long in it.
Absolutely fascinating experience and a use for the language I could never expected when starting out.
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Yeah, after posting I asked a native speaker what they thought. They said sometimes it means the same thing, and sometimes not, and also that the te-form isn’t really taught in japanese schools as an explicit grammatical construct anyway, so natives don’t think about it at all really. Guess I’ll have to be satisfied with a broken half of an epiphany. 