I just this minute discovered that Kobayashi - familiar to Star Trek fans as the name of a doomed ship simulation, and also part of the title of a recent anime - means “little forest”:
小林.
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The ship name was Kobayashi Maru, which is appropriate for a starship.
A little pocket of life in the void.
Interestingly, Google translates 小林丸 as Kobayashi Maru, so it recognizes the name.
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OMG yes! This is…I love Japanese!
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I know I’ve posted this before, but I just want to reiterate since I’ve recently been learning more.
It took me until this year to realize that, like 時 or こと, all the words used in a similar suffix manner–はず, わけ, ほど, おそれ, つもり, まま and others–are nouns, being modified by a verb just as any other nouns would be. I’m not really sure what I thought of them as being before, other than some mysterious part of Japanese speech.
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One of my biggest mind blows was realizing the こ・そ・あ・ど system and how many different places it shows up that you don’t learn at the beginning. こいつ and こういう, for example.
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Does learning the Japanese keyboard on iPhone count? When I first downloaded it I’m like, “how the-”… and once I realized how to use it, it became so satisfying to use.
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Some other company names:
成功
楽天
東芝
三菱
本田
朝日
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Wow I agree
I recently had the same thought, as I’ve been getting more and more used to just how often a linking て is used to set up relations in everyday Japanese (cause-and-effect, means, degrees, etc.; it doesn’t do well to always think of it as the strict “and” it tends to be taught as in beginner or even intermediate Japanese; or you just have to retrain yourself to think of “and” as having far more flexibility in terms of implications).
However, without knowing the etymology either (it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were a link), it’s worth noting that native speakers do tend to think of the particle で and the だ conjugation as being different things. Or at least that’s been my strong impression when both discussing grammar and watching them learn English in Japan.
EDIT – I missed that this had already been clarified. Oh well. Glad someone else had the same, “Wait … are they …?” thought. And the dictionary entry that got posted afterward does seem to confirm a link, unless I’m reading that wrong and they’re two separate meanings.
Realistically this happens every time I learn that a word I had previously only seen in kana has an origin in kanji, but today’s mindblow was たくさん / 沢山 - because doi, Japan has a lot of mountains and mountain streams.
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I feel that this is quite an important bit but I find myself not quite understanding it (grammar studies aren’t that far along). Could I bother you to elaborate a tad more?
I’m not @bblum and they can feel to answer this with their own knowledge, but I like grammar questions.
I’ll start with the basics:
です - To be
だ - To be (Informal)
で - The て form of だ
Typically when you want to connect sentences together as clauses, you will switch all verbs aside from the last verb into the て form. For example, saying “This morning I ate breakfast, then went to school” would be: けさ、私は朝ご飯を食べて学校に行きました。
This can be done with the copula too, by using で. Saying “I am a woman and a student” can be expressed as: 私は女の人で学生です。. Here, で effectively acts as “and”, but it is really just the て form of a copula sentence (a sentence making a simple statement).
If you look at the negative conjugation of です, ではありません and ではない (informal), you can treat the で here as the て form of だ. So for a sentence “I am not a boy”, 私は男の子ではありません。, you can split this into three parts: 私は男の子で、は、and ありません。You may start to get an idea of what’s going on here. What you’re basically saying is: “Me being a boy does not exist.”, or “The idea of me being a boy does not exist”, or just “I am not a boy.”.
You can’t apply this for every situation you come across, but there are occasionally a few neat occurrences.
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what do you mean by this? is there a website i can learn more about this? lol
Yes, that makes a lot of sense, thanks! Should be very useful to know in the future.
This is a stupid one- but one thing that’s really blown me away is learning how awful my English spelling is. (English is my first language.)
edit: This is more of a “WaniKani thing that blew my mind” but I think it counts, because I never would of known if I hadn’t started studying Japanese (ha)
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@UntitledName pretty much covered it.
I’ll add another example I got from asking a native speaker though: 時間切れで負ける - to translate it like it’s the context particle, “to lose via running out of time”; to translate it like it’s the copula, “time ran out, and then (to) lose”. But in fact either way it means the same thing.
Some example uses of で as the context particle in your friendly local grammar guide make a little less sense than this one if read as the copula, but I find it fun that it’s kind of a blurry line.
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Thanks, this is really good to know!
光栄 and 栄光 are good examples as well 
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I had the same when I learned that Mitsubishi literally meant ‘three diamonds’, hence the three diamonds in their logo.
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japanese mindblower of the day:
stock phrase for “I’m sorry”– gomen nasai
ごめんなさい=御免なさい
御= “honorable” (prefix added to noun/verb forms used by those of superior station than the speaker in super-polite speech)
免=“excuse”
なさる= to do/make (super-polite form of する)
なさい= imperative form of なさる
ごめんなさい– “[please] honorably excuse [my actions].”
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