Biggest Realizations / Mind Blows You've Experienced Learning Japanese: Emoji means what?!?!

tfw I just realized that 藤 / ふじ / wisteria, a kanji I thought I would never see in the world outside of WK, is used in the name of one of my favorite artists 藤ちょこ

It’s a very common kanji for family names:
佐藤 齋藤(and variations) 加藤 内藤 藤井 and so on.

Wisteria is also a really popular thing to go see in Japan so believe it or not, it does come up in conversation.

The problem with names is many of them use alternate readings that you don’t learn in WK. I’d just look at them and think “How the f*ck do you read this”. In the 5 names you listed I know the kanjis in 4 of them and still can’t read them ;-;

I can totally see myself being in a conversation and think the other person is talking about the Fuji mountain when they’re actually not :rofl:

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That’s generally the way Japanese names are. They can have kanji just for the meaning but be read completely differently just for the sake of it. There’s no way around this really, just something you have to get used to and put up with.

Well, most people are unlikely to talk about Mount Fuji without adding the 山 at the end, but if they do, 富士 is high pitch > low pitch, and 藤 is low pitch > high pitch

image

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That are things that I probably don’t think of in the middle of a conversation :thinking: I’d just hear ふじ and relate that to the mountain before thinking any further.
Is that some tool you used to display the pitch of that sentence? It looks convenient.
And you just reminded me that I wanted to install the pitch accent user script for WK.

Yeah, it’s this site.

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It probably helps that Japanese people will mainly (in my experience) refer to 藤の花 when referring to the flower and not the mountain.

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Idk if this fits but I just got to 少女 and I’m lowkey freaking out cuz WOW I CAN READ THIS IS JAPANESE NOW! Like hahah, I knew it had something to do with girl, and so its neat to read the kanji and now how they’re kinda ish put together to mean what they mean! :sparkles:

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I just had the lesson for 埼, which means cape in the geographic sense.
埼玉 therefore is Cape Ball.

Cape Ball
Caped Baldy
Saitama
giphy

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learned the word 茹でる (ゆでる) just now and realized wk’s mnemonic for ゆで卵 ("湯"で、卵) was a complete lie

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Today I was studying keigo when I realized that
いらっしゃいませ doesn’t mean “welcome” like I had believed all these years. It’s sonkeigo and it basically means “come in”.

I’ve also recently realized that the ご in ご飯 was meant to be an honorific. I had never heard of rice or meals being referred to without the ご so the thought never occurred to me.

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Yeah, some, like お腹 or おやすみ (for the meaning of good night), basically are never referred to without 御

…お腹too?

Mfw me and the other person living in Japan are the only ones communicating

And then I wake up and see the replies

Nice! I can’t wait to have time to watch the new season.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei also had a lot of name puns (some of which get explained in post-credit shorts).

I love Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei but it is so fast paced that it is very hard to pick up anything if I’m not watching on Animelon, which allows one to change the speed.

When I visited China, I noticed the character 好 so many times. I don’t know why, it just stood out.

In Japanese class a few months later, we looked at a text with very basic kanji, and it had 好き in it.

Then I realised, That character I saw is ‘like’ in Japanese!

I still don’t know what it is in Chinese, but that moment I just felt so accomplished. I could finally attach a meaning to the character I’d see so many times.

好 in Chinese means good, very or yes/ok.

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