I have become fascinated with the linguistics of people my age, as it is by far the most common dialect I encounter, and also the most shouted down by my sensei…
I’m not content with my generation being just “bad at Japanese” there are rules, I just don’t know them yet.
Has anyone else encountered Millennial Japanese words and linguistic patterns that you can explain, or which have explanations somewhere on the internet?
For that matter, one’s you can’t explain and want to work through as a group?
アモーレ I’m pretty sure comes from some celebrity who lived in Italy and used the word to describe his wife / girlfriend. It was in 2016’s word of the year contest.
I’m guessing はげる may have something to do with the politician a few months back who screamed at her aide in a car, striking him in the head and calling him “Baldy! Baldy!”.
Are you just referring to the character? I don’t really see what about the word that would rendered unusable, except that it might seem as odd as using any other slang.
I still don’t really get why that would stop you, it’s not like Japanese people are going to interpret a westerner’s usage of it differently than a Japanese person’s. Plus, it’s not even the same “handedness” as the Nazi swastika.
The issue is that a lot of the ways that I can communicate in are not things that only Japanese, Japanese speaking people will see, and that pattern is one which can hurt other Western people if they don’t have a specific understanding of why I’m using it.
I don’t follow, why would others who don’t know Japanese, be reading your Japanese writing in the first place? They’d have to be some kind of strange to read everything and then get upset because a Japanese character looks like a symbol that upsets that person.
Dude, Twitter.
Maji isn’t exactly the most subtle or infrequent word in Japanese
Doesn’t take much to be like “WOW THEY LOOK LIKE A NAZI SYMPATHIZER” In this political climate…
Maybe I just have too much faith in people to assume that if a word in another language that looks similar to something they recognize, it probably means something totally different. If the character was just on its own I could see it, but with any other normal Japanese text? I’d really hope people would be smart and actually think before going all up in arms about it.
I use Maji in hiragana (or katakana for emphasis) but I can’t use the kanji. The kanji only recently became a slang shorthand and it’s far from common knowledge so I can’t take the risk.
