*Looks at kanji “…Fast cow?” *Looks at definition “Well okay then.”
Jisho also has 早牛も淀、遅牛も淀 as an expression, so one wonders if 早牛 is used as a synecdoche.
Lmao, most recent English word I’ve learned
ヤモリ - gecko; house lizard
It can be written 家守 as well as 守宮. Somehow, protection can be on either sides.
Seems like it’s appeared twice already in this thread, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it so here:
矍鑠 - vigorous (in old age); hale and hearty
I’ll quote Kalas on the fun fact:
I haven’t run across this one before, but whenever I find words with unusual kanji, I like to look them up on Kanjipedia (if it doesn’t show up there, then it’s not on any of the Kanken tests) to get more context. In the case of 矍, there appears to be the word 矍視, and for 鑠, there is 鑠金 as well as 鑠かす, which shows up in the idiom 衆口金を鑠かす. Now these are likely very very obscure words, but they could show up in older literature.
錦, meaning ‘brocade’. Miraculously, I already knew what brocade was thanks to Final Fantasy 14. And they said video games wouldn’t get me anywhere!
Ayyyy I brought you here!
Your credentials as a tutor are proven this day
Out here trying to earn my mentor crown as a SCH
十年一昔
Though it’s practically not even in 10 years in context, in this digital era.
Also it can be counted 二昔
These new Tracy Chapman covers are getting ridiculous
座薬 - suppository
No particular reason. Seriously.
You know, I don’t think I’ll even need a mnemonic to remember that one.
現行犯逮捕 - Arresting someone caught in the act of a crime. (Just a compound word of 現行犯, which is being caught in the act (of a crime), and 逮捕, which is ‘arrest’.)
手榴弾 - hand grenade
粁 - kilometer
About Etymology and Stuff
I was mentioning to my coworker how I liked words like 手榴弾 because even though I hadn’t seen it before, I could easily imagine what a hand pomegranate bomb was. He responded that he was surprised as well when he learned the word grenadine in English and related it to grenade. That made me look up the etymology and lo and behold, grenade itself comes from pomegranate. One of those weird cases where the Japanese made me learn something about English.
I had already known the kanji for meter (米), so when I saw 粁 in the book I was reading, I noticed that it was just the kanji for meter and 1000 smashed together. Before the war script was often read right to left as well, but I’m not certain whether that is the reason for 千 being on the right side or not.
It turns out that all the kanji for units of measurement are made this way, so another kanji I had seen previously, 糎, became a lot less mysterious once I learned that 厘 means 1/100 (the meaning of the phrase 一分一厘 also became clear). (un)Fortunately, all of these kanji died out, so this wonderfully logical system of kanji has basically no use anymore.
一から - From scratch, from the beginning
北朝鮮 North Korea
lol
今あるものに価値を見いだす。
”To find value in what you have now”
初めは「見いだす」を見ると、混乱していたんですが、実は検索してみたら、その動詞は見と出の混合です。「いだす」という出すの読み方は初めて見てた。つまり見出すということです。ほんまびっくりした!絶対に覚えますよー!