Most recent Japanese word you've learned?

No it’s still called ateji. Gikun is used in literature (poems, stories, manga) not for actual words.

For example, in hunter x hunter, hisoka’s ability is called 伸縮自在の愛 but it has furigana バンジーガム

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There are lexalized gikun, like たばこ for 煙草, though yes, it is mostly something you see in figurative writing.

又従兄弟またいとこ = second cousin // 従兄弟どうしの子。両親が従兄弟の間柄である子供同士の親類関係を指す表現 // norwegian: tremenning; søskenbarn sine barn

I always need to think when it comes to kinship terminology.

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Mmm. I’ve never really learned exactly what a “second cousin” is in English (my native language), because it’s not something that’s ever come up in real life, only in novels, and there it’s generally not important to remember anything more accurate than “related but not very closely”. Occasionally when it comes up in a discussion I look it up and then promptly forget it again…

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Learned that 経済 originally comes from an abbreviation of a yojijukugo, 経世済民 (けいせいさいみん, governing a nation and providing relief to people)

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In the relation “Xth cousin, Y removed”, X is the smaller of the number of generations between each member and their common ancestor (not counting the generation at either end), and Y is the difference in generations between the two people.

So, to give some worked examples:

  • two people whose parents are siblings are first cousins - it’s two generations to the common ancestor: person A > parent A > grandparent < parent B < person B, but you don’t count the generations of either person A or the grandparent, so it’s 1.
  • two people whose grandparents are siblings are second cousins - the great-grandparent is the common ancestor, three generations above.
  • Person A’s grandparent is person B’s great-grandparent, thus MIN(A generations, B generations) = MIN(1, 2) = 1; DIFF(A generations, B generations) = 1, so they’re first cousins, once removed.

For a real-world example, the late Queen Elizabeth II and her late husband Prince Philip were third cousins - Queen Victoria was great-great grandmother of both of them. Funnily enough, they’re also second cousins once removed - Christian IX of Denmark was Elizabeth’s great-great grandfather and Philip’s great grandfather.

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I mean, yeah, I’ve read these explanations before. I’m just saying it never sticks because I never have any need to care about any of this meaning anything more specific than “distant relative”.

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But how will you know how many times you’re related to the British royal family, then?

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I learned a few things from studying proverbs/idioms with the old ladies in our local 英会話

お茶の子さいさい piece of cake
無用の用 the usefulness of the useless
仏の顔も三度 3 times and Buddha would lose his temper

I also learned from my school that girls are saying 同情 when they agree with something, It reminded me of the tumblr “same hat” comic

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猿轡 さるぐつわ gag

reading it with hiragana for the second kanji i was sooo confused. what the heck does a monkey have to do with anything and i then went to it might mean idiot, but that also didn’t make much sense :woman_shrugging:
but even knowing it now, what does a monkey have to do with it… did they need ways to shut up monkeys ??

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Have you heard a monkey? Those things are loud.

Plus, there’s that speak-no-evil guy…

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年貢米(ねんぐまい)and 廻船(かいせん)and also 採掘(さいくつ)、 which respectively are “annual rice tax”, kaisen is/was a type of small Japanese cargo boat, and the last is “mining”. From reading about medieval Japan :slightly_smiling_face:

I was just reviewing the wanikani vocabulary 鉛/なまり/lead and then it showed up twice in my reading, in the form of 鉛の採掘 and 鉛の山が見つかった (i.e. lead deposits were found), while I think I’d never previously encountered this kanji in the wild :slightly_smiling_face: 偶然だったね

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模倣犯 もほうはん copycat criminal

礼賛(らいさん) praise; glorification. Kanji reading throws the unexpected…

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Turns out there’s a word for a reverse waterfall of comments in a video

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That’s funny that it’s 弾幕 as someone who likes touhou but can’t really play the games, it’s hard to dodge the bullets. So it’s funny to see scrolling comments described like that. Just almost impossible to dodge because there’s so many.

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Some would say that’s the point :smile:

やらかした!
I messed up.

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Not a word but a pronunciation, does it count?
Now challenge yourself on the pronunciation of the following words, before checking the answer that’s in spoiler tags :smiley:
大人=おとな
大人気=だいにんき
大人数=おおにんずう

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