Yeah, I really can’t imagine saying anything other than ごちそうさまでした at a restaurant, unless you have a very close relationship with the people there. Most of the time I don’t say anything.
Japanese people don’t even say thank you when they get change back at the register at other kinds of shops (obviously not all, but that’s the general impression I get… people don’t talk to the staff beyond what’s absolutely necessary).
And the idea of small talk (very common in the US) is completely alien.
I remember the first time I went to America with my Japanese wife, we went to a convenience store and the cashier started commenting on my shirt, and she was quite amused by it.
That’s the same impression I get too. When I first arrived here, my friend told me that the conbini staff were saying it was cute how I’d say thank you and goodbye to them, heh. I guess it’s something that pretty much only really little kids do in our area.
I think the most involved conversation I’ve ever had with an employee I hadn’t previously meet was with an Animate cashier because we both liked JoJo and I noticed her ribbon haha. It seemed abnormal from the looks her coworkers gave us though, whoops.
Hello everyone! This is my first post. Do you know what it means when someone ends a sentence with め? Such as in 女め or 男め? I have the impression it denotes contempt, but I am not sure about the actual meaning. Thanks for your help.
It is a postposition or suffix more than a sentence ender, but you have intuited correctly that it denotes contempt. Like other particles, it doesn’t have an explicit meaning in the sense that there isn’t really a direct equivalent in English. This め often gets added to もの (person) or やつ (also slightly derogatory) or other insults, like 化け物め or 生意気なやつめ . I can’t really think of a use for it that isn’t insulting.
Thanks for your answer. I see. So, if someone says 女め! they are referring solely to the derogatory characteristics associated with the female sex. Kind of like saying, “you, typical woman!”.
*edited: Is this in the right direction?
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. I think you may be getting too hung up on the way “woman” could be derogatory in English, whereas め is more of a marker indicating that the speaker is being derogatory towards the person (or animal, or thing) being referred to, not that the derogatory aspect is related to the word in question.
So when I say その犬め that’s just me being derogatory towards the dog (maybe it chewed up the carpet or something and I’m less than happy with it - think along the lines of “that darn dog!”), not me accusing the dog of being all the derogatory things you could imagine a dog to be.
It’s possible of course that there are stereotypes or inherent qualities to the word being used that are relevant to why the speaker is being derogatory of course, but that’s not inherent to め
In the anime/manga Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san, Nishikata often says (to himself) 高木さんめ after she beats him in a bet or teases him somehow. So to your point, I don’t think め can mean “the derogatory characteristics associated with 高木さん”. It’s just “that damn 高木さん” or something along those lines. Like phyro said, it doesn’t really have a direct translation.
Thanks! This clarifies things a lot. Calling someone “woman” means one thing; adding め means another. Adding め basically emphasizes the speaker’s contempt. I think I get it now.
Just to be entirely clear - “woman” is just referring to someone. め shows contempt (or something else of a negative sort). The two are unrelated, it doesn’t mean there’s any contempt towards the concept of “a woman”. The reason to be negative towards someone can be entirely unrelated to how you address them.
The examples will be improved in the future. They’re picked from a database of over 100 million native sentences, so it’s literally impossible to manually curate; I’m already heavily filtering them, but it obviously still needs some improvements to pick out better sentences. It’s not a trivial problem to solve. For now you can always change them and pick out a better one, and I’ve also recently added the ability to pick bilingual sentences too when available so that might be more appropriate for you.
The primary intent isn’t to teach handwriting; it’s to teach you to be able to read, and the stroke order diagrams are essentially just a bonus. The motivation for that was simple: most text you’ll encounter is not going to be handwritten, and most people don’t care about handwriting at all.
I’m just basing it on what IzMantis seemed to be using the site for.
It does seem though that the existence of a stroke order diagram carries the implication of “this is how to write the character” inherently. It’s the primary reason to want to know stroke order (with others being just trivia, or knowing how to answer for a test like Kanken potentially, I suppose, but if few people are interested in handwriting, the number interested for those reasons would be even less).
Well, the order itself should be correct, it’s just that the shape might not necessarily be the same one as it’s customarily handwritten. (:
I’ll probably add alternative fonts in the future for the users to choose from, including more of a handwritten one, it’s just that it’s a lot of work to ensure all of the necessary characters are there, that the kanji components are there and are correct, that it’s consistent, etc., so it’s not really a priority right now.
I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s not like a computer writes the kanji, so doesn’t it make more sense to use a stroke order model like you find on Jisho.org? I don’t understand the logic of starting with a fake way of writing that’s not what native speakers learn.
I haven’t used the website like that though, so I wouldn’t know if it’s just all the strokes are numbered, it’s a gif, etc
Not really, because, again, the primary purpose of the kanji cards on my website is not to teach you how to handwrite the kanji, but to teach you how to recognize the kanji, similar to how WaniKani does. And most people learning Japanese mostly care about reading non-handwritten Japanese. This is why a “handwritten” font is not the default.
I definitely agree that it might be suboptimal in cases where the printed form differs from the handwritten form, but, like, a compromise needs to be made somewhere. If I’d had used a handwritten fonts I’d get a lot of “I don’t care about handwriting” complaints, if I remove the stroke numbers I’d get complaints that they’re missing (and for the majority of the kanji the handwritten form and the printed form does match up), etc.
I’ll probably at least have to clearly mark kanji which are written differently when handwritten so that there is no confusion.