When talking about birth in Japanese, I usually hear the passive form too. The Japanese for “to be born” is 生まれる (umareru). There is a non-passive form 生む (umu) which means “to bear”, but I don’t often hear it in Japanese, at least not in relation to human birth. But in Fight Club, they use 生む (in the past tense 生んだ [unda]).

ミンディーは先週子供を生んだんだよ。 [sound file]

Mindii wa senshuu kodomo o undanda yo.

Lit: Last week Mindy bore a child.

When my wife and I had our baby last September, nobody used the word 生む (umu) with us to talk about the birth. Instead they would use the passive form or a more formal word 出産する (shussan suru) which means “to give birth, to deliver”. People outside of the family would use the even more formal ご出産 (goshussan). “Go” is a prefix added to some words to make them extremely polite. There is no equivalent of this sort of extreme politeness in English. I suspect Thomas gets away with using 生む since he is talking informally about his ex-wife.

Opening Your Heart

Another cool thing I picked up was the phrase 心を開く (kokoro o hiraku), as in the following:

ここにいるみんなもトーマス君の勇気を見習って欲しい。　自分の心を開くんだ。 それでは、パートナーを選んで。 [sound file]

koko ni iru minna mo Thomas-kun no yuuki o minaratte hoshii. Jibun no kororo o hirakunda. Soredewa, paatonaa o erande

Lit: I want everybody here to follow Thomas’s example. Open your heart. Okay, find a partner.

心 (kokoro) is hard to translate, but it means something like “heart, spirit, mind”. 開く　(hiraku) means “to open”. “Open your heart” has the exact same connotation in Japanese as it does in English: to speak your mind freely without inhibitions. I always get surprised when little idiomatic phrases like this match exactly between languages. If anybody knows of other languages that use “open your heart” to mean this same idea, let me know!

Japanese Giants

No, not the baseball team. Bob.

こうして僕はあの大男と出会った。 [sound file]

koushite boku wa ano oootoko to deatta.

Orig: And this is how I met the big moosie.

One of my favorite Japanese words (maybe #2 after 牛肉) is 大男 (oootoko). The first character means “big” and the second character means “man”, so together you get “big man”. Pretty simple. It’s one of the few Japanese words with three o’s in a row, which to me makes it hilarious to say. It’s like you are dumbstruck with fascination. OHH! A giant! I actually got called this one time at the elementary school I work at. Great word.

Red Strangers

Bob tells Jack about the problems in his life: his use of steroids, his divorce, his bankruptcy. In the English version of Fight Club, Jack thinks to himself: “Strangers with this kind of honesty make me do a big rubbery one.” Here is the Japanese:

赤の他人たちの正直の告白は僕の心を揺さぶった。 [sound file]
aka no tanin-tachi no shoujiki no kokuhaku wa boku no kokoro o yusabutta.

Lit: The honest confessions of red strangers moved my heart.

赤 (aka) is red, 他人 (tanin) is stranger. What is a red stranger? Unlike 心を開く above, this idiom doesn’t exist in English. My monolingual dictionary tells me that 赤の他人 means まったくの他人. まったくの means something like “complete” or “total”. A red stranger is a complete stranger. A total stranger. Didn’t know that before. But why red?

I looked up red in my dictionary, and for the fourth definition it has:

名詞の上に付けて、「まったくの」「すっかり」「あきらかな」の意味を表す語。

trans: A word that when placed above [ed: in vertical writing. for horizontal writing, you'd say "before"] a noun, gives the meaning of “complete”, “entirely” or “clear/obvious”

It gives the following example words:

• 赤裸 (akahadaka) completely naked or buck naked
• 赤恥 (akahaji) complete shame/humiliation

I wonder if Chinese uses the character 赤 to express this kind of meaning too. Any Chinese speakers want to help me out?

Red Babies

Speaking of red, the word most people use for baby in Japanese is 赤ちゃん (aka-chan). “-chan” is a suffix that you add to someone’s name to make it diminutive. It’s similar to calling someone named Thomas “Tommy”, or Michael “Mikey”. 赤ちゃん (aka-chan) might mean something like “little red one”. I always thought that 赤ちゃん (aka-chan) was the original word, but it is actually the cutesy way to say 赤ん坊 (akanbou), which is the un-diminutivized word for baby.

While talking to Bob one-on-one at the support group, Jack breaks down and cries. Somehow this letting go and crying cures him of his insomnia:

赤ん坊よりも眠った。 [sound file]
akanbou yorimo nemutta.

Lit: I slept better than a baby.

Putting aside the fact that the writers obviously have never taken care of a baby and therefore don’t realize that babies are extremely light sleepers who wake up several times in the night screaming for milk, this is a great sentence. By the way, if you are wondering why the Japanese call babies “red”, it’s because Japanese babies’ skin turns tomato-red when they cry. It’s actually pretty amazing to see.

That’s all for this chapter. The next chapter is really short, but we get to go all New Agey. Don’t miss it! Subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Topics for next time:

• Imagine your pain as a white ball of healing light.
• Power animals
• Resurrection

Chapter 5 Total Running Time: 3m 47s

Chapter 5 New Words: 46
Project Mayhem Total Running Time: 10m 07s
Project Mayhem Total New Words: 130

Previous Project Mayhem posts:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4

Related posts:

1. Chapter 2: How to Say Testicular Cancer in Japanese
2. Chapter 4 – Swedish Furniture and Katakana Loanwords
3. Chapter 3 – Japanese Men Mumble

Katakana Loan Words

When Japanese borrows words from other languages, naturally it changes those words to fit the Japanese sound system. These loanwords, with the exception of those of Chinese origin, are typically written in a special Japanese script called “katakana“. Here are some basic examples for English loanwords:

• hamburger: ハンバーガー (hanbaagaa)
• McDonald’s: マクドナルド (makudonarudo)
• gargoyle: ガーゴイル (gaagoiru)

This changing of sounds isn’t unusual. We do it in English too. I don’t know about British English or Australian English or Singaporean English, but when we pronounce the word “samurai” in American English we pronounce the ‘a’, ‘u’ and ‘r’ completely differently from the original Japanese. Japanese taifuu (台風) mysteriously gets an ‘n’ to become “typhoon” [edit: actually, 'typhoon' doesn't come to English from Japanese.  Thanks toad!]. Even “ninja” gets its “i” sound shortened. Come to think of it, I don’t think many people pronounce the ‘ts’ in “tsunami” either.

Back on track, sometimes Japanese will shorten long loan words to make them easier to say:

• personal computer: パーソナル・コンピューター (paasonaru konpyuutaa) becomes パソコン (pasokon)
• convenience store: コンビニエンス・ストア (konbiniensu sutoa) becomes コンビニ (konbini)

These shortened loanwords can be tricky to pick up by ear the first time you hear them, but they aren’t that big a deal.

For most English-speaking learners of Japanese, English loanwords are easy to spot in conversations. They sound like a Japanese person saying an English word. We hear that all the time when we watch Heroes. It gets complicated with names though.

Foreign Names Are Hard To Catch

I can’t speak for everybody, but for me foreign names are really hard to pick out of a Japanese conversation. I don’t mean common names like “Thomas” or “Patrick” or even “Tyler Durden”. Those are easy. I mean the kind of names you get when you’re talking about a “Johannshamnh sofa with the Strinne green strip pattern” or “Rislampa wire lamps made out of environmentally-friendly unbleached paper”.

Fight Club Chapter 4

In the fourth chapter of Fight Club, the main character Jack orders furniture from an Ikea catalogue. Boy was this scene a nightmare to transcribe. I had to cheat and bust out the English script before I even realized that the words tripping me up were loanwords. I wasted a lot of time searching my dictionary for some word or words that sounded like “ohamashabu” (おはましゃぶ). It turns out that this is how “Johannshamnh” is pronounced in Japanese.

クリプスクのパーソナル・オフィス・セット、 オベトレックの健康自転車、 ストリンがデザインした緑の縞柄のオハマシャブのソファ。 [sound file]

kuripusuku no paasonaru ofisu setto, obetorekku no kenkou jitensha, sutorin ga dezain shita midori no shimagara no ohamashabu no sofa.

Orig: The Klipske personal office unit, the Hovertrekke home exer-bike. Or the Johannshamnh sofa with the Strinne green stripe pattern.

Oops! I don’t even know how to pronounce that in English. :)

Sometimes it is easy to recognize a foreign word when you hear it. There are certain combinations of sounds that just don’t occur in Japanese, ever. Unfortunately for me, “ohamashabu” sounded like it could be a Japanese word, so I got stuck. I don’t know if I would have figured it out without the English script.

Demanding Medicine

In the last half of the chapter, Jack is talking to a doctor about his sleeping problem. One cool word I learned was the word for “narcolepsy”. Here’s the line:

じゃ。睡眠発作じゃないかな。　　たまに起きたら、とんでもないところにいるんです。 どうやってそこに行ったかわからない。 [sound file]

ja. suimin hossa ja nai kana. tama ni okitara tondemonai tokoro ni irun desu. douyatte soko ni itta ka wakaranai.

Orig: What about narcolepsy? I nod off, I wake up in strange places, I have no idea how I got there.

睡眠 (suimin) means “sleep” or “sleeping”. 発作 (hossa) is a medical term that means “attack”, “fit” or “seizure”. So “narcolepsy” in Japanese is “sleep attack” or “sleeping fit”. Sweet.

The doctor tells Jack to relax and Jack begs for a prescription. In the original English, his pleading sounds pathetic and sad. In the Japanese, it sounds a little rude to me, even though the language is polite. Too direct maybe? I can’t imagine ever saying these words to a doctor in Japan. I’d use a much softer sentence form.

先生、睡眠薬を出して下さい。 [sound file]

sensei, suiminyaku o dashite kudasai.

Lit: Doctor, hand over some sleeping pills, please.

We get the word 睡眠 (suimin – sleep/sleeping) again, this time combined with ～薬 (yaku – medicine) to get “sleeping pills”. That’s an antonym for “two-month-old son”. Trust me.

That’s all folks! Stay tuned for Chapter 5. If you are so inclined, try subscribing to the RSS Feed.

Topics for next time:

1. Support goups.
2. Addiction.
3. Sleeping like a baby.

Chapter 4 Total Running Time: 1m 35s
Chapter 4 New Words: 27
Project Mayhem Total Running Time: 6m 20s
Project Mayhem Total New Words: 84

Previous Project Mayhem posts:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3

Related posts:

1. Chapter 5 – Japanese Giants
2. Chapter 3 – Japanese Men Mumble
3. Chapter 2: How to Say Testicular Cancer in Japanese

Mumblers

The third chapter of the Fight Club DVD is very short: about 50 seconds. Even so, I found that it was more difficult than the previous chapter. Why? Because older Japanese men are mumblers. In this scene, the main character Jack is talking to his boss at work. For some of the lines, the boss’s Japanese was completely incomprehensible to me, even when I slowed it down 300%. I think that’s awesome! Why?

Because in real life, Japanese men are mumblers. Nobody speaks in that clean textbook style that we are trained to learn in language classes. They slur words, omit words, drop syllables. I can relate because I’m a mumbler too (in English).

So what can we do if native speakers of our target language mumble at us? Like the boss in Fight Club – I can’t understand what the hell he’s saying. Should we give up and ignore them? No! We must train ourselves to understand mumbled Japanese. I got my wife to transcribe what the boss says. Sure enough, the syllables that come out of his mouth don’t exactly match how you write it on paper. Have a listen, first to the full speed version and then to the slowed version:

詳しいことはここに書いてある。 [sound file] [slow version]
kuwashii koto wa koko ni kaite aru.

Lit: The details are written here.

“koto wa” sounds a bit like “kota” to me. And “koko ni” sounds like “koin”. Couple that with the fact that the boss speaks very fast Japanese (see full speed version) and it’s no wonder I couldn’t understand him! I never learned to identify how certain words change when they are mumbled. Now I can learn, practice and become accustomed to hearing it.

Here’s another thing the boss says. I’ve highlighted the parts that are mumbled:

今週は出張してくれ。　尻拭いの仕事がある。 [sound file] [slow version]
konshuu wa shucchou shite kure. shiri nugui no shigoto ga aru.

This line replaces the English line “I’m going to need you out of town a little more this week. We’ve got some red flags to cover.” 尻拭いの仕事 (shiri nugui no shigoto) doesn’t translate to “red flags” though. It translates literally to “ass-wiping job”. “Ass-wiping” is an idiomatic expression in Japanese that means “paying the consequences for someone else’s mistake” or “cleaning up someone else’s mess”. I don’t know the history of this expression, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it has it’s roots in infant or pet care. :)

The boss has quite a few lines in the movie, so I expect that by the end of Fight Club I’ll be a mumbled-Japanese master. That ought to help me out a lot at work!

Planet Starbucks

At the beginning of the chapter, Jack talks about how in the future, planets and stars will be named by corporations: the IBM stellar sphere, Microsoft galaxy, planet Starbucks. Let’s take a look at these astronomy terms.

The word for “galaxy” in Japanese is 銀河 (ginga). The two Chinese characters that make up this word are “silver” and “river”. So galaxy is “silver river”. Pretty cool huh?

“Planet” is a little weird. The Japanese word is 惑星 (wakusei). The first Chinese character means “bewildered, lost”. The second one means “star”. A planet is a bewildered star? There’s got to be an explanation for that somewhere. I’m curious to know if Chinese uses the same character combinations for galaxy and planet too. If you know the answer, drop me a line.

Finally, “stellar sphere”. I don’t even know what a stellar sphere is. Apparently neither did the Japanese translators. They changed “IBM stellar sphere” to IBM宇宙探索船 (IBM uchuu tansaku sen). That means something like “space exploration vessel”. Not as grand as having your logo on a whole galaxy.

Grande Latte Enema

“He was full of pep. Must have had his Grande Latte enema.” Jack’s thoughts as his boss is walking away. Here’s the Japanese:

偉く元気だな。　カフェインの浣腸でもしたのかよ。 [sound file]
eraku genki da na. kafein no kanchou demo shita no ka yo.

Just about every foreigner who has ever visited a Japanese elementary school is intimately familiar with the word kancho. In the schoolyard context, a kancho is when you put your hands together, index fingers extended, and shove them up somebody’s ass. No I’m not joking. Please read the Gaijin Smash archives from beginning to end for more information.

More generally it just means “enema”. “Grande Latte enema” becomes “caffeine enema” in Japanese Fight Club. For those interested, here’s how you can do it at home (with cute Japanese illustrations). Don’t forget to get your supplies.

Stay tuned for Chapter 4, which I promise won’t be so gross. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to the RSS Feed.

Topics for next time:

1. Swedish furniture.
2. Katakana loan words are hard to hear.
3. How to demand medication from your doctor.

Chapter 3 Total Running Time: 51s
Chapter 3 New Words: 16
Project Mayhem Total Running Time: 4m 45s
Project Mayhem Total New Words: 57

Previous Project Mayhem posts:

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2

Related posts:

1. Chapter 2: How to Say Testicular Cancer in Japanese
2. Chapter 5 – Japanese Giants
3. Chapter 4 – Swedish Furniture and Katakana Loanwords

At the end of the last post, I mentioned I’d be talking about the idea that Japanese has no vowels. Of course, this statement is ridiculous. A vowel is just a sound produced with an open mouth and the tongue not touching anywhere. Japanese has this kind of sound. What I really meant to talk about is how Japanese doesn’t divide its sounds into consonants and vowels like English does. The Japanese don’t think of “ka” as a “k” sound plus an “a” sound. “ka” is its own sound unit. So is “ta”, “na”, “ra” and the rest of them. Check out the chart here. In Japanese there is no plain “k”. Only “ka”, “ki”, “ku”, “ke” and “ko”.

Ok, ok, so what’s the point?

Well, in the second chapter of Fight Club, we get this line:

With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.

Now, Japanese does have a word for “vowel”, but since most Japanese don’t think of their language in terms of consonants and vowels, translating the above line verbatim wouldn’t be natural. The Japanese version instead uses a rhetorical question:

銃を口に突っ込まれてしゃべれるやつがどこにいる。 [sound file]
Juu o kuchi ni tsukkomarete shabereru yatsu ga doko ni iru?

Lit: Where is there a person that can talk with a gun shoved in their mouth?

There are some other interesting changes. Instead of “wondering if the gun is clean”, the main character in Japanese Fight Club “worries if there are any germs on the gun.” Another line that caught my attention:

That old saying, how you always hurt the one you love, well, it works both ways.

In English, the “it works both ways” part is vague. What does it mean? Does the one you love hurt you? Do you love the one you hurt? Does the one you hurt love you? Who knows, especially this early in the movie? The Japanese is specific:

愛してるから人を傷つけるとはよく言うが、傷つけたから愛せるとも言える。 [sound file]
Aishiteru kara hito o kizutsukeru to ha yoku iu ga, kizutsuketa kara aiseru to mo ieru

Lit: We often say that it’s because you love them that you hurt a person. But you can also say that it’s because you hurt them that you can love them.

Pretty cool, huh.

And finally, testicular cancer in Japanese: kougan gan (睾丸癌 [こうがんがん]).

ここは睾丸癌患者たちのサポートグループ。[sound file]
koko ha kougan gan kanjatachi no sapo-to guruupu.

Lit: This is a support group for testicular cancer patients.

May you never contract it!

Stay tuned for Chapter 3. Subscribe to the RSS Feed if you’d like.

Topics for next time:

1. Some astronomy terms
2. Male Japanese speakers mumble a lot
3. How to say insomnia, cornflower-blue and “grande latte enema” in Japanese

Chapter 2 Total Running Time: 1m 46s
Chapter 2 New Words: 41
Project Mayhem Total Running Time: 3m 54s
Project Mayhem Total New Words: 41

Related posts:

1. Chapter 3 – Japanese Men Mumble
2. Chapter 5 – Japanese Giants
3. Chapter 4 – Swedish Furniture and Katakana Loanwords

タイラー・ダーデンを知ってるか、何度も人に聞かれた。

If we decode the first few characters, タイラー・ダーデン, using the katakana chart we get “tairaa daaden”. Sound vaguely familiar? Here’s a sound file of the first line: “tairaa daaden o shitteru ka, nandomo hito ni kikareta”. Sound even more familiar?

Give Me The Answer Already!

That’s the Japanese pronunciation of “Tyler Durden”, one of the main characters of Fight Club! I first saw Fight Club at the movie theatre on my birthday many years ago. I’ve seen it many times since. I chose this movie to study for the following reasons:

1. It’s one of my favorite movies, so I am deeply familiar with it.
2. Most of the characters are men, so I don’t have to worry about picking up women’s Japanese. Japanese is a heavily gendered language, and a lot of male foreigners fall into the trap of emulating female friends and then sounding like girls when they speak Japanese.
3. I never get sick of this movie, so I can endure endless repetition. That’s something I wouldn’t be able to handle with a movie like Shrek.
4. The DVD is divided into 36 chapters. A two hour movie, divided by 36 chapters equals about 3-4 minutes per chapter. That’s very manageable.
5. It’s full of great lines!
6. I have a morbid curiosity to know how to say “blood parasites”, “compost heap” and “testicular cancer” in Japanese.
7. I happened to have the DVD sitting around in my apartment.

Watching a movie you love in a foreign language is a great way to study. You build your vocabulary, train your ears to natural-speed speaking and have fun at the same time. I don’t think I need to argue that quoting movies is one of everybody’s favorite past-times. When you start studying a movie in a foreign language, you will want to quote your favorite lines in that language – speaking practice!

Since the movie is familiar to you, you can usually guess at the meanings of the foreign words even if you’ve never encountered them before. If it gets too tough, you can always cheat and turn on subtitles. And since you love the movie, you will likely be motivated to see it through to the end! What a great feeling that will be to have watched an entire movie in a foreign language, with full comprehension!

So How Do You Do It?

I spent the last few days transcribing the first two chapters completely. To do that, I first ripped the audio from the DVD using a DVD audio ripping program. Then I used SoundForge to isolate parts of each chapter and slow them down to a speed where I could pick the sounds out. Finally I used a dictionary to determine what the words meant. The next step is learning all the vocabulary while listening to the chapters full-speed on repeat. Time to train the ears!

Back to the first sentence of the movie. If we translate the whole thing literally, we get something like “I’ve been asked many times by people, ‘Do you know Tyler Durden?’.” This isn’t too far off from the original, which goes “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.”

In fact, in studying the first two chapters of the movie, I’m surprised at how close the Japanese translation is to the original English. It’s almost word-for-word. The few places where it differs are interesting, but that discussion can wait until the next installment of Project Mayhem.

Stay tuned. Topics for the next installment:

1. Japanese has no vowels
2. How to say testicular cancer in Japanese

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1. Language Learning Tip #1: Start A Translation Project
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3. Learning a language is like having a pet