Chapter 3 – Japanese Men Mumble
By thomas on Nov 2, 2007 in Project Mayhem
Last chapter I talked about some of the interesting differences I found between the English and Japanese versions of Fight Club. This time I’m going to do more of the same. I mentioned before that watching Fight Club in Japanese was difficult for me because my listening comprehension skills are poor. That’s true, but already I am noticing a big improvement. Just from doing this little bit of hardcore active listening on a very short two-minute segment of a movie, I am already understanding more of what I hear in the office, on TV and on the street. Project Mayhem is already paying off big time.
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:
- Swedish furniture.
- Katakana loan words are hard to hear.
- 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:
Related posts:
- Chapter 2: How to Say Testicular Cancer in Japanese
- Chapter 5 – Japanese Giants
- Chapter 4 – Swedish Furniture and Katakana Loanwords
- Japanese Study Habits 2008
- Project Mayhem – Learning a Foreign Language Through Movies
Hey Tom,
Love the blog. Really funny. Good job on the mumbling — that’s EXACTLY how men sound!
“詳しいことぁこいん書いったる” and stuff.
On 惑星, I think the reason it’s called that iiiiiis the same reason as in English. AFAIK, planet is from Greek and means “wandering [star]” see dictionary for details. So 惑星 is a star that bewildered astronomers because it doesn’t stay in place? Or that is bewildered and confused and is therefore wandering? Something like that.
Note that in Sino-Japanese, a regular star is 恒星 “fixed-star” or “constant-star”. Also note that the other name for a planet is 遊星 (”playful-star” or “playing-star”).
Oh, and — you probably already know this, but — both stars and planets can be called 星 (ほし), at least if my thousands of hours of sci-fi watching are anything to go by.
BTW, Chinese prefers “行星” (xing2xing1)/”moving-star” to 惑星, although both terms will work, according to my dictionary [it looks to me that the general practice in Greater China is, essentially, to recognize Japanese-made kanji-combinations as valid, even if they don't get used much; furthermore, some Japanese-made actual kanji have even come into Chinese, like 鯰 ...but I could be wrong].
Um…what else…yeah — asteroids are 小惑星, small-planets.
OK, I’m done. Hope that helped. Sorry if it was already obvious. Plus, I hope I’m actually right about all the stuff I said (lol).
How’s Pali going? You’re such a baller for studying that!
Khatzumoto | Nov 2, 2007 | Reply
Khatzumoto: Thanks for the visit! I love your blog too. I hope I’m not too annoying by linking to it all the time.
Good call on the wandering star. It makes perfect sense. And it’s pretty cool to think that the ancient Greeks and Chinese thought of the planets in the same way, although I guess without telescopes that would be the obvious way to think about them. But still, the naming is so close.
I didn’t even know how to say planet before I watched this chapter. Which word is more common in Japanese: 遊星 or 惑星? I kinda like 遊星. I have this entry in my SRS, 遊泳禁止 (no swimming), but I always miss it because I can never remember the on-yomi for 遊ぶ. Now with 遊星 I have another 遊 word stuck in my word connection web so I’ll probably never miss it again. Thanks.
I looked up some more words. Meteor is 流星 an meteor shower is 流星雨. Red Giant is 赤色巨星.
And no, none of what you said was too obvious, at least not to me. About 98% of the information in your comment was new to me so I learned a lot. I didn’t know that you could refer to planets as just 星. I didn’t know the word for asteroid either. I’m in that awkward “Intermediate” phase of Japanese learning where I’ve mastered all the basics but I don’t know any words. Everything is vocabulary building.
Pali is going great. It’s going much faster than I expected. The Buddha’s sermons are really well-suited for language learning. I don’t know if you’ve ever read excerpts from the Tipitika before, but it has lots and lots (and lots) of repetition. Before the canon was written down it was transmitted orally, so the monks used to keep the whole thing in their head. That’s why there’s so much repetition – to facilitate memorization. If you read a random passage in the Tipitika, it might go a little like this:
“The untamed mind, O monks, leads to great disadvantage.
The tamed mind, O monks, leads to great advantage.
The unguarded mind, O monks, leads to great disadvantage.
The guarded mind, O monks, leads to great advantage.
The unwatched mind, O monks, leads to great disadvantage.
The watched mind, O monks leads to great advantage.
The unrestrained mind, O monks, leads to great disadvantage.
The restrained mind, O monks leads to great advantage.
I do not, O monks, perceive one single thing that when untamed, unguarded, unwatched and unrestrained leads to such great disadvantage as the mind. The mind, monks, untamed, unguarded, unwatched and unrestrained leads to great disadvantage.”
When reading/learning a passage like this, it’s almost impossible not to pick up the words for monk, mind, great, advantage, disadvantage, tamed, untamed, guarded, unguarded, etc.
thomas | Nov 3, 2007 | Reply
Wow, that Tipitika repetition is great for learning.
>Which word is more common in Japanese: 遊星 or 惑星?
I’m afraid 惑星 is far more common. Probably in large part because 遊星 has so many homynyms (like 優勢、優性、幽棲、郵政、有声、有性、幽静), whereas 惑星 is unique-sounding.
Oh, also it recently came to my attention that 遊, while it now mainly means “play”, can also carry a meaning of “wandering”, as in 遊牧 (ゆうぼく nomadic, pastoral). Isn’t it great that “play” is related to the idea of wandering, as if to say that playing is going and doing and learning whenever, wherever and whatever you want?
Totally rambling. Anyway, later…
Khatzumoto | Nov 5, 2007 | Reply
@Khatzumoto: Yes, the Tipitika is great. Well, for learning Pali it is. And the goal for about 95% of the people learning Pali is to read the Tipitaka, so it goes hand in hand. (The other 5% are Indo-Aryan philologists and the like)
惑星 it is! Fortunately, 遊星 has already served its function in teaching me the on-yomi for 遊ぶ, so I can toss it out without any worries.
The connection between wandering and playing makes sense to me. The image of an exhausted parent chasing a toddler around a grocery store comes to mind :)
thomas | Nov 22, 2007 | Reply