Author Archives: taekk

Using 「とは」 to look up strange words

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The edict dictionary is one of best online dictionaries available, better than any print E->J dictionaries I know of. It is also continuously being expanded from user submissions. Even in the rare instance that it doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you’re covered with the monster huge 大辞泉 and 大辞林 J->J dictionaries available for free at Yahoo!辞書. If you have the patience to work through the Japanese definition, you should be able to find a definition for every word in any print dictionary available to native speakers. However, with new words and slang being invented all the time, you might run into words that are not in any traditional dictionary. The good news is that a lot of Japanese people won’t be familiar with them either. Here’s a quick tip from me to easily find Japanese sites that explain and define words of this nature. In the process, I’ll also discuss a very special double particle.

The 「とは」 double particle

While you can guess the meaning of most double particles from the sum of it’s parts such as 「には」 (a target that’s also a topic), 「とは」 really has a meaning of its own. Simply put, it is a somewhat formal and concise way to define something. For example, try searching on Google for 「とは」 and you’ll get pages with titles like 「ITとは」 and 「WWWとは」. If you go to the site itself, it’ll give you a short definition of the relevant term.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. When I run into a term that’s not in the dictionary (which in my case is usually new expressions or slang too stupid to put in a real dictionary), I search the term in Google with 「とは」.

For example, when I was listening to 眞鍋かをり’s podcast titled あなたの周りのＫＹな人, I had forgotten what “KY” meant. Now, looking up a term like “KY” is usually very difficult because there isn’t a lick of Japanese in the “word” (and I use that term loosely). But all I had to do was attach 「とは」 and soon found this neat and in-depth definition in no time.

From http://zokugo-dict.com/09ke/ky.htm

その場の雰囲気や状況などを察する（感じる・掴む）ことを「空気を読む」とも表現する。KYはこの「空気」と「読む」の頭文字で、主に空気が読めない人を意味する。また、逆にそういった人に「空気を読め」と提言する際にも「KY」と耳元で囁くなどして使われる。女子高生がメールのやりとりで使い、普及した。

若者の間では以前から使われているが、2007年、こういった頭文字略語の存在が話題となり、広く知られる。

In fact, thanks to this search, I found the 「日本語俗語辞書」 with all sorts of stupid slang that I’ll probably end up wishing I’d kept to myself. Please don’t send me an email along the lines of, “Hey, after reading your blog, I called my boss an AY for fun and he actually knew what it meant! He totally MMed on me and now I’m out of a job. What should I do?”

Anyway, in addition to the regular KY語 (God, it’s turning into its own language now?), this tactic was also useful for looking up Internet slang when I wrote about 電車男. For instance, the first search result for 「ROMとは」 turned up this nice little definition.

From http://d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/ROM

書き込みをしない人のこと。あるいは書き込みをせずにいること。（「ROMる」、「ロムる」などと表現する）

ネット上のコミュニティでその場の雰囲気をつかむために「ROMったり」、「ROMになったり」する。

他人に対して「ROMってろよ」と発言するのは「黙ってろよ」と発言するのと同義。

So there you have it, a simple neat tip from me to you. I just wish I had better examples that won’t turn your cute little 「ます／です」 classroom Japanese to the dark side. Just don’t be using this stuff when you’re talking to me. You’ll totally get the hand and I mean that.

LOL! KTNXBYE

WPtouch, cool but sounds kind of risque

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I just installed WPtouch on this blog for you iPhone users. Personally, I would never spend that much money on a phone every month. It would definitely fall under the “Latte Effect” on my budget. But I thought it would be a nice touch for those of you who can afford it. Now you can read my pointless ramblings with ease wherever you go! Yay!!　＼(^〇^*)／

So if you’re reading this from an iPhone, how’s it look? I tested it out using iPhoney (OS X only) but it only works so-so. Maybe I’ll try it out on an real iPhone the next time I visit the Apple Store.

The plugin seems to work pretty well but I don’t know why Pages don’t have comments despite the fact that they’re enabled (this has now been fixed). Also, I wish there was a way to get the Archive Page on the iPhone version only and without having to manually hack the Theme. Finally, it doesn’t work with WP Super Cache yet so I had to disable it. Oh well, it’s not like the meager traffic on my blog is going to put any kind of strain on a server that also runs Groklaw and Project Gutenberg (both directories are next to mine under “g”). 🙁

Google, what will they think of next?

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I don’t know when this was released (couldn’t find any announcement on the Google Japan Blog) but it looks like Google finally introduced street view for Japan. I suppose it was only a matter of time once they figured out how to censor people’s faces automatically. They covered an amazing range of streets for Osaka and Tokyo and partial areas near there such as Kyoto, Saitama, and Chiba. Smaller areas are also viewable in Sendai, Hakodate, and Sapporo. I can’t even imagine how many hours it took to drive through all those tiny little streets!

Hopefully, with the ability to actually see where you want to go, this will become another tool in our arsenal to navigate the crazy no-name streets of Japan. Although without any street names, it’s almost impossible to even know where to put the little yellow guy. But with a little bit of searching, you can at least use it to show your family where you lived or are living in Japan!

For instance, if you work for Hitachi, you might end up in their 第二志村寮 like I did. And here’s the crappy old building I used to work at before they moved their headquarters to the fancy and new ダイビル in 秋葉原. Before that, I worked briefly at the ironically named 新丸の内ビル near Tokyo station just before it was torn down to be rebuilt. (I wonder if it’s already been rebuilt and reopened?)

If you have never been to Tokyo or Osaka before, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the never-ending spans of concrete with the occasional tree or bush here and there. It gets pretty hot once all that concrete and metal starts baking in the summer. Who says we need nature? Ha!

Dict.cn’s daily classroom

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My current favorite online Chinese dictionary, Dict.cn has recently been upgraded with lots of new features. For instance, while Chinese Perapera-kun already takes care of this for me, non-Firefox users will appreciate the automatic look-up of highlighted words.

Personally, my favorite feature is the 每日课堂, which will allow you to learn a little bit of Chinese every day with a little story or even just a simple sentence. While this site and most of its features are obviously geared for Chinese speakers learning English, the fact that 每日课堂 has both English and Chinese makes it a valuable resource for us learning Chinese as well.

[2008-08-01] 每日学口语

I have been putting on weight.
我开始发胖了。

I have in fact, been putting on some weight lately so the sentence above is nice to know. 我要少吃多运动。

Finally, this might have been there already, but they also have a 繁体字 dictionary. Technologically, there should be no reason why it would need to be split up but I guess I shouldn’t complain since the site is already free and useful.

Figuring out Chinese: Finding out about “何”

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I ran into this sentence while trying to read a little bit from a Chinese blog.

何为感觉？

The sentence intrigued me because it was using 「何」, a character I’m sure most of you learning Japanese are already familiar with. I was curious to see how it was used in Chinese and decided to do some digging. In the process, I thought it would be a neat idea to outline some of the steps I take when trying to figure this kind of thing out for any language including Japanese.

Breaking down “何”

I first looked it up in Dict.CN and came up with the following.

1. why
2. which
3. what
4. carry
5. how

Wow, it looks like ”何” can mean just about every question word there is. How is it that I don’t see it more often? As usual, the English definitions are pretty much useless for clarifying anything. Unless I’m looking up very simple concepts or objects such as “friend” or “car”, I don’t even bother with the English definitions. Instead, the real value is in the example sentences. Here are a few samples.

1. 你这次考试的结果如何？
How did you do on your test?

2. 你跟你的新上司处得如何？
How are you doing with your new boss?

Ok, in this case, all the examples seem to be referring to another word “如何”. Looking at the sentence, it seems pretty clear that it means something like “how is”. My first thought is, how is that different from “怎么样”? But since this is a whole other direction, I decided to drop it and go back to finding more information about “何” by itself.

So this time, the example sentences from Dict.CN didn’t turn up much. Ah well, time to whip out my trusty Wordtank G90. The definition and example sentences given by the G90 were a lot more useful and seemed closer to what I was looking for.

①疑問を表す

That explanation was further broken up into １．何、２．どこ、and ３．どうして with examples for each. Here are just a few samples.

1. 他为何不来？
彼はなぜこないのか。

2. 你有何高见
あなたにはどんなお考えがおありでしょうか？

I interpreted these examples to mean that “何” is a general question word to increase the level of questioning similar to but probably not as strong as 「一体」 in Japanese.

Now, example sentences are great but I like to have a little more context. So I tried searching “何” in ChinesePod. It turned up a bunch of Media and Advanced lessons which I was too lazy to dig through, one Elementary lesson that had no mention of “何” at all (maybe a bug?), and finally a promising Upper Intermediate lesson called Drinking Ability. And sure enough the dialogue had the following line, referring to a manager out-drinking the whole company.

何止一桌，是一个公司！
Way more than one table. It was the whole company!

Ok, so this usage didn’t seem to fit with my initial interpretation. In Chinese, because what constitutes a “word” is so flexible, you have to always be careful to consider whether you’re looking at a combination of characters or a set phrase. So I looked up “何止” in my Wordtank to make sure it wasn’t a set phrase. And sure enough:

【何止】 ・・・にとどまらない。ただ・・・だけではない。
例文）
他的作品何止这些
彼の作品はこれだけにとどまらない。

So this was different from just “何” and my original interpretation was safe. By the way, Dict.CN returned no results for “何止” so you definitely want to get the best dictionary you can with the most comprehensive coverage. (My G90 C->J dictionary has about 150,000 entries.)

Breaking down “何为”

Now that I had a general idea of how “何” works, I took a closer look at “何为” from the original sentence that started this whole thing. I noticed an interesting, and as it turns out, deceptive similarity between my original sentence and one of the example sentences for “何” in my dictionary.

他为何不来？
何为感觉？

Since the first example came with a Japanese translation, I concluded that it was roughly equivalent to “他为什么不来？” but with a more questioning tone like, “Why in the world isn’t he coming?” But “为什么感觉？” doesn’t really make much sense by itself or in the context of the original text.

I guessed that the key was in the difference of order between “为何” and “何为”. My hunch was that the first, “为” is an abbreviation of “为什么” while the second “为” is an abbreviation of “为了”. The translation “What is the feeling for?” seems to fit the context of the original text better.

I searched Google and Baidu for “何为” to verify my hunch and found this page. It looks like “何为” can be a person’s name as well? I don’t really know. At this point, I’m was starting to get frustrated. Who said Chinese was easier than Japanese?? (Oh right, that was me.)

A little more digging up turned up an article titled 何为Hibernate. Alright, I know about Hibernate (it’s a Java O/R mapping framework) and the title “What is Hibernate for?” seems to make sense. I found another article 小泉三次参拜靖国神社意欲何为？. Again the title, “What is Koizumi’s intention for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine?” makes sense. I was too lazy to actually read the articles to verify so in the end I just went and asked a Chinese coworker to confirm my hunch. I seemed to be right though he did mention that the use of “何为” was very high-level and not common.

[Correction]
According to your comments, 何为 is another way to say “what”. so “何为感觉” means “What is feeling?” And “意欲何为” comes from Classical Chinese meaning “干什么”. I admit, I still don’t get it really but I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Conclusion

This is pretty much the approach I take when I run into anything new that can’t be easily learned from a dictionary and when I’m too lazy or impatient to just ask a native speaker. It gets a lot easier to go through all the example sentences and search results as you get better in the language. But the difficulty just means that you’re learning more since you know less.

Today, I learned some useful and perhaps not so useful stuff about “何” in Chinese. Spending so much time digging around for information really helps me remember it better than any flashcard and presents opportunities to learn about other stuff such as “如何”， “何止”， and “为何”. All this extra work will also ensure that I won’t forget that the reading for “何” is “hé” for a long time. While I still don’t completely understand all the nuances yet, I’ll be able to recognize it in the future until I can eventually get a feel for how and when to use it.

And hey, what do you know. I just ran into “何” again for today’s 每日学口语 (8月2日).

上大学有何用？
What’s the point of going to college?

In conclusion, I’d like to say that Chinese is a um… interesting… to put it politely. Sigh… Again, please feel free to make any corrections if I’m getting any of this wrong.

The Internet Chinese Text Archive

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Here’s a Chinese resource that looks pretty cool: The Internet Chinese Text Archive.

The biggest problem with the site is it doesn’t set the proper encoding information!! So you have to manually set the encoding to “Chinese Simplified” very time. It’s really, really annoying. I’ve tried everything on the browser such as setting my preferred language to Chinese with no luck. Ugh… One trick I came up with is to mouse over each link and just read the url on the bottom bar of the browser. It’ll tell you what you’re looking at (in English no less) without having to reset the encoding every time. Then you can finally set the encoding when you get to the text you want.

Anyway, while this site looks cool, the material is far too advanced for me to make any recommendations. I thought I’d try to tackle some short stories first but it’s slow going.

Ooh la la, the 色情性爱 category looks interesting. Could be a good motivator to study Chinese.

Any good suggestions for people like me learning Chinese? Preferably something interesting, not too difficult, and as modern as possible.

大家有什么好建议吗？

KTNXBYE

Can you do it? Maybe not, but it can be done.

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This is a question I hear often and one that I had myself at one point.

What is the difference between the potential form and 「～ことができる」？

As you know, the potential form is a relative straight-forward verb conjugation indicating that one is able to do that verb. The only strange exception is 「する」 which becomes 「できる」, a completely different verb to indicate “one is able to do”.

The situation gets a little bit murkier when you normalize a verb with a generic event 「こと」 and use 「できる」 instead of just using the potential form. Ultimately, it seems like there’s two methods of expressing the potential. (Don’t complain, Chinese has… oh I don’t even know how many, there’s too many to count.)

The natural question for any learner of Japanese would be, “What’s the difference and when do I use one instead of the other?” Indeed, an excellent question! What’s even more confusing is when the original verb is 「する」 therefore becoming 「することができる」. Hey, isn’t that redundant??

It’s longer

The first and easy answer is, the 「～ことができる」 version is longer. Ha ha, aren’t you glad I’m here to clear everything up for you? Seriously though, the fact that you have another particle in there allows a lot more flexibility. Nobody says you have to use 「が」, that’s just a sentence pattern simplification.

Saburooさん, author of the 現代日本語文法概説, has some very excellent examples.

読むことしかできない – Can only read it.
読めしかしない – ????

Semantic Differences

Besides the obvious grammatical differences, what the original question is really asking is whether there’s any differences in meaning and usage. I would say the differences in nuance is so subtle, it’s debatable whether discussing them would even help learners of Japanese. The short answer is they are pretty much interchangeable and you can stop reading here.

For the rest of you who like to torture yourselves like me, let’s think about it for a second. 「～ことができる」 uses a generic event 「こと」 and a generic verb 「できる」 to say that the event is able to be done. Doesn’t it sound a bit… generic? In fact, I think using 「～ことができる」 makes it sound more like a general statement about feasibility.

電車で行けますか？ – Can you go by train?
電車で行くことができますか？ – Is it possible to go by train?

You can take this idea further to talk about general rules and policies.

タバコを吸うことはできますか？ – Is smoking allowed (for anybody)?
タバコを吸ってもいいですか？- Is it ok to smoke? (I want to smoke.)
タバコは、吸えますか？ – Able to smoke? (Are you asking if I can smoke? Otherwise, why are you asking me if you can smoke?)

In a similar vein, you can see examples of when you might want to use 「することができる」. It can sound a bit more formal since it addresses a larger audience than you personally. In fact, companies might decide to substitute even more former-sounding words such as 「可能」 in the place of 「できる」. You can’t do this with the regular potential form.

インターネットで登録することができます。- It is possible to register on the internet.
インターネットで登録することが可能です。- It is possible to register on the internet.
インターネットで登録できます。- You can register on the internet.

Conclusion

This is an example where not worrying about every little detail and just getting a lot of input might be the better approach. However, I think it is worth the time to examine what words are being used and what they mean by themselves (in this case 「こと」 and 「できる」).

I hope this short explanation can at least give you a general idea of the slight difference between the potential form and 「～ことができる」. As I mentioned, they are very similar and often interchangeable. My final suggestion is to keep things as simple as possible. For instance, don’t say 「することができる」 if you can help it. Why make things more complex than they need to be?

On LaTeX, self publishing, and another dialogue

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Though progress continues to be slow, the textbook project is finally turning into something I’m getting excited about. Lately, I’ve been thinking about layout and presentation.

Here is the second dialogue designed to demonstrate positive and negative state-of-being for nouns and adjectives. As usual, this deceptively simple conversation had a lot of thought put into it. This dialogue will be followed by pretty standard explanations of the conjugation rules and a brief description of よ and ね.

スミス：　おはよう。
キム：　　おはよう。
スミス：　元気？
キム：　　あまり元気じゃない。
スミス：　そう？
キム：　　うん。最近、とても忙しい。
スミス：　いいね。
キム：　　全然よくないよ。 		Smith: Morning.
Kim: Morning
Smith: How are you?
Kim: Not very good.
Smith: Is that so?
Kim: Yeah. I’m very busy lately.
Smith: That’s good.
Kim: It’s not good at all.
  1. おはよう [casual, exp] – Good Morning
  2. 元気（げんき） [na-adj] – lively, healthy
  3. あまり [adv] – not very (used with negative)
  4. そう [adv] – so
  5. うん [casual] – yes
  6. 最近（さいきん） [adv] – lately
  7. とても [adv] – very
  8. 忙しい（いそがしい） [i-adj] – busy
  9. いい [i-adj] – good
  10. 全然（ぜんぜん） [adv] – not at all (used with negative)

As you can see, it uses a two-column format for the Japanese and English translation. I debated on adding a kana-only version but couldn’t figure out how to fit it in. In the end, I decided if the vocabulary with the readings are right there, the reader shouldn’t have much trouble figuring it out. I’m still debating whether or not to add furigana however.

Though I had initially wanted to concentrate on the content only, I decided I should also think about the layout, presentation, and format. This is especially important for creating a printable book because I have to think about what size paper I want to use. And DocBook, as we know, deliberately leaves out any shred of formatting information. So I’m looking into setting up LaTeX and will see how that works out soon enough I hope.

I’m also looking into Lulu.com for self publishing. They even do audio CDs though they don’t currently package it with a book. Now all I have to do is figure out how to find other speakers besides myself for the characters and how to get some recording done with reasonably professional quality.

But first, I guess I should concentrate on writing the rest of the book. The next dialogue will cover the polite positive and negative state-of-being and the question marker 「か」 but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Random question, why do spell checkers keep telling me “dialogue” is misspelled? It is a word, isn’t it?

This chair is worth 2 playstations…

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I was reading this blog entry on chairs (did I mention the huge number of blogs in my Google Reader?) and was shocked to see a picture of the exact chair I was sitting on.

Taking a closer look, I realized that indeed, I was sitting in a $979 chair. I think the best proof of how great this chair is in the fact that I never thought about my chair. This is in sharp contrast to the days of cursing at my crappy chair in Japan which didn’t even have back support beyond the first 5 lower vertebrae.

Not bad for working as a software developer for Library services. I also have a dual-monitor Dell dev box and a MacBook Pro for work. We’re located in Fremont, the center of the universe, a great location in Seattle. The atmosphere is really great and laid back as well. We’re currently really hurting for Database and QA resources so if you’re interested, take a look at the list of our open positions.

On the (possible) origin of 「出来る」

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I was just working on an article (one of my 80 drafts) about the difference between the potential form and 「ことができる」 when an amazing insight hit me! I didn’t want to clutter up that article so I decided to write about it separately in this post.

I was discussing the potential form and how only 「する」 had this curious exception of using a completely different verb: 「できる」. While I never thought much about it these many years, with some Chinese under my belt now, I suddenty realized that “出来” was also used in Chinese to indicate potential!

In Chinese, “出来” means to “come out” and you can see various examples of this here.

叫全家人都出来, 我好给他们拍照。
Ask the whole family to come out so that I can take their photograph.

You may be wondering what this has to do with 「出来る」 but what the dictionary doesn’t tell you is that this “出来” is often combined with a verb to indicate that the verb is able to be performed. For example, “听得出来” means “able to hear”, basically the same definition as 「聞こえる」 in Japanese. The listening is coming out, therefore you can hear it. I guess it does kind of make sense, in a weird Chinese sort of way.

I harvested the following example from Google since my Chinese is not too good. So I hope I’m not making any mistakes here in the translation.

你能听得出来什么歌吗?
Can you hear what song it is?

Some of you may be wondering why there a “能” in there as well which seems redundant. Yeah well, sometimes it’s there and sometimes it’s not. (See, I told you I wasn’t very good at this.)

Chinese grammar (if indeed, there is such a thing) doesn’t seem very consistent but my guess is when you have a subject (in this case 你), you need 能 to act as the verb. The 得 (which is kind of like の but only for verbs) kind of rendered 听 a description rather than a traditional verb, hence the need for 能.

So things are a bit different for the negative case because you use 不 and don’t need 得. Here’s another similar example I pulled from Google.

你听不出来我是谁吗?
Can’t you hear who I am?

Please feel free to correct me on any of this as I’m pulling these explanations out of my ass as I’m writing it.

Chinesepod has a great podcast discussing “不出来” and “得出来” so I encourage you to check it out. You can also find many additional podcasts with dialogues using “出来” by using the search box. Sorry, I can’t give you a direct link to the search results since it seems to POST and not GET. (John, this is a tiny suggestion for you.)

Conclusion

Anyway, I hope you can see how “出来” means more than just “come out” and is used to express potential as well. So the fact that Japanese uses a verb with the exact same kanji for a similar purpose seems a bit too much for mere coincidence. Could 「出来る」 be some kind of weird Japanized version of “出来”, originally derived from Chinese? Sounds like a good topic for a research paper. All I can say is it’s mighty suspicious that only 「する」 has this weird exception of becoming 「出来る」 unlike every other verb in the whole Japanese language.

Update

Kim pointed out something that I completely forgot about. Another odd potential exception is 「あり得る」 from 「ある」. Is the use of the kanji 「得」 here just another coincidence? The suspicion is growing…