Tag: Elementary

  • Me? Her? Fangirls! – ミーハー

    Me? Her? Fangirls! – ミーハー

    Don’t look now! It’s the Me-Her girls! The what girls? Say it with me – the Me-Har girls. You’ve got it! ミーハー女子. But what does it mean?

  • No More Hold-Ups!

    No More Hold-Ups!

    もう改札で止まらない! So goes the catchy line in this advert featuring the pudgy, bulging yurukyara character that is Tokyu’s ‘Noru-run’. The picture speaks a thousand words, but can you figure out the Japanese? It’s quite clever!

  • Lucky Ears – 福耳

    Lucky Ears – 福耳

    Do you ever secretly worry about the shape of your ears? Perhaps you have larger-than-normal earlobes? Do they droop down in a stretched-out fashion? It may be that you’re one of the lucky owners of ‘fukumimi’!

  • Fire Safety – 火の用心

    Fire Safety – 火の用心

    One of the more iconic types of poster you’ll find in Japan are the fire safety posters. Often adorned with a cute girl or popular celebrity, they aim to raise awareness of accidental fires in the home and encourage people to be vigilant.

  • Complete – コンプ

    Complete – コンプ

    Here’s a neat little conversation that I just spotted on Facebook that has a slang term and some pretty simple language. It definitely gives you a better feel for how an actual conversation between two young guys would play out! As you may have guessed from the title, コンプ simply means ‘complete’. As with many…

  • Mothers’ Meetings – ママ会

    Mothers’ Meetings – ママ会

    Something you’ll see a lot of in Japanese is the Kanji 会 (かい), which symbolises a grouping or meeting. Its uses are quite broad, from titles, such as ‘International Association’ (交際交流会 – こくさいこうりゅうかい) to birthday party (誕生日会 – たんじょうびかい) . The trick is simply to look for the Kanji on the end and think of…

  • 150,000 Free Japanese-English Sentences

    150,000 Free Japanese-English Sentences

    Have you ever heard of the Tanaka Corpus? If you’ve been using Jim Breen’s fantastic free online Japanese-English dictionary JDIC, you may have unwittingly encountered it. The Tanaka Corpus is a collection of over 150,000 sentence pairs ideal for students learning Japanese. Perfect for repetitions in your favourite SRS software!

  • ASCII Art Omitted – AA略

    ASCII Art Omitted – AA略

    You might see this term used online among Japanese netizens. The term AA is an abbreviation of ASCII Art – American Standard Code for Information Interchange – referring to those weird and wonderful faces made up of electronic characters.

  • Lady Men – ギャル男

    Lady Men – ギャル男

    A interesting sub-culture found in Japan, particularly around the fashionable, young districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku, is that of Gyaru-oh, the so called ‘lady men’.

  • Twitter Lingo – なう

    Twitter Lingo – なう

    Those of you who are Twitter users will have undoubtedly comes across the slang term なう, which evolved on the social network in response to the ‘What are you doing now?’ tagline. Let’s take a brief look at the term!