Month: October 2017

My pick for the SoraNews24 article this week is something that a lot of Japanese-language learners can probably relate with: Foreigners misreading Japanese kanji of “two men one woman” is too pure for Japanese Internet.

Anyone who’s studied Japanese before has probably tried to “sound out” kanji before, that is, attempting to read a kanji you’ve never seen before by deducing its meaning through the parts that make it up. Sometimes they can make sense (“person” plus “tree” equals “rest”) but more often than not they don’t (“sun” plus “sound” equals “darkness???”).

And when misreadings occur because of assumptions, they can have hilarious results, just like the example in this article. I won’t spoil what the Japanese-learner read the kanji composed of “man-woman-man” as, but let’s just say it’s pretty far from the actual Japanese definition.

Read it and find out for yourself here!

Top image: PAKUTASO (edited by SoraNews24)

My pick for the SoraNews24 article this week is the article that I had a one-in-a-million connection with: Japanese Twitter can’t stop laughing at this JLPT listening question straight out of Evangelion.

A few days ago I was looking around the Japanese Internet, seeing if there was an article I could do. I stumbled upon a tweet of someone showing off a listening question from a past JLPT test that was basically taken from the anime Evangelion.

That sounded really familiar, in fact a little too familiar, so I did a little searching and saw that the test was administered in December 2009, the date when I took the test myself! I remember how that question (which was completely out of place on the test, the rest of which was 100% SAT-like serious) made the entire class burst out laughing.

I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be have taken the same level test on the same day in the same year, so I took it as a sign and had to write the article with my own personal perspective. Check it out here.

Featured image: PAKUTASO

My pick for the SoraNews24 article this week is the pupil-perplexing: Japanese Internet can’t agree on what to call this color, what do you think it is?

Color differences between languages and cultures has always fascinated me. Sometimes the colors that we use to refer to every day things (like grass, the sky, or apples) can vary slightly between languages. Maybe in another language the grass isn’t green, but “blue,” or maybe apples aren’t red, but “orange.”

It’s something that we take for granted, and then when it gets challenged, can be quite jarring. And if you want to see a great example of another culture having a problem with a color that you may not think is so difficult, be sure to check this article out.