linguisdicks

[linguisdicks]

hi! this ask might be a bit weird but is it true that 赤鬼 can be read as “akagi” as opposed to “akaoni”?

Yup! 

鬼 【おに(P); き】

And in combination, the ki is going to harden to gi usually (as happens with most voiceless consonants; they get voiced in combination), so: akagi!

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how do you say bull fighter in japanese?

That would be 闘牛士 (tougyuushi)

There is actually a manga called Golondrina by BL mangaka Est Em that...stars a bisexual woman!

It is set in Spain, and the main character is a Chica, a boyish young woman betrayed by her lover Maria who wants to commit suicide with the ultimate goal of making her lover regret her actions, but when she tries to throw herself in front of a car to do so, the driver Antonio takes her home with him and discovers she's a girl.

Chica learns that Antonio is part of a family of matadors and decides to die in style before Maria by becoming a female matador.

I haven't read the story myself, so I can't actually tell you how it ends (or if the MC and young man get together--though from volume 2, Chica meets Vincente, another matador who's her rival and...???), but it's on its 4th volume now, so it's long and plotty it seems, and while reviews for volume 1 were "meh..." they seem to turn around completely in volume 2, so if you're up for it, maybe give it a try?

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Meanings...nothing more than meeeeaaanings

Furigana are the little bitty kana written above/beside kanji to tell readers how to read a certain character. They're a great help when you want to read manga but don't quite have the kanji skills to do so yet, but...not all furigana are created equal!

In the top panel, we have some song lyrics, which read (middle verse):

Oishi: "「まっぴら」と手をひらり　渦を巻く花びらメロディ、飛び出すテニスボール　拾った　逢った　運命の彼に" ("The melody of the swirling flower petals, lightly grazing my hand. I picked up the tennis ball flying towards me and met the man [person] of my destiny")

Yeah. The lyrics are pretty suggestive. Even more so when you take into account that they're directed at the character's doubles partner (he's a tennis player) and that the seiyuu himself penned the lyrics.

Our point of focus, here, is on "彼". If you look at the lyrics booklet shot, you can see that there are furigana above the kanji. This character is read かれ (kare) and means man/he/him. It's completely and 100% masculine, and the basis of 彼氏 (kareshi, "boyfriend").

However, the furigana above the character tell you how to read it in this particular instance: ひと (hito, person).

So why use 彼, if the lyricist wanted it sung a completely different way--as ひと? Why not just put 人 (hito) in the first place?

Writers do this when they want to embed multiple meanings in a line--in this case, he wanted to have person sung, but for the audience to know he was talking about a specific person, a man--the character's doubles partner. It's Japan's version of the double entendre, in this case!

But furigana to offer an alternate reading isn't always suggestive, instead functioning to clarify. See the second panel, from Setsuna Graffiti:

Nade: "ジンさんは如月煙火店の４代目だ。" ("Jin-san is the fourth-generation owner of this place.")

"如月煙火店" literally means "Kisaragi Fireworks Shop", but this unwieldy mouthful is reduced, through furigana, to simple ここ ("here/this place"). Why? Mostly because it would be more natural to just say "here" in Japanese, since the characters would know what "here" meant from context, but using the actual name of the place helps to remind us--the reader--of what "this place" is. It's like having a conversation with your friend and inviting them over to "my house" instead of, "the Johnson family home" or something.

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Manly men use manly words and...stuff

One of the most difficult aspects of Japanese language is the subtle differences in word usage that come with gender, age, relative 'status' in a group, all manner of cultural fripperies we must contend with. Use the wrong personal pronoun or verb ending, and you could very well be branded an uncultured rube or, worse yet, just another gaijin *gasp*

But it's not always our own words we need to be concerned with; sometimes it's just as difficult to parse someone else's slang or dialect as to master our own. One of the most common 'twists' to the language you'll come across, particularly in BL manga, is the peculiar way that some guys speak.

Rutta: "全部もらうぜ。お前も、夢も、手放す気なんてねえんだ。" ("I'm gonna have it all; I don't plan on letting go of you or my dream.")

The ～ねえ construction is one many of us have probably encountered before, if you've read any manga involving uber-manly characters. But the language warping doesn't end there.

This kind of slang takes any verb or adjective ending in -ai and -oi and turns them into -ee.

kitanai --> kitanee (汚えぇ, dirty) umai --> umee (うめぇ, tasty) osoi --> osee (おせぇ, slow) ikanai --> ikanee (行かねぇ, won't go)

So any time you see a ~manly guy~ use a word you don't know that ends in ～ねえ or ～え, consider that he might be using an -ai/-oi adjective or a plain negative verb!

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For the lewd japanese abreviations, there's also O.T.N for "Ochin(chin)" おちんちん if i'm correct. I saw it in a vocaloid song titled "Gigantic O.T.N" (wtf yeah i know). Hope it helps a little. I like your blog~ :)

Another fun one!

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Brevity is the soul of ****

It's not uncommon to come across amusing censorship in BL manga or doujinshi art--we've all seen those "dicks of light" and bemoaned the black bars or giggled when they were replaced with more amusing distractions (Free! artists like to replace the dicks with dolphins and sharks and whales, whatever's appropriate, for comedic relief...).

But one way of self-censoring in Japanese is to use abbreviations for more naughty words, like speaking in code.

Naturally, not all abbreviations you'll see in Japanese are for risque terms. See above, outlined in red, in an excerpt from Yokozawa Takafumi no Baai:

Yokozawa: "問題はそこじゃない。ＴＰＯを考えろ。" ("That's not the issue. Think about TPO!")

TPO stands for "time", "place", and "occasion" -- it's literally an abbreviation for the English words. Used thusly, our character is ordering his beloved to consider the situation they're currently in (time=during office hours, place=at the office, occasion=on the job) and whether or not it's appropriate to play grab-ass just now (hint: it's not).

But I do believe I promised you some abbreviations for naughty words, yes? The ones I've personally come across in BL series are:

TKB - chikubi (乳首, nipples)

DT - doutei (童貞, virgin)

Some other fun ones include:

S*X - sekkusu (セックス, sex)

ANL - anaru (アナル, anal sex)

PNS - penisu (ペニス, penis)

Pretty straightforward! You can read more at the source, which details more words that, like TKB and DT, take their abbreviations from the Japanese word rather than the English one.

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I have a question regarding your Kansai-ben post, I finally got around and watched the Trifecta movie and noticed Yokozawa saying "wa" a few times (there was a part where he was embarrassed and said he was going home, possibly from the Valentine short). Being the wild bear he is, I doubt he took on an "okama" identity but I don't ever recall him being from Kansai? I might've heard wrong but Onodera and either Hatori or Chiaki seemed to use it once as well :o Could you explain this?

You're quite right in that he's definitely not using it in the 'okama' fashion, nor is he from anywhere near the Kansai region, which would make him one of many men these days (particularly 'manly' men) who use it as a kind of fashionable slang (picked up without even realizing it in his youth, probably, like many guys who see it in television).

Y'all is part of the southern US dialect of English, but its usage has spread around the country, such that even those who've never been to the South will sometimes use it without thinking (it's also necessarily a part of AAVE as well, which is not unique to the southern US, and could have helped its spread). So "originally and primarily found in X dialect" doesn't mean speakers of other dialects won't use it too :)

I don't recall Ritsu ever using it, but I know Takano uses it almost religiously (I feel like every other sentence out of his mouth ends in some kind of breathy わ sometimes). I'm sure that Yokozawa is just following a similar pattern!

It seems a bit contradictory to say that okama-type characters AND super manly men will both use this particle, albeit for different reasons, but that's how it is!

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Kansai-ben there, done that

When you learn Japanese in a classroom context, or even when you're self-taught, almost 100% of the time you're going to be learning Toukyou-ben, aka the "normal" Japanese spoken by Tokyo-ites. But Japanese is rife with dialects--versions of the language that are unique to certain areas of the country with respect to little twists on verb endings or quirky speech patterns by the natives of the area.

Probably the most commonly seen non-Tokyo dialect is Kansai-ben, the version of Japanese spoken by those living in the Kansai region of the country, to the southwest of Tokyo. Characters who speak this dialect are often characterized as either or both the class clown (the region has given birth to many of Japan's comedians) or a rough/badboy/punk type.

Among other aspects to the dialect, one of the hallmarks of the Kansai dialect is the use of the ending particle wa (わ, not to be confused with は). Wa is also seen as an ending particle in Tokyo-ben, but there it's typically used as an emphatic particle ending almost exclusively by women (as in "行くわ/Here I go!"). If any men use it, they're either 1) really flaming gay, the "okama"-type characters, or 2) from the Kansai region/imitating Kansai-specific speech patterns.

In the above panel, we see Juuzen of Abe Miyuki's Super Lovers, a Kansai character, show off his upbringing with the particle in question:

Juuzen: "チンピラチンピラやかましいわ!!" ("You're really annoying, always calling me a punk-nose brat!!")

So when you've got a male character tossing out lots of sentences that end in わ, this should be your first clue that they're just speaking in the Kansai dialect (of note, there are of course different sub-dialects unique to areas within Kansai, but on the whole, this is true for all Kansai-dwellers), so don't scratch your head too hard over it!

Learning to recognize and translate dialects can be a bit daunting, but it's not that difficult once you learn the patterns! It's all pretty much the same Japanese, just with a little code-breaking thrown in!

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You don't have to publish but I really am thankful for this blog! I've been trying to learn Japanese forever and since the schools here don't offer Japanese classes, I had to turn to online sites that ended up only giving you like 3 lessons (if you didn't pay for a membership) so I'm thankful for you taking the time out of your day for doing this! I'm learning more than I ever thought I did thanks to you! :D

I won't really be able to give "proper" Japanese lessons to teach you guys things from the ground up, because that's honestly a ton of work! But I hope you can enjoy the posts I do make and learn even a little from them, especially since it's really rewarding knowing I'm helping people be able to enjoy all of the manga I already get to love in its 'purest' form!

Learning on your own can be really difficult, I definitely understand, so hopefully this blog will be something fun that can teach you useful stuff in a context you already love!

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Where does 君 fit into all of those second-person pronouns? I know it generally goes with 僕, but what type of person would use it after a one night stand?

I discussed this in detail in the post I just made, but as for "what type of person would use it", any of the following would use it (not an exhaustive list, of course):

an older man to a younger man (regardless of who topped/bottomed)

someone who typically uses boku (provided they're with a stranger, otherwise they'd probably use a name)

someone who may not use boku but does tend to be reasonably polite/normal (rather than overly rough)

Hope that helps!

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What a great idea for a blog! Now that you wrote about anta and omae, could you perhaps tell us more about 'kimi' (君)?

The Importance of Being Kimi

A couple of people asked for me to write some stuff about 君 (kimi) as well, so here goes!

In Japanese language classes, many of us learned that kimi was the second-person pronoun that goes with boku, a polite-ish first-person pronoun used by boys. And while that’s true, you’ll see it in far more contexts than just that, and I’d hazard to say you’ll see it used more by people who don’t use ‘boku’ than by those that do! Why?

Because kimi is a term used to describe those ‘below’ you (younger, subordinates, children, etc.) by those with some measure of power over the person it’s being used on. For example, let’s look at these panels from Konya mo Nemurenai by Yamamoto Kotetsuko.

Here, we see our protagonist Rikiya saying the following (middle panel):

Rikiya: “I won’t (regret it!)! I work a part-time job!”

Rikiya is a guy in his 20s and speaks much the same way, using ore as his first-person pronoun of choice. This is pretty normal. However, when he speaks with Endo and uses a second-person pronoun instead of Endo’s name…

Rikiya: "I was scared…but so stupid. And just when I was about to give up…you appeared."

He uses kimi here for ‘you’, so clearly it’s not as clean-cut as “ore goes with omae, boku goes with kimi”.

Kimi is, simply, a pronoun of polite distance and/or one to be used with those ‘below’ you in any sense. In Rikiya’s case, he uses kimi out of a sense of politeness (reflected in his verb inflections as well, where he uses simple plain verb forms and pretty much never tacks on masculine particles or masculine slang endings)

In other cases, though, we may see a boss at work use kimi with a subordinate (provided he likes them well enough/has enough self-respect; if he’s a rough sort, he’ll just go straight to omae), such as Munakata Reishi from K Project; it’s important to note these types of men will use kimi with underlings regardless of gender.

A group of men hitting on someone they find attractive may demonstrate how they feel they’re ‘above’ that person (a subtle power display) by using kimi on their mark as well, in a manner akin to saying, “Hey, you sweet little thing, wanna have some fun?”

Women, though, will rarely use kimi. It’s more of a man’s word to use (though you may hear female singers using it in song lyrics, along with boku); women wanting to wax polite will just use anata if the situation calls for it, while those wanting a rougher tone will generally go for anta (as mentioned previously), or occasionally flat-out omae if they really don’t give a crap. Kimi is kind of a half-measure, so if you’re going to throw gender roles to the wind, go all out, I suppose!

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Hi, first of all thanks for creating this blog. I have a little question, In the extra of Rakuda Tsukai to Ouji no Yoru (Ogawa Chise), in the first panel the is a character (the one with the circle in the picture) that I’m not sure if its “ku” (ク) or “wa” (ワ) from katakana. 

That would be a ク (ku)! A ワ would have a straight vertical tag on the left, and much shorter than the one here, instead of the swooping longer line of ク. It looks like a person’s name, perhaps (Saadiq is the name of a musical artist whose name is written that way in katakana)? Hope that helps!

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Friends don't let friends use アンタ willy-nilly

Given the number of personal pronouns the Japanese have at their disposal and the intricacies of their appropriate use, coming upon a new one and trying to determine if it’s something you can add to your personal arsenal or not may be a daunting task.

In the above panel, our light-haired protagonist has just woken up to find himself bound S&M style by an attractive stranger. Wanting to know who the heck is responsible for this situation (and how they got into his home), he squawks:

A:「つーかそもそもアンタ誰だよ!!」("Besides, who the heck ARE you?!") B:「神だ」("A god.")

Here, we encounter a second-person pronoun (“you” in English) that you may or may not be familiar with: アンタ/あんた (anta).

As you may have guessed, it’s derived from anata, but unlike its parent pronoun, just about everyone you speak with will give you different advice on when it’s appropriate to use and when it isn’t.

General gist: It’s kind of like a more polite version of ‘omae’. Emphasis on kind of. Men and women alike will use it, albeit in different situations.

Women: The type of women to use anta will be a bit more rough and outspoken than their more polite peers, typically using plain verb forms and sharper language. If a girl is the type to use atashi (and not in an overtly cutesy way) as her first-person pronoun, she’s likely to use anta as her go-to second-person pronoun. See: Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion. In many school-setting series, you may see female characters giving their male protagonists a long-suffering 「アンタなぁ…」 when flummoxed. Given that it’s a bit rough and familiar, you won’t soon see them using it on, say, a sempai at work or their boss or their grandmother, though those same people may use it on you with impunity.

Men: For male characters somewhat concerned with keeping up appearances/conforming to societal norms and expectations, this is the second-person pronoun to use on people you’re keeping a bit at arm’s length, for whatever reason. It’s used quite often by characters in Nakamura Shungiku’s series: Onodera Ritsu to his boss and older lover Takano Masamune, Takahashi Misaki to his older lover and landlord Usami Akihiko, Yokozawa Takafumi to his superior-at-work and older lover Kirishima Zen. Seeing a pattern here? These are all younger characters addressing older characters for whom they may feel some measure of, “It’s not appropriate to call you omae even though we’re sleeping together, so anta it is!” Alternatively, omae, even between people close in age, can come off too familiar, and sometimes a character will fall back on anta for that reason when speaking with someone they don't have a prior relationship with. In situations where a character is faced with a total stranger, societal norms will require that he show them some manner of respect if they look his age or older, and so he’ll resort to either anata (if he’s feeling overly polite) or anta (if he’s more comfortable with being casual). A stuffy businessman who wakes up next to a stranger in the morning might be expected to use anata, whereas a frat-boy-like college student who finds himself on the heels of a one-night-stand might use anta.

Personal pronouns and determining which ones are appropriate to use and when can be a hassle even for Japanese people, though (doing research for this topic in Japanese brought a half dozen threads of people asking, “Is it okay to use アンタ with this sort of person…?”), so if you’re still feeling a little overwhelmed, take heart! You’re not alone :)

But I can't put too fine a point on the fact that second-person pronouns should be used sparingly. You can easily overshoot 'saucy upstart' and land right in the middle of 'rude asshole' calling someone 'you' in even the most polite of terms too often, so be careful!

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They'd just say 「いち　プラス　いち」 (ichi purasu ichi)!

Let’s ignore the kitty paw in the picture for now and focus on the text of concern! This excerpt is from a short story in the Yokozawa Takafumi no Baai novel series by Nakamura Shungiku, and reads as follows:

「ほら、撮るぞ。1+1は?」 「にー!」

The context here is a single father is taking a picture of his daughter and male lover together, giving us a great opportunity to see what the Japanese version of Cheese! is.

The whole point of saying “cheese” when you take a picture is to force a smile—and given that the Japanese were probably coming up with ways to force smiles long before they’d incorporated the English チーズ, they needed to find a way unique to their own language.

The Japanese word for “two” is に, ni. When you say it out loud, much with “cheese”, your mouth forms a smile. So when Japanese people take a picture, they say, “What’s one plus one?” (“1+1は?”), eliciting a response of “2!” and hopefully a smile as well.

[linguisdicks]

yall are kami samas among otoutous

Is this a question or a seduction.

Also pretty sure I read a BL like this once.

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First post~!

Welcome to linguisdicks. Say it aloud a few times, let it roll around in your mouth a bit. There you go.

This blog is for those of us who like to keep our Japanese skills polished by reading about boys polishing each other's knobs. To put it bluntly, we like our BL manga and we want it raw. This tumblr will showcase random fun Japanese tidbits that pop up in the most awkward of places: gay porn!

Submissions and asks are encouraged (just be sure to review the FAQ first), as we're here to help you! Saw an odd verb conjugation in a piece that ran in the latest Drap? Can't wrap your mind around why a character is speaking so formally to his beau when they've had their dicks in each other's mouths more times than they can count? Trying to figure out some slang that you're sure means "strictly a top" but want corroboration? You've come to the right place!

If you're ready to get started, then head on over to the FAQ to review our Ask and Submission guidelines! We're also looking for a Tag Czar to make sure posts are tagged properly and that the tag list is up to date, so apply within if you think you've got some experience!

[linguisdicks]

Let's ignore the kitty paw in the picture for now and focus on the text of concern! This excerpt is from a short story in the Yokozawa Takafumi no Baai novel series by Nakamura Shungiku, and reads as follows:

「ほら、撮るぞ。1+1は?」 「にー!」

The context here is a single father is taking a picture of his daughter and male lover together, giving us a great opportunity to see what the Japanese version of Cheese! is.

The whole point of saying "cheese" when you take a picture is to force a smile--and given that the Japanese were probably coming up with ways to force smiles long before they'd incorporated the English チーズ, they needed to find a way unique to their own language.

The Japanese word for "two" is に, ni. When you say it out loud, much with "cheese", your mouth forms a smile. So when Japanese people take a picture, they say, "What's one plus one?" ("1+1は?"), eliciting a response of "2!" and hopefully a smile as well.