The first thing I would like to say is although my intention for this blog is to share resources, express my luvs for Japanese and contribute to on-line educational resources, I don't think this will be a blog/site where I teach everything from the ground up. I will of course give explanations for what I'm talking about but since there are so many good sites that teach "basics" much more succinctly than I feel I could, like japanese.about.com, I won't always include full lessons on grammar etc. Also, being a student myself, while I check (and often obsessively re-check) everything I would post about another language, I could very well be very wrong and would welcome comments/questions/corrections/scolding from readers. <3
Anyways..
So I was playing a Japanese game Mitchiri Neko (website here) on my phone today and it being a free game, features occasional ads. A particular ad struck me and then after taking a minute to understand it, I laughed out loud at its..hmm.. let's say "economic" use of words.
So I thought 'hey this could make a good first lesson blog post'.
So to the right of the first picture we see "育てて"・'sodatete', this comes from the verb "育てる"・'sodateru' meaning 'to raise' (children, pigs, etc.）It's presented here in it's 'te' form, which, amongst many other uses, is used here as an imperative form of the verb (a verb form that is used when giving a command/tellin' you how to raise your pigs). My translation here would be "raise!"
The next word we see is "太らせ"・'futorase', coming from the verb "太る"・'futoru' meaning 'to get fat'.
Here's it's used in it's "causative" form, meaning that its used when talking about making/letting someone do something. My translation of this word would be "fatten up!".
The third word, written in Katakana, one of the two syllabic scripts in Japanese, Katakana commonly denoting foreign/loan words and names, says "ベーコン" which, if you are katakana-savvy will know or know as soon as you say it out loud, means "Bacon" !
I love how blunt the use of this word is on the ad, there's no messing around with this games intentions. Probably not for animal-lovers.
Lastly, we have the word '出荷' ・しゅっか・'shukka' meaning "freighting; shipping; forwarding".
The two Kanji (Chinese-derived symbols) separately mean
出："out; outgoing;" details here
荷："baggage; cargo:" details here
I would translate it in this instance as "shipping", "delivery" or "ship out".
So essentially, all together, this ad is telling you the basic premise of the game:
"Raise 'em > Fatten 'em up > BACON > Ship it out!"
I used to be afraid of the idea of games like this as a child, often having disturbing daydreams about my Pokémon being slaughtered for fur and alternative medicine :P
Hope you enjoyed this post, またね！
