Today’s Kanji
- 一
- 二
- 三
- 四
- 五
- 六
- 七
- 八
- 九
- 十
- 百
- 千
- 万
- 円
- 口
- 目
Since most of these Kanji are pretty basic and its meaning are simple, I won’t explain each of them. I’m lucky that I learned this Kanji when I was in elementary school in Korea.
New Vocabularies Learned
- 三日月 － みかづき Crescent moon
- 七夕 － たなばた Star Festival in Japan (July 7th)
- 八百屋 － やおや vegetable shop
- 腕立て伏せ － うでたてふせ Push-up
- 十分 － じゅうぶん enough
- 百科事典 － ひゃっかじてん encyclopedia
- 百貨店 － ひゃっかてん department store
- 千葉県 － ちばけん Chiba prefecture
- 万引き － まんびき shoplifting
- 万年筆 － まんねんひつ fountain pen
- 円い － まるい round
- 楕円 － だえん oval
- 円満 － えんまん harmonious
- 目次 － もくじ table of contents
- 科目 － かもく school subject
- 目的 － もくてき purpose/ object
- 面目ない － めんぼくない／めんもくない ashamed
Comments
2. 七夕 – Every year on July 7th, they have Star Festival in Japan. The word “tanabata” means “Evening of the seventh” (Kanji “seven” + “evening”). On the celebration day, people write their wishes on paper strips and hang them on trees, wishing for their dreams come true. Streets and towns get filled with colorful paper strips this time around.The celebration relates to a legend of two separated lovers, who are only allowed to meet once a year on July 7th.
People hanging their wishes!
You can read more about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanabata
9. 万引き － I find this word interesting and easy to remember simply because of its sound “manbiki.” When you count sheep in Japan, you use something that ends ~hiki, with variations such as ~piki or ~biki depends on the number. So that means when you count 10,000 sheep, it should be “manhiki” (万匹、まんひき) Kinda similar heh?
17. 面目ない － This word has two readings, “menMOKUnai” and “menBOKUnai.” Let me try to make an educated guess of why this expression came to have the meaning “ashamed.” The kanji part “面” means face and “目” means eye. I”m sure you’ve seen people covering their faces and eyes when embarrassed or ashamed. That is the image I think of. Now I just did a little bit of research in Korean web, didn’t get a satisfactory result, but I’ve seen some posts explaining how this word came from Buddhism. The part “面目” represents self and to say ”ない,” which means “doesn’t exist,” could be understood as one’s loss of true inner self. Complicated! You may say, but at least now you’ll never forget the word! 🙂
That’s it for today, and let’s all stay motivated for more Japanese vocabs!
それでは、みんな日本語勉強頑張りましょう！
– Leonard
Nice vocab list, there were a few I hadn’t seen before like 面目ない and 楕円. I’ll have to try and memorize those.
If you don’t mind I wanted to give a few comments about the readings of the vocab words. I’m not fluent enough to have 100% confidence in my answers, but at minimum I’d say to consider what I say and see if it makes sense.
1) I think the correct reading of 百科事典 is ひゃっかじてん. Looks like you had a typo.
2)I think maybe 十分 (pronounced じゅっぷん) is typically used to mean “10 minutes”, where as 充分 (じゅうぶん) is typically used to mean “enough”. But it looks like the dictionary says you are technically correct, so maybe I’m crazy (:
Looks like your comment got cut off somehow…
Haha Yeah I think it happened when my WordPress app got shutdown for some reason.
Thank you for your comment! You are totally right, actually, my dear Japanese friend pointed that out to me and I was going to fix it as I post my second post today! It will be reflected very soon! 🙂 Actually for 十分 I’m thinking about writing a post on it as to why I got confused. It’s related to my Korean background.