*This post is in English, Japanese, Chinese, but I will include phonetics (romaji for Japanese, pinyin for Chinese) so you can follow along.
The Text: Piano no Mori, Chapter 1, page 2
Characters: Narrator
転校生は… (tenkousei wa)
一時的にせよチテ囃される傾向がある (ichijiteki ni seyo chite hayasareru keikou ga aru)
…がそのまた逆も (ga sono mata gyaku mo)
あるので… (aru node)
My translation attempt:
The transfer student…
Even though everyone tends to treat him with applause for now
It’s also the opposite
Because there is…
Convoluted thoughts
This page was rough. I’m still very early stages in learning Japanese and there’s not nearly so much to hang onto here as there was on the first page. (Learning to introduce yourself is one of the few things you learn when you first start learning a language, so I definitely got lucky last time.) That second sentence especially threw me for a loop. The grammar is so different from anything I’d seen before. With a lot of dictionary referencing, the breakdown is something like
一時的 – Temporarily
にせよ – even though
モテ – popular
囃 – banter, applaud
される – to be done
傾向 – tendency
がある – to have
Chinese brain picked out 転校生, 一時的, 傾向, and 逆 as awkward but still intelligible.
転校生 (tenkousei), meaning transfer student, is 轉學生 (zhuan3xue2sheng1) in Chinese. 學校 (chi, xue2xiao4)/学校 (jap, gakkou) means school – lit. learning campus, so this is a pretty easy mental jump. Looking into this one I learned that Japanese started out using traditional characters, but went through its own process of simplification in 1946. Japanese didn’t simplify as extensively as Chinese did, and made some different choices, which is why it uses the simplified 学 rather than the traditional. Japanese also simplified 轉 into 転 rather than 转.
一時的 (ichiji teki), meaning temporary, would be pronounced yi4shi2de in Chinese. This isn’t a Chinese phrase by any means, but the breakdown of “one hour ‘s” kind of makes sense. I found that 的(teki) has a fascinating history. The meaning of indicating possession matches the Chinese 的(de), but it’s thought that the sound actually was adopted from the English adjective ending “-tic” as in “spastic” or “plastic” during the Meiji Era (late 1800s – early 1900s). Japanese also has another way to indicate possession, which is the particle の(no). I’ve always thought の looked like a simplified 的, and apparently I’m not alone. Modern Chinese has borrowed の as a non-standard replacement for 的, especially among the young’uns.
傾向 (keikou), meaning tendency, exists as the exact same phrase in Chinese, but with a completely different pronunciation: qing1xiang4. 逆, meaning opposite, was the exact same way (jap, gyaku; chi, ni4). I have no idea what happened here, my research turned up nothing.
The other thing I learned from this section was that there are seemingly a butt-ton of Japanese words that can be written using kanji, but are commonly written just using kana (hiragana). There are 4 just in this short passage.
ある＝有る (aru, to exist)
また＝又 (mata, again)
される＝為れる (sareru, to do)
その＝其の (sono, that)
When do you write them using kana and when do you write them in kanji? Why would you not use more kanji if all of them are in the list of common kanji that everyone is expected to know? It would definitely help me identify word breaks.
References:
Jisho is Japanese dictionary I am using here.
MDBG is my all-time favorite Chinese dictionary.
Wiktionary is where all my etymology info is coming from.
An English translation of Piano no Mori can be found here, and I use this to check my work.
This IPA Chart helps me guess what words sounded like historically
Etymology Adventures 