Lots of new kanji here, and also a fun phrase. もちろん(mochiron) is a super common Japanese phrase that means “of course”. The phrase is generally written in kana, but does have associated kanji: 勿論(chi: wu4lun4). The phrase literally means “do not discuss it,” or, in English, “to go without saying.”
Tag Archives: chinese
Piano no Mori – A Real Heart has Chambers
At first glance, 必 (kanara, meaning must) and 心 (kokoro, meaning heart) look very similar2. Tracing the evolution of the character shows however that they actually started out as two completely different characters and converged over time.
Piano no Mori – Early Roadblocks
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.) 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).
Etymology Adventures 