For example, today I realized Sekai no Owari (the artist) is literally “end of the world”. I’d heard the name before and it just flew over my head as this average band name in Japanese, but now that I know Japanese, it was a legit surprise to realize this, and I noticed it’s kind of uncovering an Easter Egg (for those who don’t know, Easter Egg, in video games, are small, sometimes 4th-wall-breaking secrets left hidden in games by the developers). Any one have any cool stories/can relate to this?
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Being able to understand family and personal names was like that for me. I had an epiphany one day that one of my favorite authors’ name (緑川ゆき) meant “green river, snow”, and it blew my mind. I’d been memorizing Japanese names my whole life as just a bundle of sounds, but suddenly they made sense and had all these wholesome meanings.
When you watch anime, you see how politeness levels influence characterization and character interactions in ways that usually aren’t communicated in English subtitles or dubs.
If you want to make video game analogies, I think it’s often more like “grinding” than “finding an Easter egg” but you do find them at times.
I was a big Rammstein fan as a teenager, and when I later learnt German and listened to them again, I was totally amped by how this previously locked-away world of meaning had opened up. But also kinda horrified by what I had been singing along to.
I occasionally come across vocab terms which I just find interesting. Sometimes they’re yojijukugo which just paint a neat picture (I remember reading 弱肉強食 in a manga, which was a funny contrast to the generally cute setting), sometimes it’s a loanword that snuck in before English became the place to steal vocab (ブラウン管 for a CRT screen), and sometimes it’s a vocab term that’s an idiom from some cultural story (油断, potentially from [this story](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B2%B9%E6%96%AD#Etymology)).
Understanding puns for the first time is the best for me.
I tried reading the Japanese version of *Black Jack* once, and there’s a story where a high school student is totally obsessed with visiting a pond and raising a carp there. It gets to the point where the kid is more concerned with the fish than with other people.
Black Jack sees the kid feeding and sweet-talking the carp, and he remarks “こいびとかな？”
It’s a terrible joke, but I was so excited to actually understand it.
For me, learning Japanese is not kinda like an Easter Egg, it’s exactly like it: I only do it once a year, and when I do it, I think of it as a symbol for the resurrection of Christ.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a trap. Sometimes I find myself “reading” where I’m essentially just scanning the text for unknown words, and I have to snap myself out of it.
One thing I found rather odd is when talking about movement through time. The past is referenced with the adjectives used for something ahead of you, whereas the future is referred to with those for something behind you, the opposite of how it is in English. I remember hearing that Mandarin is the same way.
Weird that a Japanese person wouldn’t immediately get the joke in the title “Back To The Future”.
It took me a while for it to click that 撮影 is pronounced satsuei. I knew the meaning of both the written form and the spoken form and just… hadn’t connected them. That has happened a fair bit for me because of the haphazard way I’ve learned.
Not so much Easter Egg, but I’m surprised how more indirect language like Japanese has a huge amount of explicit nuances. I’m talking about things like using が instead of は, or forms like の、という, sentence ending particles like わ、よ and so on. Even if you look at reasoning, then there are で、から、もの and a lot of variations like のだから、ものだから and so on. Sometimes it says a lot about the character/person, their views on situation and what exactly they try to say. It’s not even context and knowledge about the speaker, but purely the sentence itself directly delivers that.
I liked learning “少し” is the origin of “skosh” as in “a little bit”. “Just a skosh please.” Is something you’d say in Scotland (possibly England too).
Also, a bit unrelated but I like to think the character for cat (neko) “猫” is a picture of a cat leaning up to knock a container off of the table. 🤣
Edit: I would pronounce it either “skoush” or “skoosh”.
My most recent discovery was learning 力士 and then connecting it to the wrestler Rikishi from way back in the day
i kind of feel that way when I’m learning kanji and then i encounter it later somewhere and i read it effortlessly without thinking about it and i just get the feeling like “holy shit i can read that!!”
also with anything i listen to, when the words i learned start becoming recognisable and i can automatically pick them out in what’s being said, then suddenly i’m hearing it everywhere. like there’s this song I’ve been listening to for months and today the word 一生懸命(いっしょうけんめい) jumped out at me when previously it was just blurred into the rest of the lyrics.
it’s a very nice feeling when the efforts of your studies show themselves especially when i doubt i’m truly retaining anything with my methods 😅
I now find a lot of French sayings English-speaking people use pretentious because they could just say them in English. Someone has a certain *je ne sais quoi* (I don’t know what), please do it *tout d’suite*(right away), *crème brûlée* is just burnt cream. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it, I just don’t get why people splash in something a lot of people don’t understand unless they’re trying to seem smart.
Yes. I was in the alcohol aisle and admiring the pretty green color of….. Midori!
Yes, that’s a great way to explain it! It is a bit like grinding when doing reviews and such, but then you read the sentence, finish the dungeon, and get your loot or discover the Easter egg and that’s the understanding of the sentence. I cheer myself on sometimes out loud, like “yes! I got it! I knew what it meant! Wow what a sentence, I love how that’s phrased or structured! Dang look at me extracting meaning from these silly scribbles!” Or like “oh that’s how that kanji is used, oh it can combine with that other kanji and means this! That makes sense! So this other word must mean…. oh dang I’m right!”
I’m playing through a VN game thing called the nonary games (bundle) 999 9 doors, 9 hours, 9 people, or something like that. It was originally for DS, so the pc port has two modes that were originally on each screen on the DS. One is adventure mode and the other is novel mode with the only real difference being there’s like additional narration text in novel mode, so adventure is voiced lines or what people say to each other, and novel mode has all that and naration or exposition or additional details about the scenes or the people or the actions. I really like it though, and I was super intimidated by books and large text passages.
But it’s so cool cause I’m learning like so many words and phrases you’d never learn by let’s say watching anime, because the expositional text and the narrators descriptions are so different. Like there was a sentence like “he said while his lips flapped about, dripping sweat onto his shoulder.” Or something like that but those kinds of phrases describing how someone said something, how they moved, where they looked, what happened as this was happening or right before it. Idk I’m finding myself really really enjoying learning those words and reading the exposition and it also feels way easier than I thought it would, so I’m more confident to start I guess maybe web novels or real novels after I finish literally anything that I’ve started.
Oh the question, yeah there’s a scene in kotaro lives alone where he’s confused about a bathhouse and a battlefield I think because of pitch accent. That felt like an Easter egg. And gintama has a lot. Specially with balls 金玉 and a fake gintoki called kintoki because he’s golden and better than silver.
The moment you realize hedgehog in Japanese is “needle mouse”.
I love discovering the easter eggs in names.
Hitori bocchi
Tadano hitohito
And more
I just found an Easter egg of my own and had to share:
尖る(とがる): to taper to a point
The kanji is the ‘big’ radical on the bottom with the ‘small’ radical on top, which is literally what a sharp point is.
This is probably super obvious to some folks, but I was super excited when it actually clicked haha
I was really happy when I figured out the meaning of the artist name 96Neko
Ku Ro Neko put it together black cat. Really fucking clever IMO.
200 upvotes for a person realizing that reading something tells you what it’s about? You guys sure do set the bar awfully low for yourselves
I can’t think of a better one right now but when I first saw 苦手意識 I laughed pretty hard.
This is the most fun thing about studying kanji. It is full of little “huh” moments.
Yesterday I learned that the two kanji that spell Diplomacy are Outside (gai) + Mix (kou). That’s such a funny way to describe what diplomacy is.
I like to learn naughty words, it’s funny to get effected by the symbols lol
Like 裸 is suddenly 興奮
Omg the whole culture is an Easter egg hunt. Why shoji screens? Earthquakes. Hmm not much insulation with paper walls. Onsen! It just goes on and on..
… you call it “Easter eggs”. I call it, ‘unimaginative’ or ‘being too literal’. Which actually may not be a bad thing in the end.
Besides how much mangaka love their puns, there’s a lot of kanji words that are a case of ‘oh, so you’re being literal about it’s name’. For example, one that I can never undo now is what Japan’s rainy season. For context: at the end of the rainy season, plum trees would traditionally bear their fruit. So although the rainy season is always called つゆ、the characters for it are 梅雨… Or ‘plum rain’. Another is the famous きもの、which when written in kanji is 着物, or ‘wear thing’ (thing you wear).
So it’s not so much Easter Eggs as it is, ‘Wow, the Japanese are terribly uncreative with what they call things’
When you start understanding jokes and puns, it’s like a revelation! Also you start to pick up on subtle things such as certain words true meanings. I know it’s a silly example, but for the example of ヤリチン. I knew it carried the meaning of a fuckboy, but when I learned it, I just thought it was a normal word. Then I realized it comes from やりたい and ちんちん.
Go out drinking with a group of older Japanese guys, and let’s just say you will learn a lot of things that you’ll never see in a textbook..
One thing that always amuses me is seeing Japanese words that have been borrowed into English used in a different way in Japanese. I was reading about a Shinto temple that had a wall covered in emoji, which sounded really tacky until I discovered that emoji (絵文字) can also refer to pictographs.
A couple days ago I learned the kanji for Japan, and it uses 日本, which individually means sun and book. I’m not sure why, but I think that’s really cool!
I was in my early 20’s when I realized that uzumaki naruto’s name is based off of narutomaki. And that’s also why he likes ramen.
Understanding a pun is such a fun thing for me, especially because I already love puns and dad jokes lol. One time I was watching a en vtuber and they made a pun and I was so smug in my head because I knew what it meant haha.
Also the name Natsuiro Matsuri clicking in my head as Summer-colored Festival was a big brain moment for me.
I remember being excited when I finally understood the pun in the title of 1Q84. It did take me much longer than it should have to get that, though.
My experiences are small but I had this happen twice. I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender for the first time and when Aang met his winged lemur, he saw him with peaches and was like “Oh! I’ll call you Momo!” That was just a neat little detail to me and I brought it up with just about everyone.
The second was realizing that the word for chicken, niwatori, is essentially “garden bird” which I find very funny (cause it’s true).
When I watched Haikyuu, one of the opening songs was “Hikariare” and I immediately understood that it means “Let there be light” and I couldn’t believe I was able to understand it. It felt like a big achievement lol
Not an Easter Egg but here’s a nice thing that Japanese has in common with Italian, more specifically from Piemonte’s dialect (Piemonte, or Piedmont, is a region situated in the North West of Italy).
When in Japanese we end a sentence with 「ね」
Ex. 面白いですね。
In my dialect we do the exact same, using “neh” (same pronunciation and meaning)
Ex. Interessante, neh? = “interesting, isn’t it?”
(There could be variations such as “eh” or it could be the full thing “non è vero?” = “isn’t it?”)
Same situation with 「じゃあ」
Ex. じゃあ、行きましょう。
In my dialect: じゃあ becomes “ciá (pronounced as “cha”) which is very similar and, again, it has the same meaning.
Ex. Ciá, andiamo. = “Okay, let’s go”
And I think this is extremely interesting, other than funny (definitely 面白い…ね?)
Oh this is particularly relevant to Japanese.
Absolutely. I’m constantly stunned by the revelations. Biggest one so far was the Midwestern “just a skosh” coming from 少し.
yes!
I have reverse Easter eggs when I read something in katakana and don’t get it and then literally sound it out and know what it is feeling like an ass. 😅
Low-key ruins some anime/manga series for me sometimes. Mainly because you realize that the author just named the characters like first son, second son, fourth daughter, fifth daughter, purple, blue, whatever. Like they just got lazy with the names.
Yes! Today I learned what パクパク is and made the connection to Pac-Man lol.
“OHHHH he’s PAKU(PAKU) Man! Ohhhhhh!”
I’m not 100% sure this is the real deal, but I figured out that those Tamagotchi toys is kind of like a pun. 卵(たまご) is egg, which is the shape of the toy, and 友達(ともだち) is friend. So it’s like egg-friend. I felt pretty smart when I figured that out 😅
Edit: I am wrong about this. I was pretty close to the real meaning though…
For me, it’s the feeling that I have access to a whole world of content that many don’t normally get to see, and I can parse that world and it’s details out for those that wouldn’t normally have access. It’s an incredibly rewarding feeling, and it’s why translation is special to me. What good is the treasure if you don’t share it?
I have gamer brain, so a lot of things translate to game mechanic stuff. I speedran learning kana, and I do like thinking about other language learning stuff in videogane terms. it helps with learning
Yeah lol, today I was looking at the Zojirushi electric kettle in my office and noticed the little elephant logo and it suddenly clicked, 象印！
Omg yes I’ve had so many lately now that I’m learning more common words. My favorite is when i realize my friends have Japanese names or they gave their pets Japanese names. One of my bffs cats name is 月 and so is another friend of mine. One of my other friends named her cat そら. And then i realized my old Japanese friends name is 秋. I always thought aki sounded cute but i never asked what it meant. Autumn.
Cute realizations