Robot

25th of Jul, 2006ce* in: illustration

Been such a long time since I drew anything for myself, purely for the fun of it! I redesigned my Japanese logo (bottom right), using some rules for writing kanji that I figured out when looking at a design, here in the tokyo metro. After this I plan to do more, maybe not robots but certainly in the same style.

how to say “I”.

16th of Jul, 2006ce* in: japan

In English, how many ways can we refer to ourselves?

I, my, me, one’s self, in person & one’s.

So in all that’s six ways. By far and wide “I” would be the most used. However some languages have a multitude of ways to refer to one’s self, and Japanese is by far the most confusing! Japanese has well over 11 ways of making self references:

01. 私「わたし」”watashi”. (formal, female japanese)
02. 私「わたくし」”watakushi”. (formal)
03. 僕「ぼく」”boku”. (male japanese, childs japanese)
04. 俺「おれ」”ore”. (male japanese, from boss or elder)
05. 拙者「せっしゃ」”sesha”. (samurai)
06. わたれ “wataru”. (not sure about this one, may have it wrong, childs japanese)
07. 自分「じぶん」”jibun”. (one’s self, myself, in person)
08. うち “uchi”. (one’s self, formal)
09. 自身「じしん」”jishin”. (ones, formal)
10. 自ら「みずから」”mizukara”. (one’s self, in person)
11. 自我「じが」”jiga”. (one’s self)

I’m convinced there are a lot more out there, with regional dialects and so on.

my name in Japanese

11th of Jul, 2006ce* in: diary

recently I was told some nice kanji for my surname, which is “king”. So my full name is:

宝剣「ホーケン」(hawken) –> syllabic = ho-u-ke-n
金具「キング」(king) –> syllabic = ki-n-gu

The names don’t really sound like Japanese person or family names, but the phonetic meanings are interesting. Hawken means Treasure Sword and King means to have gold or Gold Implement.
A friend of mine is called Ben. Unfortunately this literally means “poo” in Japanese phonetics. However his surname is Thomas, in Japanese this is syllabically “tomasu”. So ben+to = bento!