A blade above the heart = "endure" or "spy." To endure as a spy, you must be willing to endure even a blade against your heart.As I just said, this means "endure conceal spy" and is itself made up of two kanji parts: Yep, that the kanji characters for NINJA!įollow this progression and see if you can remember it: A simple example is 大 dai which means "big" or "great" and 好き suki which means "like." if you had never heard of daisuki, you can imagine the two kanji in your head and get a sense of the meaning: "big like" or "love." Sometimes, you can imagine the kanji for the sounds you hear and deduce the meaning of a new word. In some cases, by thinking in kanji, you can understand vocabulary words you have never heard. In some cases, Japanese people will air-draw kanji to illustrate which homophone they mean-and this is real conversational Japanese. Kanji makes it clear what the intended meaning is. 3) Japanese has a limited number of sounds.īecause of this, there are a remarkable number of homophones, words that are pronounced the same but have a different meaning. Kanji helps break that up while instantly conveying meaning. With no spaces between words, long texts only in hiragana is a challenge. This makes skimming text easier in Japanese-if you know kanji. 2) The primary function of kanji is to convey meaning at a glance. Signs, menus, newspapers, novels, and TV shows all have kanji in your face. It is also written, and if you have ever been to Japan, kanji is written everywhere. 1) Japanese isn't just spoken or heard while watching Anime. Well, yes, but you will be severely hampered. A theoretical model is proposed as one way of conceptualizing various approaches to cultural translation in music.Before we go any further, why even bother with kanji? It is certainly the most challenging part of learning Japanese, and can't people just concentrate on conversational Japanese? Artistic choices to (or not to) explicitly aim for this mode of cultural translation are routinely made by contemporary musicians active in hybrid genres, and analysis of specific examples from such ensembles as the Helsinki Koto Ensemble, Yoshida Brothers, Moscow Pan-Asian Ensemble, and Tokyo Brass Style illustrate how cultural translation can be either conscious or unconscious, and deliberately highlighted or shunted in such music projects. While much has already been theorized regarding how foreign musical genres may be transplanted, adopted and fused with indigenous traditions, the notion of cultural translation may most accurately fit the specific objective of intentionally representing significant aspects of one musical tradition through the techniques of another distinct tradition. Music, like language, qualifies as a field in which “ideological horizons of homogeneity have been conceptualized,” and postcolonialist scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy have acknowledged its critical role as an emblem of identity within the very sites of hybridity that particularly interest scholars of cultural translation. Explores various ways that intercultural analyses of musical meanings may offer theoretical insights applicable to the broader field of cultural translation.
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