The Japanese language is one of the most indirect languages in the world. There are the obvious examples of this, such as when some customers try to enter a busy restaurant without a reservation and the staff say 難しいですね (”this is tricky…”) instead of simply telling them that there are no seats. However, I've noticed that Japanese’s indirectness may go much deeper than simple euphemism.
Japanese seems to come built-in with ways of avoiding directly addressing your conversation partner.
The Japanese way of expressing things often involves voicing your internal monologue, which means people will say things ostensibly to themselves, even though what they really want is to communicate to the other person. When I first noticed it, I thought it was a bit similar to how some (western) cartoons occasionally handle exposition by having a character mutter something to themselves so that the audience can hear. This can be seen in the following extremely common forms of expression:
うま!Literal translation: “Delicious!” Semantic translation: “Wow, this is really good”
怖い!Literal translation: “Scary!” Semantic translation: “I’m scared!” or “This place is giving me the creeps”
It could be argued that these single word exclamations may not always be “talking to yourself”. But imo more often than not, they are spoken with the vibe of “I felt this adjective so strongly that the word just slipped straight through my internal monologue and out of my mouth”.
雨降るかな? Literal translation: “Hmm, will it rain or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if it’s gonna rain.”
今夜来るかな? Literal translation: “Hmm, will [they] come tonight or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if they’ll come tonight.”
Compared to the adjective examples, this is less ambiguous. There’s no direct translation for the verb “to wonder” in Japanese - you just wonder aloud! The literal translations sound funny because they only make sense if the speaker is talking to themself.
あそこにあったんだ!(context: the listener has just shown the speaker something they were looking for) Literal translation: “There it is!” Semantic translation: “There it is!”
In this example, the literal and semantic translations are the same, because this is a case of talking to yourself in English! If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to say “there it is” when the person you’re talking to clearly already knows that’s where “it” is. Instead, the phrase serves to convey satisfaction and surprise.
まだ20歳なんだ!(context: the speaker has just found out from the listener that a friend of theirs is younger than they expected) Literal translation: “[She’s] only 20!” Semantic translation: “She’s only 20? That explains so much!”
In this example, んだ is used to mark the sentence as an explanation of something. The listener already knew the friend was only 20, so the aim of the sentence is not to convey new information, it’s to show that some sort of internal reasoning is happening within the speaker’s mind.
In the immortal words of Carly Rae Jepsen:
🎶 Do you talk to me, when you're talking to yourself? 🎶
For every Japanese speaker, the answer is yes!
reasons to write fanfiction (I'll start):
share a cool scene that popped into your head
evoke a particular emotion the canon makes you feel
song made you think of a character or idea from canon
make people feel the same way about a character you do
make dolls kiss for fun
explore ideas the canon hints at but doesn't do anything with
traumatize characters and make them suffer
coddle characters and let them rest
had an insane idea for a crack ship and now everyone needs to know
the author of the canon was wrong and must be fixed
use familiar characters to explore your own ideas and plotlines
canon is too short and you need to wallow in the universe of the story
“why isn’t there any fic about (x)?” there can be a fic that is precisely about what you want to read. just start writing that fic for yourself.
“but I’m not a writer” every writer has had their first time writing. most writers start with writing something they want to read. your work doesn’t have to be perfect, because having 1 fic that is precisely about what you want to read, even if it’s not perfect, is still better than having 0 fics about what you want to read.
Why are some people so married to textbooks when it comes to language learning how do they think people learned languages before the invention of writing
Tumblr gifmakers are better than $1mil worth of marketing. I’ll see endless ads for a show and be like meh but I’ll see one good gifset and suddenly I’m on s2 ep10 finding blorbo from my gifs
Marsha P. Johnson (August 24, 1945 – July 6, 1992) was a trans activist, sex worker, drag queen, performer and survivor. Marsha went by “Black Marsha” before settling on Marsha P. Johnson. The “P” stood for “Pay It No Mind,” which is what Marsha would say sarcastically in response to questions about her gender. In connection with sex work, Johnson claimed to have been arrested over 100 times, and was also shot once in the late-1970s. She was a prominent figure in the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and was one of the first drag queens to go to the Stonewall Inn after they began allowing women and drag queens inside. It was previously a bar for only gay men.
Following the Stonewall uprising, Johnson joined the Gay Liberation Front and participated in the first Christopher Street Liberation Pride rally on the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion in June 1970. One of Johnson’s most notable direct actions occurred in August 1970, staging a sit-in protest at Weinstein Hall at New York University alongside fellow GLF members after administrators canceled a dance when they found out was sponsored by gay organizations.
Shortly after that, along with Sylvia Rivera, she established the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970 which was a group committed to supporting transgender youth experiencing homelessness in New York City. The two of them became a visible presence at gay liberation marches and other radical political actions. In 1973, Johnson and Rivera were banned from participating in the gay pride parade by the gay and lesbian committee who were administering the event stating they “weren’t gonna allow drag queens” at their marches claiming they were “giving them a bad name”. Their response was to march defiantly ahead of the parade. During a gay rights rally at New York City Hall in the early ‘70s, a reporter asked Johnson why the group was demonstrating, Johnson shouted into the microphone, “Darling, I want my gay rights now!”
In 1974, Marsha was photographed by Andy Warhol in a series called ‘Ladies and Gentleman’ where Andy took Polaroid photos of drag queens (photos above).
Susan Stryker, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona said, “Marsha P. Johnson could be perceived as the most marginalized of people – black, queer, gender-nonconforming, poor.” Still, Stryker noted, “You might expect a person in such a position to be fragile, brutalized, beaten down. Instead, Marsha had this joie de vivre, a capacity to find joy in a world of suffering. She channeled it into political action, and did it with a kind of fierceness, grace, and whimsy, with a loopy, absurdist reaction to it all.”
Marsha’s advocacy and contributions to the LGBTQ+ community are an important part of our history and should be celebrated. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both key figures in the gay liberation movement, will be honored with a permanent installation in Greenwich Village which should be completed by 2021.
ppl talk about the difficulty of writing characters smarter than yourself, but the real challenge is writing a character who is funnier than you are
the final trial forced agatha to accept that nicky's death was never rio's fault. sometimes, boys die. agatha never would have kissed rio, showing that she chooses death, without first realizing that.
now that agatha is a ghost, which we know rio will despise, it sets them up for more deliciously antagonistic interactions BUT it also sets them up for healthier interactions than they've had in centuries. when we see them again, their interactions will likely take on a lighter, more playful tone than anything we've seen so far.
because agatha no longer blames rio, and rio was able to take agatha willingly instead of giving her 'special treatment' that would reveal its own cost sooner or later, they're now standing on more equal footing with one another and each is able to see the other more clearly. of course they still have centuries of emotional avoidance (mostly on agatha's part) to sift through, but their main problem was agatha blaming rio for something rio couldn't help, and rio trying to protect agatha from loss by bending the rules for her but really only delaying the inevitable.
agatha needed to accept that rio's role is indiscriminate, and rio needed to accept that agatha is mortal and therefore subject to the same natural laws as any other human. this new level of mutual acceptance brings down a HUGE emotional barrier to their eventual reconciliation, and is a damn good development for agatha's show to conclude with.
toxic yuri soulmates who will always find their way back to each other as their shared love forces them to slowly let go of the beliefs that drive them apart and become less toxic brain go brrrrrrrrrr🤯