The Return of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook: Microsoft Edition
May 13th, 2009 | View Comments
The last Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook (#7) ended rather abruptly. To make a long story short, my dad (and Peter‘s dad) passed away the day after that post went live, after a long illness. Blogging fell to the bottom of my priority list. But now I’m back and ready to learn some more “useful travel phrases”!
So, where were we?
“My computer is rebooting on its own again!”
我的電腦又自己重新啟動了!
Wo3 de dian4 nao3 you4 zi4 ji3 chong2 xin1 qi3 dong4 le5!
コンピューターが勝手に再起動しました。
Konpyuta ga katte ni saikidō shimashita.
The Japanese love to borrow words from other languages, especially English. They even have katakana, an entirely different writing system just for borrowed English words (and other non-Chinese borrowed words…and sound effects). Katakana is more boxy than hiragana, the writing system for actual Japanese words.
For comparison:
| Romaji | a | i | u | e | o | ka | ki | ku | ke | ko |
| Hiragana | あ | い | う | え | お | か | き | く | け | こ |
| Katakana | ア | イ | ウ | エ | オ | カ | キ | ク | ケ | コ |
Sounding out the first stretch of katakana in the Japanese, コンピューター gets you konpyuta, which is obviously “computer”.
In Chinese, we’re not so lucky. Computer is 電腦 or literally “electric brain”.
At least the Chinese grammar is fairly straightforward (though the literal translation sounds a bit redundant): 我的 = “my”, 電腦 = “computer”, 又 = “again”, 自己 = “self”, 重新 = “start over”, 啟動 = “start up”, 了 = marker to indicate an action is completed.
As usual, the Japanese grammar ties a native English speaker into knots: コンピューター = “computer”, が = object marker, 勝手 = “arbitrary”, に = adverb marker, 再起動しました = “rebooted” (literally “reboot did”). It’s implied that you’re talking about your computer. If you needed to emphasize that it’s your computer, you could add 私の (watashi no) at the beginning of the sentence.
It’s worth mentioning that 起動 (kidō), the Japanese for “boot up” is also perfectly acceptable Chinese. Using 起動 instead of 啟動 in the above sentence is just fine and it’s even pronounced the same (qi3 dong4): 我的電腦又自己重新起動了. Also note the similarity in pronunciation between Japanese and Chinese.
That (finally) concludes the Microsoft edition of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook. We’ll be back to Mondays at noon for new installments!
Yvonne posted this on May 13th, 2009 @ 7:39pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "The Return of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook: Microsoft Edition"
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American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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