(no subject)

[which_chick]

I got a postcard from the brother and his wife. They're in France, Tours specifically. That's where the postcard is from.



Here's the message part of the postcard:


Just in case you're not up on your languages, the postcard is not in french. That's handwritten Japanese. It is perhaps slightly optimistic of my brother and his wife to think that I can actually read a postcard written in Japanese, but I'm giving it ye olde college try. Let's look at it in smaller doses so that they are less intimidating.



This (above) is the salutation. To Jessica:



It's hot here.



But we are still going to cafes because we like them. I'm a little foggy on the next sentence because I'm too stupid to be able to read that initial kanji. I sux0r. It doesn't look like any that I know and my radical lookup skills are not clearing the fog. I got nowhere with it. (bugarup? not_your_real? Is there anyone in the studio audience who can give me a leg up, here?) Picking up with 大変だったね。 ..., that was(?) really horrible, y'know. (The horribleness refers to the first half of that sentence, the part I can't read. The hirigana between the two are probably から though that's the weirdest looking か I've seen in a while. It does match the が in 行くのが on the previous line, though. から is usually (because) or (since). The next kanji is probably 落ちる conjugated to an "ing" noun sort of a thing.. It means to fail, like an exam.)



Roy bought a red pair of shoes. Welp, laterz.



Roy & Sarah

Comments

[cassandramorgan.livejournal.com]

So..umm...why'd they write in Japanese when they're in France? Unless maybe they're pretending they're in Japan....and maybe that's what the first part of that sentence says ^_^

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

They wrote in Japanese (or, a thousand times more likely, FOUND someone to write for them in Japanese) because I kind of can read it a little and they know that. It's sort of a fun thing for them to do.

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

I was not aware that you had siblings who were up on Japanese. Pity you can't get their help translating your smut manga.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

No, no. Roy and Sarah do not speak Japanese. Sarah speaks a fair amount of French. Roy has (at this point) some French and a bit of high school Spanish. I expect that what happened is that they found someone who did have enough Japanese to write to me on their behalf.

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

For that mystery kanji, try looking at the kanji for horse. If you're using JWPce, it's the first of the 10 stroke radicals. It's not a perfect match, and I sure can't figure out how to make it fit into the rest of your sentence. But someone who could do that to a か could probably also do awful things to a kanji.

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

"Horse" was the first thing I thought of. I know it by heart as one of the 10 or 12 things I learned from the Chinese Calligraphy book my parents bought me when I was an impressionable pre-teen.

I don't see where it's not an exact match, either. Looks like the real deal to me. Did they say they fell from a horse maybe? Or were they commiserating on a horse-falling-from incident you'd related to them? 落ちる can mean to fall down.

(Wow, love this multilingual cut-n-paste thing.)

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

That could be -- it's not an exact match for "horse" but it's close. (Horse, for the studio audience, looks like this: 馬)

However, if they were up to speed on me getting dumped from the IRH (which did happen here a couple of weeks ago), that would mean they were reading my LJ while they were on vacation in France. My prose is good, but I don't think it's that good...

[not-your-real.livejournal.com]

Two strokes down, three across, the hook thingie around the four little leg dots... I'm not seeing the difference. Maybe just cause I learned the calligraphic Chinese version before the printed Japanese version?

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

There isn't enough overlap on the three strokes across. That disturbs me. Also the top horizontal stroke projects on the left like 耳 instead of being flush like with 馬. For people not so anal as I am, it's probably okay to read that unreadable sentence as "Heard you fell off the horse -- that must have sucked." or similar.

*sigh*

No, I couldn't figure this out by myself. It doesn't LOOK like 馬 to me, at all. (This is probably why my literacy is still pretty pathetic.)

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

That "Welp, laterz" looks to me like f_T = 42. Are you sure this isn't a secret formula for French coffee?

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure. In better writing, it looks like this: では、またね. Probably I've done it a bit of a disservice translating it as Welp, laterz but not much of one.