Tuesday, September 05
Just unwinding with some Ichigo Mashimaro after a hard day of mmph mph mmmph mph.*
Steven wrote:
The theme song to Ichigo Mashimaro ("Strawberry Marshmallow") begins, "You mustn't call us cute!"But the fansub I have** has the line as "something like cuteness cannot be expressed in words".
Which I find interesting, because the distinction is subtle but significant. No way is my Japanese good enough to tell which one is more accurate - after all this time I'm still at the pick-up-words-and-occasional-phrases level - so I'll throw this one to the peanut gallery... If I still have a peanut gallery after my enforced absence of late.
kawaii nante sonna koto iccha dame desu says the subtitle.
Well, I can see the "cute" part anyway. And "nante", "sonna", "dame", and of course "desu" are familiar enough. But I looked up "iccha" and it doesn't even seem to be a word.
Update: Strawberry Pocky! Yeah!
* Which is made even more enjoyable by the fact that I am not allowed to talk about it.
** I am years behind in watching my fansubs. I keep right on downloading them, though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:09 AM
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On the R1 release it says: "kawaii nante sonna koto ittcha dame desu"
But I can't find "ittcha" in the dictionary either. Probably it's a contraction of some kind.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, September 05 2006 12:36 PM (+rSRq)
kawaii nante sonna koto (wo) itte wa dame desu.
or somewhat literally:
"You musn't say something like 'they're cute'"!
Posted by: yukiusagi at Tuesday, September 05 2006 01:18 PM (gIFA/)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, September 05 2006 01:43 PM (+rSRq)
Oh, and if I remember correctly, the fansubs I watched had a proper translation for this line.
Posted by: Jeff Lawson at Tuesday, September 05 2006 02:54 PM (OqFkA)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 05 2006 04:06 PM (oFrbW)
I know kawaii of course, and I have a general idea of how desu is used - though certainly not all the ways it can be used. Nante I've sort of grokked from context. Sonna similarly, but I don't have a firm grasp on it.
Itte I'm sure I've heard, but I certainly didn't know what it meant. And koto not at all. So the sentence as a whole was opaque to me.
I watched the first four or five episodes of the new Pretty Sammy show untranslated and (I think) followed most of it, but that of course is a combination of knowing the tropes and the Sasami/Washuu/Ryo-ohki/Mihoshi backstory (even though they've mangled it) more than my pre-schooler vocabulary.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 05 2006 07:15 PM (FRalS)
Posted by: Kristopher at Tuesday, September 05 2006 07:52 PM (1vIml)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, September 06 2006 12:12 AM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 06 2006 12:52 AM (FRalS)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, September 06 2006 03:26 AM (6YRS5)
Posted by: Kristopher at Wednesday, September 06 2006 10:17 AM (O5Ju8)
Koto (and sometimes just no) is a nominalizer.
For example, if I say "Nihongo wo hanasu koto ga suki desu," koto converts the sentence "nihongo wo hanasu" into a noun. It turns the idea of "speaking Japanese" into a noun that you can then use to say, "I like speaking Japanese."
No is far more common in colloquial speech (in my experience anyway) and you'll hear it tagged onto the end of verbs all the time. It functions in just the same way. I could say, "Nihongo wo hanasu no ga suki desu" and still mean the same thing.
Itte is the gerund of iu, "to say." There's a somewhat convoluted set of rules on how to conjugate to the gerund, but most of my teachers just called it the te-form.
Posted by: Will at Wednesday, September 06 2006 11:19 AM (SOx9v)
The funny thing is, as far as colloquialisms go, "ittcha" is common enough. I'm surprised the translator didn't pick up on it. Or, rather, I wonder how they got got something complicated like "cannot be expressed in words" out of something so simple.
Posted by: Jeff Lawson at Wednesday, September 06 2006 12:54 PM (OqFkA)
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