Comments on: Kanji wear it?

Question: Kanji wear it?

tilde — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 22:53:26 -0800

Any idea what this says?

On a dark "ninja style" hoodie my young newbie martial arts enthusiast has fallen for. There is a stylized Japanese sun patch on it as well, so I'm assuming kanji ....

Mostly don't want to offend someone or look foolish with some crazy nonsensical thing; could say "eat Fruity Oatie Bars" for all I know. Knowledge is power. Thanks.

By: misozaki

misozaki — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 22:59:13 -0800

Ninja!

By: Nomyte

Nomyte — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:01:15 -0800

Confirming what misozaki wrote.

By: misozaki

misozaki — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:02:35 -0800

But the "nin" is wrong. It should look like this: 忍

By: tilde

tilde — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:02:55 -0800

You guys rock. Can you break down the two characters specifically? Figure kiddo can expand a few horizons ...

By: misozaki

misozaki — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:09:44 -0800

忍 is "nin" and 者 is "ja." The character for nin means stealth, to hide, to endure etc., and the ja means person.

By: tilde

tilde — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:22:44 -0800

Coolness! I'm curious as to why the nin is wrong or how - is it like homonymic-almost like the English calender/calendar or homonymic like your/you're to/too/two or more "typo" messy mistake like sloppy cursive hand writing? Or likely someone just got all artsy with "nin", not realizing how far their alteration went?

By: MCMikeNamara

MCMikeNamara — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 23:53:00 -0800

The latter I'd say...probably sloppy artistic license by the designer.

As a Japanese student, I would pretend that I was doing the same thing when it was just ignorance usually ;)

By: paperback version

paperback version — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:47:08 -0800

It's a weird error. Not a question of sloppiness (the character is otherwise well-formed and very standard-looking) and not really an artistic thing. The "how" it's wrong is that there's an elongated dot in the top left when there should instead be a short line going through the vertical stroke; the result is a character that doesn't exist. The elongated dot is a distinct element of some kanji (as you can see, it appears in other parts of this one) and putting one instead of that short line really isn't the sort of thing you'd do to be "artsy."

Hard to draw parallels in English but imagine if there was some very standard Helvetica and then all of a sudden the lowercase "h" was dotted as you would a lowercase "i" or "j."

By: paperback version

paperback version — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:02:36 -0800

To expand on my answer a bit: it's not like someone typing "breaf" when they meant "bread" -- "breaf" may not exist as a word but it's still pronouncable. When you mis-write a kanji character and create one that doesn't exist, it cannot be pronounced. If it's close enough, most people will get the gist and be able to understand what it's supposed to be -- but it can't be said aloud "incorrectly" like "breaf" can.

By: C^3

C^3 — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:18:30 -0800

It's not that the character is "wrong," that's actually the Chinese way of writing the character.

Citation.

By: msittig

msittig — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:21:01 -0800

Misozaki: I've got Chinese fonts installed on my computer, and the character you typed is showing exactly how it is printed on the hoodie. So yeah, what C^3 said.

By: misozaki

misozaki — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 02:31:31 -0800

Oh, wow, I had no idea! Sorry about that, carry on.