Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with japanese and characters

english, please...

crazylegs — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 05:56:00 -0800

Could you read some Japanese (or possibly Chinese?) characters for me? All I know about these books is in the picture linked below. I think they have something to do with art or architecture. I think the characters are Japanese. I obviously don't read Japanese or Chinese. Can you tell me what the characters on the spines say? Thanks!

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fPZZucIaN2w/UBkmsHE3Z_I/AAAAAAAAAWA/hEin91xjy7w/s1600/japanese+books.jpg

"Eat a bag of dicks" on my principal's back? Please?

phunniemee — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 12:28:50 -0800

Do you know Japanese? Do you not know Japanese? What does my shirt say? (p.s. It's likely not Japanese.) Many years ago, when I was in first or second grade, one of the upper grades in my (PK-12) school put on fundraiser. One of the boys in the class (I'm guessing he was a junior, since they do the most fundraisers for prom, not that it really matters) drew up a neat little design, and they sold t-shirts to the rest of the school.

Since one of the "big kids" had made them, they were the coolest things ever, so everyone in my class got one. I got one. Pretty much everyone in the entire school got one. Even the admins.

I have long hoped (pretty much from the day I got it) that the shirt secretly says something obscene, and that this kid got a kick out of seeing everyone at this conservative little private school walking around with something horribly offensive plastered on their back. I really hope that's true.

Unfortunately, it's probably just gibberish.

So...any ideas?

Translation help?

ztdavis — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:37:59 -0800

What is my new used bike from the '70s is trying to tell me (translation help please)? Picture here of the characters.

Please help me sort my vocabulary list in Excel!

Vorteks — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:34:08 -0800

Complicated Excel formula question involving text-search and Japanese characters. Can you help? I have two spreadsheets.

Spreadsheet A contains a list of Japanese vocabulary words I need to learn for the JLPT this year. Spreadsheet B contains a list of Japanese characters in one column along with the characters "Heisig number" (an ordinal number indicating where that character appears in the book "Remembering The Kanji" by James Heisig).

I want to add a column to Spreadsheet A that will contain the highest Heisig number among the characters that make up the vocabulary word. The purpose of this is to sort the words in Spreadsheet A so that I can memorize only the words that can be written using the Kanji I've learned so far.

Confused? Here's an example: Spreadsheet A, cell 57A contains the word "朝寝坊". Using Spreadsheet B to looking up the 3 characters in that word, I find the Heisig number for 朝 is 52, 寝 is 1150, and 坊 is 492. 1150 is the highest of those 3 numbers, so I'd like Spreadsheet A, cell 57B to read "1150". Is there a way to set up a formula to do this? I've never pushed Excel this far before.

Thank you in advance, Hive Mind!

Quick and dirty translation?

onshi — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:21:27 -0800

What does the Japanese writing on these two packages mean (in English)?