What did you order or the post deliver? (Japanese N Gauge)

[katoftw]

I thought the set was brand new?

 

Not too large a miss though, and at the price it's still a steal.

 

I got a recent bigger miss on Yahoo Auction. An Odakyu 20000 RSE Asagiri without ANY couplers at all on ALL 7 carriages.... 

wow that is a big miss.  no couplers at all.

 

my set does look to appear new.  only the coupler is broken.  and only the little clip piece at the very bottom of the coupler.

 

i cannot complain i guess.  at 49% off new cost.  1 little hiccup can be tolerated.

Edited November 29, 2014 by katoftw

[Mudkip Orange]

Shimakaze and Keihan 800 are finally on their way :D

[Densha]

That's gonna be pleasant to your eyes!

[choco.miruku]

first time poster in this topic, ordered some stuff from both David and Nariichi san:

 

50th Anniversary Tokaido Shinkansen Series 0 2000

Chuo Line E233

Yamanote Line E231-500

14 series 700s Super Express Rainbow 

KOKI 104s and 106s

 

hard to resist not to purchase with year-end bonus and everything  ;)

[jakke01]

Just in from Nariichi-san (excellent service as usual !!)

 

Kato 10-317 KOKI 104 (2 car set)

Tomix 2741 KOKI 350000

Tomix 2778 KOKI 104

Kato 23-501 Container Type 20B (5 pcs)

Tomytec Testudou Musume Container collection volume 10 (2 x 20ft container)

 

Now just waiting for him to get Tomix 2226 DF200-100 back in stock !!!

 

Cheers,

 

Jan

[Richard W]

Just received my Micro Ace A6073 Kiha 47 Ibusuki no Tamatebako!  I'm so glad it was re-released and I didn't purchase at twice the price from the secondary market.  :-)

 

[railsquid]

指宿? Wow, that's another name from the "let's throw some random characters at this pronunciation" method of place naming... I'll squirrel that one away to annoy people with. Though I suppose the "Ibu" part is kind of close to "yubi" and "suki" to "juku".

[katoftw]

指宿? Wow, that's another name from the "let's throw some random characters at this pronunciation" method of place naming... I'll squirrel that one away to annoy people with. Though I suppose the "Ibu" part is kind of close to "yubi" and "suki" to "juku".

Are you serious?  Ibusuki is really pronouned Yubijuku?

 

The Ibusuki Treasure Box train is one of my favourite trains.  Pretty unique schemed train.

Edited December 4, 2014 by katoftw

[Kabutoni]

Ah, one of those instances again... Just like Sagami (相模) , where I live. The only combination of those two kanji 相 (sō, shō, ai) and 模 (mo, bo) which is different from all others.

 

Are you serious?  Ibusuki is really pronouned Yubijuku?

 

Welcome to the wonderful and magical world of the Japanese language. Kyūshū and Hokkaidō are full of these fun examples.

[railsquid]

Are you serious?  Ibusuki is really pronouned Yubijuku?

 

No, it's "Ibusuki", but not knowing that, if I'd had to make a guess, I'd have said "Yubijuku". But while I was thinking about it, it occurred maybe the derivation is not entirely random, possibly from the local dialect but I'm not at all familiar with that area.

Edited December 4, 2014 by railsquid

[railsquid]

Ah, one of those instances again... Just like Sagami (相模) , where I live. The only combination of those two kanji 相 (sō, shō, ai) and 模 (mo, bo) which is different from all others.

 

 

Welcome to the wonderful and magical world of the Japanese language. Kyūshū and Hokkaidō are full of these fun examples.

 

I gave up worrying about not knowing how to pronounce many things, especially names, when I realised even native speakers have no idea sometimes.

[Densha]

Welcome to the wonderful and magical world of the Japanese language. Kyūshū and Hokkaidō are full of these fun examples.

Not only in Kyushu and Hokkaido.

 

When Chinese characters were adapted in Japan around 1500 years ago, they initially used both Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese*) and Japanese pronunciation. The Chinese pronunciation (on-yomi; literally sound-reading) was based on what the Japanese thought they heard the Chinese saying and the Japanese pronunciation (kun-yomi) was based on the pronunciation of an existing Japanese word with the same meaning as the Chinese character. But because there were also lots of Japanese words that they couldn't attach to a single character, they used multiple Chinese characters to write down an existing Japanese word and thus using a pronunciation completely off from on-yomi and kun-yomi.

 

What I wrote above is actually a summary of how it originally was. Even though there are already tons of exceptions since Chinese characters were introduced, in the mean time a lot of other strange combinations and pronunciations were created that do often make absolutely no sense however you think about it. You just have to remember that certain kanji (= Chinese characters) have a certain meaning and pronunciation when they are used together to form a word.

 

*Example: 北京 (China's capital Beijing) is pronounced Beijing in Mandarin, but as Peking in Cantonese. In Japanese they adapted the Cantonese reading, so 北京 is pronounced as Pekin.

 

Bonus: To make things worse, while using the same combination of characters and thus having the same meaning, the pronunciation can actually differ depending on context and formalness. For example, 明日 (tomorrow) can be pronounced as ashita (informal), asu (formal) and myounichi (very formal), but it all means the same.

Edited December 4, 2014 by Densha

[Kabutoni]

At that, let's not go into the crazy fantasy kanji-readings you can find in manga. You know like this: 携帯怪物. A classic. You actually pronounce it in English.

[JR 500系]

That's interesting Densha! I'm ashamed at myself for being a Chinese!

 

Yap. The Chinese language is amazing, over tons and tons of different wordings and sounds. However, Chinese cannot be directly used as Japanese, although the Kanji used in Japanese has about the same meaning as Japanese, like 明日 is pronounced 'Ming Tian' in Chinese but Ashita in Japanese, but it has exactly the same meaning.  

 

Chinese usually have an added advantage when travelling to Japan as they can read off the Kanji and has about the same meaning, like 無料 is Free ~~ :)

[Densha]

Yes, of course, that's why I wrote "was based on what the Japanese thought they heard the Chinese saying". ;) The Japanese language has much fewer sounds than Chinese so they derived it rather than copied the pronunciations, just like they did with the European words they started copying hundreds of years later. I still find it cool hearing Japanese people using Dutch words all the time. :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_words_of_Dutch_origin)

 

And of course Chinese and Japanese are entirely different languages so there will be more exceptions than similarities. The only thing adapted were the characters and some sounds of those characters, but they changed so much over time that they are further apart than ever. People using traditional Chinese characters (mainly Hong Kong and Taiwan I believe) may have the best advantage though, because kanji are mainly based on traditional Chinese characters and not on modern simplified Chinese. (although, again they are exceptions) That said, the Japanese also 'invented' many kanji themselves for things the Chinese hadn't thought a character for yet.

[Densha]

At that, let's not go into the crazy fantasy kanji-readings you can find in manga. You know like this: 携帯怪物. A classic. You actually pronounce it in English.

Is it poketto monsutaa?

[JustBen]

i just got a tomix 6432 track cleaning car set :)

 

i'v already upgraded the cleaning car with a dcc controller

[kvp]

 

 

Example: 北京 (China's capital Beijing) is pronounced Beijing in Mandarin, but as Peking in Cantonese. In Japanese they adapted the Cantonese reading, so 北京 is pronounced as Pekin.

That's interesting, since in Hungarian it's pronunced as 'Peking'. I don't really know how we got that, but it seems like the popular non english pronunciation.

 

Bonus: To make things worse, while using the same combination of characters and thus having the same meaning, the pronunciation can actually differ depending on context and formalness. For example, 明日 (tomorrow) can be pronounced as ashita (informal), asu (formal) and myounichi (very formal), but it all means the same.

The kanji writing is not a symbolic writing system, it's like pictogramms. A sign with a train on it is pronunced differently by an English and a French person, but the meaning is the same. A very similar system is the international sign language, which can be used to translate between two languages, since its symbols are universal and not language specific. The fact that many Japanese words are pronounced similar to the Chinese version is actually the same process where the Japanese language borrows words from western languages, like English. This is not directly connected with the writing system, but happened around the same time, because of the Japanese-Chinese contact. A modern version of this seems to be how the latin R became part of the 'railway station' kanji. (actually the other part means something like 'horse' and depicts a horse including its head, body, legs and tail)

 

It's completly possible, but highly unlikely that a new japanese kanji will be accepted for an english word that contains the actual word written in english with latin letters, but this is how Japanese kanji was created. (the logical kanji character for the latin character 'A' itself would be 'A', unless it collides with an existing symbol)

[Kabutoni]

A modern version of this seems to be how the latin R became part of the 'railway station' kanji. (actually the other part means something like 'horse' and depicts a horse including its head, body, legs and tail)

 

Yeah, no. That's not how that character was formed. It's actually a simplified version of this character: 驛, which means horse relay station and can also be read as [umaya] or horse shop/stable. A place where you exchange horses on a long continuous journey. You're probably referring to this very wrong explanation: http://amaebi.net/archives/2226274.html

[railsquid]

Yeah, no. That's not how that character was formed. It's actually a simplified version of this character: 驛, which means horse relay station and can also be read as [umaya] or horse shop/stable. A place where you exchange horses on a long continuous journey. You're probably referring to this very wrong explanation: http://amaebi.net/archives/2226274.html

 

That picture is probably from one of those "remember Kanji through mnenomics" books... FWIW "驛" (or its Chinese-simplified equivalent) is not in widespread use in China, and certainly doesn't mean "(railway) station".

[railsquid]

That's interesting, since in Hungarian it's pronunced as 'Peking'. I don't really know how we got that, but it seems like the popular non english pronunciation.

 

The correct "Mandarin" Chinese pronunciation of 北京 in Hanyu Pinyin transliteration is "Běijīng". "Peking" originates from the earlier Wade-Giles romanization system, which IIRC actually used "k" to represent what in Hanyu Pinyin is represented as "j", which has confused things ever since, and for reasons beyond my knowledge seems to have influenced the Japanese pronunciation.

Edited December 6, 2014 by railsquid

[railsquid]

The kanji writing is not a symbolic writing system, it's like pictogramms.

 

It's a logographic writing system, which does contain some pictograms but the majority of characters are abstract combinations.

[Densha]

That's interesting, since in Hungarian it's pronunced as 'Peking'. I don't really know how we got that, but it seems like the popular non english pronunciation.

The correct "Mandarin" Chinese pronunciation of 北京 in Hanyu Pinyin transliteration is "Běijīng". "Peking" originates from the earlier Wade-Giles romanization system, which IIRC actually used "k" to represent what in Hanyu Pinyin is represented as "j", which has confused things ever since, and for reasons beyond my knowledge seems to have influenced the Japanese pronunciation.

It is so called in Dutch as well. I actually looked it up and (if we trust wikipedia) railsquid's theory is correct but misses one thing. 'Peking' is actually an old Chinese pronunciation now only used in southern dialects (including Cantonese). It also has to do with early European contact with the Canton region: when European traders about 400 years ago visited (southern) China they heard Peking and not Beijing so now that word is still used in European languages nowadays. Considering that Japan was trading with China already thousands of years ago it's no wonder that the Japanese pronunciation is based on the old Chinese pronunciation 'Peking'. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Beijing)

 

The kanji writing is not a symbolic writing system, it's like pictogramms. A sign with a train on it is pronunced differently by an English and a French person, but the meaning is the same. A very similar system is the international sign language, which can be used to translate between two languages, since its symbols are universal and not language specific. The fact that many Japanese words are pronounced similar to the Chinese version is actually the same process where the Japanese language borrows words from western languages, like English. This is not directly connected with the writing system, but happened around the same time, because of the Japanese-Chinese contact. A modern version of this seems to be how the latin R became part of the 'railway station' kanji. (actually the other part means something like 'horse' and depicts a horse including its head, body, legs and tail)

 

It's completly possible, but highly unlikely that a new japanese kanji will be accepted for an english word that contains the actual word written in english with latin letters, but this is how Japanese kanji was created. (the logical kanji character for the latin character 'A' itself would be 'A', unless it collides with an existing symbol)

Honestly said I don't know what you're trying to say with this, but at least it has nothing to do with the different pronunciation methods of kanji words I told about that you quoted. Different pronunciation methods only has to do with context in the Japanese language. That it uses either on-yomi, kun-yomi or random-yomi doesn't matter in this case.

 

 

What about making a Japanese language topic? We are far off from new ordered trains now. ;)

Edited December 6, 2014 by Densha

[miyakoji]

this very wrong explanation: http://amaebi.net/archives/2226274.html

hilarious...  馬 + JR = 馬 + 尺 = 駅.  Total lol.  :)

[HantuBlauLOL]

hilarious...  馬 + JR = 馬 + 尺 = 駅.  Total lol.  :)

 

JR station?