Languagle #25: Japanese
猿も木から落ちる
saru mo ki kara ochiru
"Even monkeys fall from trees."
What it means
Even experts make mistakes. Monkeys are the best climbers there are, yet even they sometimes fall. Similar to 'even Homer nods' in English. It is one of the best-known Japanese proverbs (saru mo ki kara ochiru).
How to say it
sah-roo moh kee kah-rah oh-chee-roo
Japanese gives every syllable about the same weight, so don't lean on any of them. The r is a light tap, somewhere between an r, an l and a d.
Word by word
- 猿 sah-roo: monkey
- も moh: even, too
- 木 kee: tree
- から kah-rah: from
- 落ちる oh-chee-roo: falls
猿, 木 and the first part of 落ちる are kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese that carry the meaning. も, から and ちる are hiragana, which handle the grammar and word endings.
Where it was found
In Japanese a proverb is a kotowaza (ことわざ). This one is from Fluent in 3 Months' list of Japanese proverbs.
Similar sayings
- Japanese: 河童の川流れ (kappa no kawa nagare). Even a kappa gets swept away by the river. The kappa is a water creature from Japanese folklore, supposed to be an expert swimmer.
- Japanese: 弘法にも筆の誤り (Kōbō ni mo fude no ayamari). Even Kōbō slips with his brush, after the monk Kūkai, also called Kōbō Daishi, who was famous for his calligraphy.
How to recognise Japanese
Japanese mixes Chinese characters with a simple, curvy syllable script. If you see dense, boxy characters like 猿 and 落 next to small rounded ones like の, も, は and から, it's Japanese. Chinese uses characters only, with no kana at all. Korean Hangul is made of straight lines and circles grouped into blocks, like 한국어, and the little circle ㅇ is everywhere. Japanese also has katakana, a sharper, more angular script (アイスクリーム, 'ice cream') used mostly for words borrowed from other languages.
About the Japanese language
Japanese is spoken by around 125 million people, almost all of them in Japan, and its relationship to other language families is still debated. It is written with three scripts at once: kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese for meaning, and two syllable-based scripts, hiragana for grammar and native words and katakana for foreign words and emphasis. A single sentence routinely mixes all three.
← #24 · All answers · #26 →