but tell me you wouldnt wear at least one of these
Is this the equivalent of americans wearing poorly-translated Chinese/Japanese t-shirts around the early 2000’s? And can i please have every single shirt up there?
WHO THE FUCK IS JESUS
My undergrad alma mater had an exchange program where we had an entire class of Japanese university students spend a year at our school studying in English immersion each year. Which was awesome, they were really cool and they loved to socialize with the American kids.
One of my best friends had one of the exchange students as her roommate; she was about four foot eleven and maybe ninety pounds, and she had a passion for huge platform boots and shirts with English slogans on them. She explained exactly that – it was cool to wear shirts with English lettering on them, even if you didn’t exactly know what it meant (this was in the late 90s/early 00s).
Her absolute favorite shirt was black with BITCH picked out in enormous rhinestones. She’d worn it three times before I asked her if she knew what it meant, and she said she’d been told it meant “Like a baby dog, the cutest dog? A really cute girl puppy.”
So I explained to her that it wasn’t quite an accurate translation, and as I elaborated on what it meant, from “female dog” on up to “a name you call a woman you don’t like” and all the reasons you might call someone that, her eyes got wider and wider until finally she yelled “THAT’S BETTER, THAT’S THE BEST! BITCH IS EVEN BETTER THAN CUTE!”
Since Youtube is pretty much my main study tool and I’m always looking for channels in my target languages, I thought I’d compile my favourite youtube channels in German. (These are not channels about studying German, they’re just channels I as a native speaker like to watch.)
HYPERBOLE they’re best known for their “frag eine/n…” series where they interview all kinds of people from different walks of life
KARAKAYA TALK political and social issues, specifically aimed at german poc
Here is a masterpost of MOOCs (massive open online courses) that are available, archived, or starting soon. I think they will help those that like to learn with a teacher or with videos. You can always check the audit course or no certificate option so that you can learn for free.
i don’t know why but i’m really amused by the winner of some ‘new kanji’ contest:
compare with the real kanji
座 (seat/gathering), but the two 人 (person) radicals have been moved from next to each other within the 土 (earth) radical to diagonally from each other, making this “social distance(d seating/gathering)”
This is hilarious, but to further the hilarity, I’d like to point to the fact that half of the “A rank” (runners up) for this contest also are related to 2020 epidemic jokes
First up we have:
Compare with
太
The original kanji means “to gain weight”. But it adds the
コ “ko” and ロ “ro” katakana symbols at the top to represent the weight you gain while staying home due to the corona virus.
Then we have:
Compare with
会
The original kanjij means “meeting”, but the lower radical is changed to look more like a “Z” to represent Zoom meetings. Thus, the new kanji means “web meetings” or “zoom calls”
And of course another social distancing one:
Compare with
話
This means “to talk” or “chat”, but it’s changed simply to show the two radicals social distancing from one another as we should also while holding conversations nowadays.
At least we can have some fun language humor despite all of this!
There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber
English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.
ifesbob 