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What kind of blue is 蒼? - Printable Version

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What kind of blue is 蒼? - TheTrueBlue - 2009-07-19

やった！
magamo Wrote:By the way, neither 青夜空 nor 夜青空 is a word.
/facefault

magamo Wrote:Since these phrases are poetic in nature, they're must-learn expressions if you're going to spend a romantic night with your ideal virgin under the moonlight. You'll thank me later.
どうもありがとう，先生。

magamo Wrote:Another example is horses. I think you say these four horses (青毛) are black, but in Japanese they have 青毛 (blue hair). They are 黒い馬 but have 青毛. Strangely enough, あおうま refers to horses of these colors: 芦毛 (aka 葦毛) and 白毛. You probably think they're gray and white respectively, and if your Japanese friends are not familiar with horse colors, they might say they're 白 too. But Japanese people in the know say they're あお. Actually 青 can mean "horse" when used as a word, though people who don't read novels and classic works may not know this.
But be warned. You said your girl should be a kind, gentle, and caring virgin, right? Then chances are she's waiting for 白馬に乗った王子様 (the literal translation is "a prince riding a white horse"). This is an oft-used figurative phrase that means a rich, good-looking guy with a great personality who comes to save a girl from her boring life, i.e., the Japanese equivalent of "knight in a shining armor." The 白馬 (はくば) here is actually あおうま, but it sounds more romantic than あおうま in many cases. Yes.
Awesome! Thank you for this info!

magamo Wrote:Then chances are she's waiting for 白馬に乗った王子様
ワクワク！

magamo Wrote:This whole paragraph is pretty much useless for your virgin hunt purpose, but it might be interesting if you're interested in the Japanese culture, not only in girls.
Yes ma'am.

magamo Wrote:A lot less romantic example is 青ばな (also 青っぱな). The greenish snot running from your nostrils is somehow 青 in Japanese. Wipe it off before you meet her.
Good to know... Err I think...

magamo Wrote:Actually innocence is often regarded as a good thing. By the way, the Japanese equivalent of "to lose your innocence/modesty" is すれる and has a negative connotation. Your ideal girl shouldn't be a すれた女の子.
でしょう！！！！でしょう！！！！でしょう！！！！（ニコニコ）

magamo Wrote:I can go on and on and on, but I'm bored. It won't help much anyway. There are hundreds (or thousands?) of words that are あお but not blue.
Uh oh....

magamo Wrote:By the way, Aijin and I are Japanese if you didn't know. My English is questionable, but I'm more than happy to help you learn my mother tongue. I'm not a qualified teacher or anything though.
Your English gave no indication that you weren't a native English speaker, born and raised. Thank you very much for the help.　As for the aoi things, though, perhaps a link to a site that bascially has:

Green／Fresh Vegetables = aoi(野菜？）
Trainees = aoi(新者？）
Horses and their hair colors can be aoi, here's an example.　（Link)
Green lights　（Traffic wise) = aoi

Just a list would be great, no absolute need for comprehensive if wonderful contexts.

What kind of blue is 蒼? - magamo - 2009-07-19

Hmm. I think you want a word list that contains figurative/idiomatic usages and illustrative examples of the difference of the color ranges. Unfortunately I have never seen such a nice website or book. I can easily come up with tons of examples, but I'm not sure what would be useful to you. Here are several examples I didn't mention in my last post:

Plant
青リンゴ (あおりんご) greening apple,
青菜 (あおな) greens, green plants you eat,
青々とした (あおあおとした) verdant,

Season
青嵐 (あおあらし/せいらん) bracing breeze in early summer,
青葉の頃 (あおばのころ) early summer,

Face
青い顔 (あおいかお) pale face,
青ざめる (あおざめる) turn green,

Immaturity
青二才 (あおにさい) novice, greenhorn,
青い (あおい) green as in まだまだ青いな, which means "You're still immature."

Black/Dark
青あざ (あおあざ) bruise, black and blue,
青い夜霧 (あおいよぎり) night fog (青い may imply that it's early in the morning, that the fog is thick or anything 青 can collocate with. 夜霧 already means a night fog),

If you're not familiar with words I mentioned in other posts such as 青息吐息, 青い鳥, and 青汁, you might want to look them up in your dictionary. Adult native speakers should know all of them.

新和英大辞典 published by 研究社 (Kenkyusha) contains a lot of information about these differences between Japanese words and their English equivalents including 青 vs. blue. I wouldn't say it's the best material to learn color differences, but it's arguably the best Japanese-English dictionary out there. If you're serious about learning Japanese, I recommend the dictionary.

Hope this helps.

What kind of blue is 蒼? - TheTrueBlue - 2009-07-20

Yes, I'll be adding that list to my Japanese study wordpad docs folder.

I know that aoi the kana can = different kanji. But because of the breadth of this topic, I was only hoping for things that people will say is "aoi."

As you've written, if someone had said 青い夜霧, it would time to for me to zip it, and just nod and go そうですね。。。 because I would have had no idea why "thick fog" or "early morning fog" should be related to the color "blue" or any of the kanji for aoi.

For all I know he could be commenting on how this chilly early morning fog or night fog makes his sex drive tank to a little kid's or something (aoi being novice, new). Or some other non-sequitur.

If I was in a car in Japan and didn't know beforehand that "aoi" can mean green light and heard someone say it, I'd fear they had color blindness or something.

Thank you for the dictionary recommendation and the info.

What kind of blue is 蒼? - magamo - 2009-07-20

あおい+noun things like 青い顔 that don't make sense to you are not always easy to learn because there may be grammatical points/idiomatic usages behind them, so it might be better to learn them one by one.

For example, 青いリンゴ isn't the same as 青リンゴ; the former can be an "unripe" apple, blueish/green apple, or greening apple while the latter always means a greening apple, i.e., never-turn-red kind of apple (I edited my previous post because I noticed that "greening apple" would be more accurate).

青い海 may sound intuitive, but it has a connotation of summer and enjoyment. If you say 青い海 out of the blue, the listener may imagine the blue ocean, sunshine, and the blue sky at the same time. Of course, you can use 青い to describe the ocean in winter as well, but 冬の青い海 doesn't always imply the "pleasure" sense.

考え is an oft-青い'd word. If someone said your 考え is 青い, it means your way of thinking/opinion is immature. 性格 (personality/character), 行動 (behavior) and their synonyms can be described as 青い in the same manner as well. 青臭い, instead of 青い, might be more idiomatic in some cases.

Your 技術 (skill) and other synonymous words can be 青い if you're still "green." If a noun itself can mean skill level, it can be 青い too. For example, 君の日本語はまだ青いね means "Your Japanese is still at a beginner level."

Don't expect you can learn enough amount of nouns that 青い can be applied to in one sitting. Think how many non-intuitive blue applicable nouns there are in English. There are tons of such English nouns from "blue blood" to "blue pound." Most of the examples I listed in my earlier post like "blue language" aren't intuitive to us either. Japanese is as "colorful" as English.

What kind of blue is 蒼? - TheTrueBlue - 2009-07-20

Yes, I don't hope to be able to memorize and then perfectly use all or even most of the aoi lexicon.

But I'm not sure exactly how widely aoi can be used in Japanese.

Is having something described as aoi an everyday occurence living in Japan? I barely recall any or only very very few instances in a show or manga where aoi was used in such a way.

Thanks for the new examples, I'll save them for studying.

What kind of blue is 蒼? - magamo - 2009-07-20

TheTrueBlue Wrote:Yes, I don't hope to be able to memorize and then perfectly use all or even most of the aoi lexicon.

But I'm not sure exactly how widely aoi can be used in Japanese.

Is having something described as aoi an everyday occurence living in Japan? I barely recall any or only very very few instances in a show or manga where aoi was used in such a way.

Thanks for the new examples, I'll save them for studying.
I think most native speakers think those figurative usages are basic and common. Kids are already familiar with 青い顔, 考えが青い, etc.

So why haven't you come across them? I think that's because those "frequent" expressions aren't that frequent. Confused? Think common English expressions. If you didn't know phrases like "white lie" and "blue blood," I'd question your intelligence. But probably you think they're sort of frequent idioms. So how frequently do they appear in real life?

Let's see how frequent they appear on this forum. The Love in Japan thread has got about 600 replies, some of which are incredibly long. So it's safe to say it contains at least several thousand expressions. But it seems no one used "white lie" or "blue blood." I'm guessing you have to read 10,000+ posts to finally come across the allegedly frequent phrases in context.

I don't know how many English phrases you know, but if you regard "white list" and "white book" as two different idioms, I think the size of your vocabulary is more than a billion. Perhaps you know tens of billions of expressions. Those numbers are not important here. The point is the number of frequent phrases is extremely large. Let's be conservative and assume that there are a million frequent expressions like "jet black," "jet lag," "green activist," "come full circle," "pendulum has swung back," etc. To be even more conservative, we include every intuitive expression like "stupid guy" and "every word" in the one million. If each expression appeared at the same frequency, you'd run across a given phrase once in a million because no two expressions can pop up at the same time. But obviously some are commoner than others. So if you're learning a "kind of frequent" expression, that means you encounter it in context once in a few million phrases. Since phrases consists of multiple words, you may need to read/hear more than ten million words to meet it. Native speakers may think "paint a rosy picture" is kind of frequent, but it may appear only once in tens of millions of words.

So, you say you have never heard "あいつはまだまだ青いな。" Well, then, how many Japanese words have you read and heard? Don't underestimate the amount of Japanese you have to consume, or you'll fall by the wayside.

Oh, by the way, when was the last time you heard "fall by the wayside" except in this post? It's a very frequent expression even your average English student knows.

What kind of blue is 蒼? - TheTrueBlue - 2009-07-21

さすがmagamo先輩えらいですよ。

[Image: sweatdrop.gif]

確かに複雑な話ですよね。

只のリストがあればも有り難いですけどやっぱ難しいですね。

いや。。。不公平な質問を尋ねました。。。すみません。。。

What kind of blue is 蒼? - magamo - 2009-07-24

TheTrueBlue Wrote:さすがmagamo先輩えらいですよ。

http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/5207/sweatdrop.gif

確かに複雑な話ですよね。

只のリストがあればも有り難いですけどやっぱ難しいですね。

いや。。。不公平な質問を尋ねました。。。すみません。。。
あぁ、わざわざ日本語で返信していただいたのに、気がついていませんでした。ごめんなさい。

えらいだなんてとんでもないです。TheTrueBlueさんの疑問ももっともだと思います。ちょっときつい言い方をしましたが、私も学校で英語を習っていた頃は、同じようなことを疑問に思っていました。言語獲得に必要なインプットの量を低く見積もり過ぎると、なぜ学習が思ったように進まないのかと不安になると思いますし、実際そういう状況に陥っている外国語学習者は少なくないと思います。

TheTrueBlueさんは日本語を真剣に学ばれているようですし、書き込みを読む限りでは順調にいっているように見えます。これからもがんばって下さいね。

Sorry I didn't notice your reply.

I'm not えらい or anything, and I think your question is fair. You don't need to say sorry. I was being a little harsh because that was what I also got tripped up by when I was learning English at school; I didn't want you to make the same mistake. I think a lot of learners feel they're not making progress fast enough because they underestimate the amount of the target language they should read and listen to.

Judging from your posts, your Japanese seems to be good. Keep up the good work!

What kind of blue is 蒼? - TheTrueBlue - 2009-07-25

magamo Wrote:あぁ、わざわざ日本語で返信していただいたのに、気がついていませんでした。ごめんなさい。
いいえ，ご心配なく。

magamo Wrote:私も学校で英語を習っていた頃は、同じようなことを疑問に思っていました。言語獲得に必要なインプットの量を低く見積もり過ぎると、なぜ学習が思ったように進まないのかと不安になると思いますし、実際そういう状況に陥っている外国語学習者は少なくないと思います。
そうですね。確かにこれは的確な巻き尺ではありませんよね。

magamo Wrote:TheTrueBlueさんは日本語を真剣に学ばれているようですし、書き込みを読む限りでは順調にいっているように見えます。
いやいや，皆さんのお蔭で少しできますが。

magamo Wrote:これからもがんばって下さいね。
了解しました！がんばります！