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some people in Japan do also know it's offensive, at least. When i was in Japan, some guy said it, and one of the Japanese people said, "please don't say that, it's not good". Best not to use it, since it pretty much is known as an offensive term anywhere English speaking, and even if it's not widely known in Japan, some people will know it's origin.
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Why is that completely wrong? It sounds fine to me. "That was a brand new loaf of bread you just threw away!"
Joined: May 2009
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and yet, "i bought a brand new loaf of bread from the supermarket" is pretty much never going to be said. "brand new shoes" "brand new car" etc are quite common though. For most things, "brand new" has more of a ぴかぴか feel to me, though yeah, Yudans sentence also sounds totally normal...
it's not a big deal though, you can stretch english whatever way you please in this case. It's not wrong as such to use "brand new" in a different way, just more or less common or more or less creative. "brand new day" "brand new baby" etc.
@zigmonty: lol!
honestly, i don't really know. i think the older generation of people are the main people who still use "Japs" and it generally comes with some form of racist attitudes because of the war, so that's the connotations it gives if someone else uses it. But if nobodys getting offended where you are it's probably not such a big deal, i dunno...
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渡日 is a word as well, so 渡米 isn't that surprising...
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来日 can also mean coming day, but it's read らいじつ.
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I'm pretty sure it wasn't; the 日本国語大辞典 has a 12th-century citation for 来月 (read as ライクヮツ). 来日 only has 20th century citations although the Daijiten doesn't always give the earliest citation for any word. (It sounds like a 20th-century newspaper coinage to me, but I can't say that for certain).
来日 as らいじつ seems to be older than 来日（らいにち） but all the Daijiten quotes are classical Chinese or dictionaries so it's hard to tell how it might have been used, or even if that's how they would have read the sequence at the time (rather than as きたるひ)
But it's still wrong to call 来日 a "misuse" of 来 since "come" is a basic meaning of that kanji.
Edited: 2011-05-26, 8:55 pm
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I meant 来日（らいにち） only had 20th century citations; 来日（らいじつ） goes back to the 12th.
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Hey i'm a sp*c haha and we have a word for "jap" which is "ponja" (we call japan ja-pón, so pon-ja is japon backwards). At least here in Buenos Aires where many people are descendants from European people we have a lot of slangs to call them, and they're quite often used in a friendly nuance:
"tano" for italians (and I'm actually an Italian descendant).
"turco" (from turquish) for many people who are anything but turquish.
"gringo" for north americans, canadians, british, etc.
etc, etc, etc.
Here those words aren't really demeaning in any way, I wouldn't use "ponja" to refer to my japanese teacher though haha.
I'm sorry if I offended anybody, it was never the intention, but we need to have an abbreviation for "japanese people", way too long haha.
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I didn't think you intentionally offended; that's why I pointed it out to you -- I saw your country was Argentina and I thought you just might not know the word is considered offensive in some places. You can just use "Japanese" instead of "Japanese people".
