In a jpod101 teacher’s conversation, I found a new and very useful expression: ある意味. It means “in a sense”. (literally it means “a certain meaning”)
Here’s the relevant conversation from episode 331 (Second Honeymoon):
And here are more examples from around the web:
Taboo Chinese character?
When I read articles on the online Mainichi Shinbun, I found a very interesting phenomenon. Often, when the article talks about a person or place’s name from China, a kanji not used in Japan appears. I don’t know what the criteria is, but for some Chinese characters they just put a ※ placeholder and then describes the character somewhere in the article.
Take for example an excerpt from this news article:
北京五輪第４日の１１日、バドミントンの女子ダブルス準々決勝で、小椋久美子、潮田玲子組（三洋電機）は第２シードの杜※、于洋組（中国）にストレート負けした。
（※は女ヘンに、「青」の月が円）
You can see a Chinese player’s name written as 杜※, and below it is described that ※ stands for a character with “女 on the left, and 青 on the right but the 月 part of 青 replaced by 円). Phew, what a great way to describe a character :).
(strangely, on this Chinese Wikipedia page, you can see that the name is written 杜靖 which doesn’t match the description. Simplified characters in action?)
The reason for this which I could think of is that the publisher fears that Japanese people won’t have the installed fonts. However, I think it’s pretty silly anyway. In Windows XP, when we install CJK support, won’t Chinese fonts also get installed? The mainichi site uses UTF-8 anyway, so it’s not an encoding issue.
Anyway, for describing kanji they use radical terminology like へん (hen) etc. I suggest you visit Eve’s writing about radical terminologies to learn more.
(as a bonus, the article’s title has the word オグシオ in it. It stands for the オグ in 小椋久美子 (Ogura Kumiko) and シオ in 潮田玲子 (Shiota Reiko). What a cute way to name a badminton pair…)
I found this sentence from Yahoo!辞書:
When I found 「大いに」, I misread it as 「おおきいに」 (ookii ni) and thought, “Wow, you can attach に to i-adjectives!”. But it turned out to be a set word 「おおいに」 (ooi ni, much/greatly). 「おおきいに」 would have been 「大きいに」 (notice the okurigana difference). [gtj forum thread I made]
I’ve actually encountered 「大いに」 before when doing a Routledge dump:
But it’s evident from my mistake that I haven’t got it pinned down on my ready-to-use memory.
Anyway, the Routledge sentence has suite some funky Japanese grammar there with せねば and まい… It’s equivalent to the simpler 「大いに自戒しなければならないだろう」.