Does anyone know what this means?
 

Hello everyone :)

I have a question. A few years ago my boyfriend wrote something in Japanese in my diary. It says this:

Shin Hitori Honoo

But he won't tell me what it means! :p So please, I've been trying to find out for so long. Could anyone help me?

Isn't this right:

Shin = true, real
Hitori = alone, only
Honoo = flame, blaze

I just can't make anything out of that? I do have a guess, but I'm not sure. I need someone to tell me what it means. :p

Makes no sense whatsoever. Don't tell me he's my countryman.

Well, he has studied Japanese for about five months (this education actually takes four years but he quit) and then he wrote this in my diary. So it might be a wrong sentence, I don't know..?

Are you sure it's wrong?

I am more than just sure. I'm a native speaker! :mtongue:

Well that's pretty damn awesome lol. :cool:

So I've waited for years to get this translated and then it turns out to be a wrong sentence. Crap. :D

I'm probably going to study Japanese this year. I'm excited, but I hope I'll be good enough to learn the language.

What if it said: Watashi no shin hitori honoo?

Would that still be wrong? Because someone else told me that might be what he wrote.

Who is this someone else? Another romaji-user?

The new "phrase" makes NO sense, too. Are you jokng? How can you just add "my" to the gibberish and expect it to make sense?

I don't know. Don't ask me, I don't speak Japanese.

Maybe I remember the words wrong. I should go find my diary and post the Japanese characters here. Because he wrote in Japanese.

These are the characters:



Does it maybe make sense now? Was I wrong? :p

I don't know if the characters even make sense. I don't know Japanese. I was just hoping it would mean something.

You were fairly close. It's still gibberish. It's poorly written, and it says heart one person fire fire or heart one person blaze (the last two kanji, which are repeated, are written like two kanji, but could be someone very awful at writing kanji's attempt to write one kanji that has "fire" in it twice: 火火 vs 炎). I bet he was trying to say something about how you're the one person for whom his heart blazes. Assuming that, what he wrote is read こころひとりほのお (kokoro hitori honoo). But it is gibberish.

It's just another example of a noob trying to be cool by writing Japanese. I did the same thing when I was 12 years old, lonely, and bullied.

Well, he tried then. I think that's kind of cute, even though he wrote gibberish. He tried writing something sweet in a language I could not understand in stead of having the guts to say it in my face. :D

But.. How would you write this correctly then? How would you have to say in Japanese that a certain person is the only one for whom your heart blazes?

You remembered the characters correctly, but it still is meaningless to anyone but him.

Heart/soul

single person/alone

flame

Well, I wonder what it was he really meant to say then. Maybe KyleGoetz was right about his idea of what it was supposed to mean.

Still, I wonder how you would say in Japanese that a certain person is the one person for whom your heart blazes.

Anyone?

心に火のように熱かせる1人
It's a bit dictionaryish, but ALC gives 心が火のように熱く as "the heart is a fire," so I just converted it to causative form and added "one person" to it. I sure as hell would never try to pass it off as good Japanese, though. It's quite difficult to translate phrases meant poetically from one language to another without it sounding weird in the language.

The phrase is "lost in translation."

Thank you very much! I don't know any Japanese yet (that's why I'm going to school to learn it this year), so having the "one person" part added to your translation, what does the meaning of it come down to?

I'm sorry. I'm still a total noob at this.

What?So what good are my suggestions doing?

If I already knew Japanese, I wouldn't have needed anyone to translate this for me in the first place would I?

Also, I thought it was pretty obvious that I don't know any Japanese yet as I already said I'm going to school to learn the language this year.

Anyway.. Could you please just tell me what i心に火のように熱かせる1人 means?
I'm trying to understand.

You've apparently never studied a foreign language before. There are degrees of knowledge of a language. For example, I definitely know and speak Japanese, but I sure as heck can't read the Bible in Japanese! I would need help understanding phrases, and that's an essential method of improving my knowledge.

Don't confuse the issue. My point was that you have never studied Japanese, so why should I help you? You misconstrued my point as something different: whether you speak Japanese. There is a huge difference.

It means what you asked for. You asked for a translation, I gave you one. Why would I give you something else in Japanese you didn't ask for?

Heck, I even referred you to a dictionary entry for about 90% of what I said.

Why not? I'm not welcome if I don't know any Japanese?

I meant could you please tell me the words as I don't know those characters, so I can't pronounce what it says.

I'm sorry I don't know any Japanese, but I really want to learn. :)

Your friend had only studied Japanese for 5 months (it takes years to be fluent, particularly in written Japanese), so at that point still didn't really know how to construct a proper Japanese sentence (or write kanji well), so he has just given you individual words- as above, heart, one person, and (badly written) flame. There is no way to interpret the meaning other than just looking at the words and reading whatever you want into them. It's the same as writing "heart, one person, flame" in English- just a string of words.

The sentence KyleGoetz gave you is one way that you could take the meaning of the 3 words and make a proper sentence out of it- "the one person who makes my heart/soul burn like fire"- Kyle Goetz explained that that was the meaning, but you seem to have missed that at some point. And whether that's what your friend actually meant is known only to him.

Looking at the picture, it looks like your boyfriend doesn't really have a strong grip on the language. The one character is rotated ninety degrees and the other characters look bad. In this case, the only solution is to ask him what he meant to say.

No, don't get defensive. You're definitely welcome here. But it's pointless to teach you stuff when you have no basis to actually comprehend it. That's my point. It's like me asking someone to teach me how to land an airplane before I've learned how to take off.

I mean, you have said yourself you don't know any Japanese. So why do you want to know how to pronounce something that you literally cannot use?! It's confusing to me!



Why do you need to know? I thought your boyfriend wrote some stupid and poor Japanese and you just wanted to know if it was correct. Now you want me to teach you what the correct thing is? At this point, it's really starting to ring my "person wants a Japanese tattoo" alarm!

I'm not going to teach you how to pronounce it because what I told you is not good Japanese (it's correct, but not good). Translating "poetic" English into another language inevitably will lose stuff in translation. To top that off, I'm not a professional translator, so what I've given you is most assuredly not a decent translation of something "poetic." The feeling will have been lost.

Start reading Tae Kim's site. Google it. You'll know it when you see it. Learn what's on there, and you'll be further ahead than anyone in even a second-year Japanese class at any university in the US.

Looking over your posts, you've said you're "trying to understand." My point is that you shouldn't be trying to understand something like this. You should be trying to understand how to read kana and how to form simple sentences. You're just a duckling! Inevitably if you start learning stuff you're not ready for, you're going to think you get it and make a lot more mistakes by misapplying stuff.

Over in another thread, someone keeps trying to use てはいけない in ways it is not meant to. The person doesn't seem to have the proper foundation to actually use てはいけない yet because the scenarios in which he is trying to use てはいけない would be better suited to use a different grammar point he should have learned before てはいけない: regular old past tense of a regular old verb!

I'm not angry with you. I'm not trying to be a fuddy duddy or hide the ball or prevent you from learning. I'm trying to save you future difficulty by trying to learn stuff out of order (OK, and a little part of me is suspicious that you're just fishing for a Japanese tattoo).

Regardless, here's what you should be doing to learn Japanese right now:
1. google "tae kim japanese"
2. read the Tae Kim site and learn what's on it
3. enjoy knowing a ton of Japanese

While doing this, definitely come here and ask questions about what you're learning! I'll be more than happy to assist you in your goals! (I'm a nice guy, really I am!) I'm sure other JF users will be happy to help, too. This forum is to help improve the Japanese of friendly people :)

You're crazy. Who should we be speaking to, then?

I'm outa here!

I am definitely not looking for a Japanese tattoo. You can be sure of that. Please don't think of me like I am that kind of person. Besides, I already have one tattoo (nothing Japanese or what so ever) and that's enough for me. I don't want any more tattoos.

I wanted to know the correct way of saying "the one person for whom my heart blazes" so I could show my boyfriend and ask him if that's what he was trying to write down. I was going to show him all of your explanations. And then ask him why he was afraid to just say that directly in my face. :mtongue:

I started reading the guide you gave me. So I'm gonna start trying to learn this by using an English guide which I also need to translate back into Dutch first. :D It looks really helpful though. I even started wondering if the education I applied for is going to actually teach me proper Japanese after I read the introduction part about textbook Japanese. :o I'm supposed to learn Japanese in four years in this school. But maybe using this guide along side my education will help me out a lot. :)

It's possible that instead of rotating 一 the wrong way, he just wrote "1." But I doubt it.

Here's what you need to know going into university:
1. Four years is not enough to "learn Japanese" if by that you mean "become fluent."
2. It took me two years of university to be prepared enough to live in Japan. In that sense, it took two years to "learn Japanese."

Also, sorry if I was hard on you. I think I come across as a bully here sometimes, but it's really because I just want to help noobs avoid the stupid mistakes I made when I was young and dumb. And I just plain hate kanji tattoos on someone who doesn't have a connection to the language or culture—it's a fetishization that disgusts me.

But yeah, just go with what I typed way back in another post. It's not poetic, but it's at least better than what you got from your boyfriend.

And yeah, let him have it! ;) haha

Good luck. Learning Japanese is very rewarding.

Well. In the 3rd year of college we're supposed to actually go to Japan for about five months. I believe that's some sort of exchange. But I'm already nervous about that. :p Going that far away for so long all by myself.

The Japanese you gave me, I'm gonna shove it under his nose tonight and ask him if that's by chance what he meant to say. See how he reacts to that heheh.

I'm not only interested in the Japanese language. I'm also interested in it's history and culture. I wonder what I'll learn about that in school.

And it's ok you were a little tough. I understand if I came across as some nitwit wannabe who just tried to be all cool and awesome. :mtongue:

But I'm not, really I'm not. :vsign:

I don't hate kanji tattoos any more than any other tattoos. How stupid does it look if you get "Mrs. C" tattooed on the back of your neck and then end up divorcing "Mr. C" a year later? That's got to be worse than any meaningless gibberish kanji tattoo.

You make a good point. I suppose when I said I was talking about kanji tattoos on people with no connection to Japan, I was simply expressing my dislike for the fetishization of Japanese by getting a tattoo that you don't understand for the reason that it makes you feel mystical or cool just because it's in Japanese.

or just used it too make it a katakana double vocal xD

アー

pardon me im being silly ;p

I just throw it there...might be a very stupid idea.
Chinese maybe? (but I don't speak the language at all).

First, OP said the bf studies Japanese. Second, I can speak a little Chinese, and it doesn't look Chinese to me. There's no verb, and to make the Chinese construction like "person for whom my heart blazes" the kanji would appear in a different order than they do in 心一人炎.

Well. I showed my boyfriend the translation KyleGoetz gave me yesterday evening.

He read it, but could not completely make out what it said. So I let him read the English meaning that I wrote on the back.

Then I asked him if he remembered what he wrote in my diary back in 2006.
He did and said he knew it was actually gibberish, but when I asked him if this is what he meant to say.. He just smiled and blinked at me.

I'm pretty sure it is what he was trying to say. I could see by the way he reacted and smiled.

A fun and nice happy ending. Thanks for sharing the story with us!

You're welcome, and thank you for helping me!

I showed him the translation while asking about the words he wrote in my diary and he got this look on his face that just said "oops, busted". :D

It was hilarious but also so sweet. He's way too shy to tell me something like that in my face.