Adventures in Japanese: The descent

More travels in the Japanese dictionary. (These are probably not super-common, but I just found them interesting!)

下る (kudaru)
To descend. 
But also used in 腹下し, literally 'descending stomach' - suffering from everyone's favourite ailment after a rather too ambitious curry. I suppose things start moving downwards at an alarming rate...

穴 (ana/ketsu)
A hole, space, or vacancy. 
穴があったら入りたい (ana ga attara hairitai) - After something embarrassing, you may wish to sink into a hole in the floor... 
When adding the word for child or little, 'ko', to it, you get 穴子, 'anago' - apparently a type of eel.
穴兄弟 (anakyoudai) - 'Hole brothers', two guys who have slept with the same girl!
When pronounced 'ketsu', however, it can mean the ass. So, moving further into the murky realms of adult dialogue, there is also the derivative 'ketsumanko' (穴マンコ) for 'ass pussy'. Oh my. :'D

夜 (yoru)
Night.
夜目遠目 (yometoome) - 'Night eye, far eye', seeing something in the dark or at a distance. Also apparently, the unfortunate case where a woman really looked better in those conditions.

Adventures in Japanese: 'An' it's your bad luck you grew up in a family o' the biggest tuna I ever laid eyes on.'

 In a stroke of luck on my eBay wanderings, I have now received a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Japanese, for only about £7! Reading should at least fix up some of the bizarre listening mistakes I get from the audiobook, the most persistent of which is that I consistently hear 'Muggle' (マグル)　as 'Maguro' (マグロ), for tuna.

It sort of seems like they got a five-year old with a crayon to do the illustrations inside (a wizard is generally denoted by a stick figure with a pointy hat) but they are somewhat charming nonetheless. 

As you can very clearly see, this is Hermione fighting a troll. Yes.

In the course of my wanderings, I also came across the Japanese names for the Planets - a topic of interest to me since I'm currently practicing the Grand Cross course on DDR!

水星 (suisei) - Mercury. 'Water star'
金星 (kinsei) - Venus. 'Gold star'. 
火星 (kasei) - Mars. 'Fire star'.
木星 (mokusei) - Jupiter. 'Wood star'.
土星 (dosei) - Saturn. 'Earth star'.
天王星 (tennousei) - Uranus. 'Heaven-King star'.
海王星 (kaiousei) - Neptune. 'Sea-King star'. 

Left out Earth because that was boring. And not a planet anymore, but:
冥王星 (meiousei) - Pluto. 'Dark-King star'. 

Adventures in Japanese: eating!

As part of my evil 'get it together and actually learn Japanese properly' scheme, I have been listening to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Japanese audiobook.

Most of the words are beyond me at this point, but at the moment this is mainly meant to improve my listening speed. I've been noting the more interesting vocabulary down though, in a text file called 'horrible_mistakes.txt'. (After various 'wut' moments from misheard words.)

This can lead to wonderful journeys through the Japanese dictionary. For example, after looking up a 'funny whelk' eaten by Aunt Marge (腐りかけた貝), I came across these delightful eating-related expressions.

マクる
To eat at McDonald's. They made a verb out of that?! Something similar exists for Denny's.

バイキング 
Literally, VIKING! But also, a buffet? I guess Vikings are big eaters...

鯨飲馬食 (げいいんばしょく)
Drink like a fish, eat like a horse! Sounds like a good motto to live life by.

食い込む (くいこむ)
To eat into, or erode. But also... a thong causing a wedgie?