Please to decipher this. Are they speaking legitimate Japanese? If yes, is their pronunciation any good (I watched this on super-low volume, so I didn’t hear it very well)? Is the script in natural Japanese? If not… what the hey is going on, here? Is there some aspect of Russo-Japanese history that might help decode the humor?
About ten percent of it is recognizable as Japanese. Another 30 percent is probably supposed to be Japanese, but is unrecognizable. Since I don’t understand Russian, it’s hard to know if what is being said is attempted Japanese (with a Russian accent), actual Russian, or just gibberish (with a Russian accent). But I have some Japanese friends who speak Russian, so maybe they can chime in.
I found the attempts at Japanese that sounded kinda like Japanese, but not really to be really funny. As for historical background, I’d like to point out (with a reference to The Princess Bride) that the Japanese actually won a land (and sea) war with Russia, but that probably doesn’t have anything to do with this video.
I just ran the vid title, “??????? ???????. “?????? ??????” ??-???????,” through Google Translate, and got: Big difference. “Irony of Fate” in Japanese.
Now I’m wondering whether “Irony of Fate” is the same as the Sino-Korean expression “sae ong ji ma,” which comes from the hanja “poor + old man + ‘s + horse,” per the old Chinese story (????, see here). While the story itself refers to the way in which one’s fortunes can flip-flop, Koreans often (mis)use the proverb as a synonym for “irony.”
Please to decipher this. Are they speaking legitimate Japanese? If yes, is their pronunciation any good (I watched this on super-low volume, so I didn’t hear it very well)? Is the script in natural Japanese? If not… what the hey is going on, here? Is there some aspect of Russo-Japanese history that might help decode the humor?
About ten percent of it is recognizable as Japanese. Another 30 percent is probably supposed to be Japanese, but is unrecognizable. Since I don’t understand Russian, it’s hard to know if what is being said is attempted Japanese (with a Russian accent), actual Russian, or just gibberish (with a Russian accent). But I have some Japanese friends who speak Russian, so maybe they can chime in.
I found the attempts at Japanese that sounded kinda like Japanese, but not really to be really funny. As for historical background, I’d like to point out (with a reference to The Princess Bride) that the Japanese actually won a land (and sea) war with Russia, but that probably doesn’t have anything to do with this video.
I just ran the vid title, “??????? ???????. “?????? ??????” ??-???????,” through Google Translate, and got: Big difference. “Irony of Fate” in Japanese.
Now I’m wondering whether “Irony of Fate” is the same as the Sino-Korean expression “sae ong ji ma,” which comes from the hanja “poor + old man + ‘s + horse,” per the old Chinese story (????, see here). While the story itself refers to the way in which one’s fortunes can flip-flop, Koreans often (mis)use the proverb as a synonym for “irony.”
Sorry about the question marks – I still haven’t decided on a hack for foreign language encodings for WordPress yet.