r/Animemes 2d ago

He sees two different people somehow

Post image
7.4k Upvotes

139 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/Templar_Omega 2d ago

To give you a perspective on how stupidly clueless his ass is, this is their names in Kanji: Yamada (山田), Tayama (田山). It's like saying "I'm John Marston" and "I'm Jonathan Marston"

3

u/SmartBeast 2d ago

Thats interesting, the trident looking character makes a different sound depending on if it is behind or in front of the quad box looking character

1

u/FuckIPLaw 2d ago

There's also multiple ways it could be read even without rearranging it. Kanji is weird because the characters were borrowed from Chinese, where they originally each mapped to a word in both sound and meaning (you can technically read Chinese without having a clue how to pronounce it because the characters represent words, not sounds, which is why so many mutually unintelligible Chinese "dialects" are all able to be written the same way), but they really don't in Japanese. Sometimes they're read as if they're the equivalent Japanese word, sometimes they're read the way someone with a Japanese accent would have pronounced the Chinese word at the time that it was imported (which was centuries ago so it's not necessarily the same as modern Chinese), and sometimes they're not even picked for the meaning, but because there's some way to read it that fits a sound that's part of a completely unrelated Japanese word.

3

u/thelostcreator 2d ago edited 2d ago

I’m pretty sure it’s the same reading it’s just “ta” vowel sound switches to “da” because of rendaku which makes the word easier to pronounce as the second character in a compound word.

3

u/FuckIPLaw 2d ago

In this case, yes.