Comments on: What is This, Please?

By: John

John — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 21:45:06 +0000

Many thanks to everyone for the info.

By: passer-by japanese

passer-by japanese — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 16:21:19 +0000

It literally means “A compilation of fiery speeches of national youths – with adjudicators’ and teachers’ comments (The third eloquence championship)”
It’s a record of kind of political or ideological speech contest by young people at that time I guess.

By: magicant

magicant — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 05:40:04 +0000

Eek, this blog doesn’t support kanji?!

By: magicant

magicant — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 05:38:04 +0000

The characters read (in “modern” simplified kanji):

??????????
(The third oratorical championship)

???????
(National youth speech collection)

?????????
(With comments by the judges)

?????????
(Appendix to “Juuben” July special issue)

?????????????
(Printed and delivered June 5, 1936)

???????????
(Published July 1, 1936)

????? ? ????
(“Juuben” Vol. 2?, Issue 7)

?? (Juuben) seems to be the name of the magazine which literally means oratory.
According to this page
https://kotobank.jp/word/%E9%9B%84%E5%BC%81-402983
the magazine was published by ?????? (Dai-nippon yuuben-kai, Grand Japan Oratory Company) which is the predecessor of ??? (Kodansha).

By: YotaruVegeta

YotaruVegeta — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 15:13:08 +0000

If OCR and machine translation were better, I could help you, but it’s just a lot of noise and little good output.

By: ssjtoji

ssjtoji — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 23:17:08 +0000

AWWWW, just realized it doesn’t recognize Chinese characters in this wordpress…sad panda.

By: ssjtoji

ssjtoji — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 23:16:31 +0000

It is still using older version of kanji that have since become archaic in modern Japanese. Notable the kuni is ??as opposed to the now standardized ?.

I’ll take a stab at translating the title.
The first characters ?? mean country-wide or national. The second set ?? mean youth. The third set, and this is the one that took a little bit to look-up, is ??. This one, I am going to have to guess at that meaning. The first kanji, ??means hot or passionate. The second kanji, ? mean competition or contest. My guess is both together could mean something like “the fiery content” or “tournament” there is some leeway since a direct translation doesn’t make much sense. The last kanji ? literally means to gather or to collect, but in this context its just referring to a collection of stories.

So altogether, I would say the title of the book is a “Fiery tales of youth from the national tournament.” Yeah, not really the best translation, but that’s pretty much it. I will say this, I would imagine the old kanji was purposefully used to give it a more “ancient tales of Greece” feel.

As far as how to pronounce the title. I’d go with Zenkoku Seinen Nebben (I’m guessing, since this word was not in any dictionary I checked) Shuu.

That’s all for today’s kanji translation class.