How to Japanese Podcast · Daniel Morales

Episode 45 - コロケーション

·42 min·2 clips

John Wick finally dies, and the gravestone line is 'loving husband, loving wife.'

1. How to Japanese Podcast episode 45 centers on the Japanese term コロケーション and the translation problem around John Wick Chapter 4. 2. Daniel Morales hosts the episode and frames the month as a mix of personal updates, language notes, and a spoiler-heavy film example. 3. The episode asks how English collocations like 'loving husband' can be rendered naturally in Japanese without sounding forced. 4. Daniel starts with a Los Angeles comic shop called Revenge of and says it felt more like a 'lifestyle store' than a comic shop. 5. He contrasts that store with older shops he remembers in New Orleans, including Gold Mine on Magazine Street and More Fun Comics on Oak Street. 6. He argues that 'the nerds have won' because interests like comics, Naruto, and anime are now ordinary in public life. 7. He then shifts to Sekiro, saying the game felt much harder than Elden Ring even though the character feels lighter and more agile. 8. Sekiro leads him to Inui Rokuro's Automatic Eve, which he says was translated into English by Matt Trayvod in 2019. 9. He links Sekiro's katakuri arm and the book's mechanized puppets to questions about artificial intelligence and self-realization. 10. He also mentions the second Automatic Eve book, set in a fictional Chicago, and connects it to the 1893 Colombian Exposition and Devil in the White City. 11. The John Wick section begins with a spoiler warning and the claim that John Wick Chapter 4 finally kills off John Wick. 12. Daniel points to the final gravestone scene, where John Wick's grave sits beside his wife's grave with the inscriptions 'loving husband' and 'loving wife.' 13. He says the Japanese subtitles feel more literal, because they read as husband who loves his wife and wife who loves her husband. 14. He uses Merriam-Webster's 'noticeable arrangement' definition and Cambridge's 'sounds correct to people who have spoken the language all their lives' definition. 15. Cambridge's example 'a hard frost' helps him explain that collocations can be idiomatic without being full idioms. 16. He then moves to the Japanese Digital Daijisen and the Gakken collocation dictionary, which he uses to test words like 'totemo janai' and 'mei kara uroko ga ochiru.' 17. The 'totemo janai ga, sonna takai kuruma wa kaenai' example shows how a phrase can mean 'there is no possible way' rather than 'not very much.' 18. Daniel's tone stays conversational and exploratory, with long digressions, repeated self-corrections, and a newsletter-style monologue format. 19. Listeners who study Japanese vocabulary, translation, or subtitle choices will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a tightly edited lesson without movie spoilers may skip it.

As heard by us

A useful, slightly loose lesson in collocation and why some phrases sound natural while others only translate cleanly.

Episode 45 of the How To Japanese podcast for November 2023 starts with a comic-book-shop memory and a John Wick Chapter 4 spoiler warning, then settles into the language lesson.

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You want to hear why loving husband works in English but not the same way in Japanese.

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