On the right: a cute little kid's cartoon on the back of the packet. It's a simple story of a game of hide-and-seek gone wrong.
Below: the last frame from of the cartoon, with the punchline, "Orirarenaku nacchatta yo..." which I'd translate as, "Oh no! I can't get down!"
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| "Oh no! I can't get down!" |
Now, you're probably thinking, "What a long word that is!" But that's because long words are difficult in English. In Japanese, long words are easy, because long words are really just short words with bits added on the end in a systematic fashion.
In this case:
- the stem is oriru which, among other things, means (I) get down.
- orirareru means (I) can get down.
- orirarenai means (I) can't get down.
- orirarenaku naru means (I) become / will become unable to get down.
- orirarenaku nacchau means Oh no. (I) become / will become unable to get down.
- orirarenaku nacchatta means Oh no. (I) became unable to get down.
The yo at the end is a acts like an exclamation mark.
The nice thing is that we can mix and match these different endings in pretty much any way we want:
- orinai means (I) don't get down.
- orita means (I) got down.
- orichatta means Oh no. (I) got down.
- oriteinakatta yo means (I) wasn't getting down!
- and so on ...
If you're a connoisseur of programming languages, you'll recognise this as being the much-desired property of orthogonality, which makes languages both expressive and easy to learn.
Sadly, I can only see the beauty and simplicity of Japanese on packs of Pocky sticks, because it's for kids and is therefore written in phonetic script. Out in the real world, they'd write it like this:
降りられなくなっちゃったよ。
And that first symbol, 降, is one of the many hundreds I still have to learn before I can even begin to make sense of a paragraph in a normal book. Makes me want to weep.
