Thursday, April 29, 2010

フリーペーパー

furi- pe-pa-, "free paper".

100429In today's classroom, a group of students presented their preliminary research on Japanese marking, and in a show-and-tell style, they brought in a number of items that they collected from Japan, including free newspaper and magazines. These are under the category of free publications, or フリーペーパー, a "fake" English term invented in Japan.

One character of today's katakana words in Japanese is to indicate a new concept, and present a tone which is foreien. However in this case, unexpectedly it is in fact a good challege for a English speaker to understand it and it may take a moment to figure out what does it exactly means.