LLearn Japanese

I need to get this meme out of my head—you’ve heard of elf on the shelf, but have you heard of…

  • December 14, 2024

A lot of groups I’m in like to do rhyming memes that sound like “Elf on the Shelf,” and I cannot get this silly idea/phrase out of my head. Forgive the ai art—it was way too silly to be worth the process of doing it properly in photoshop.
And I’m sorry if this is the wrong subreddit 🫣

by tallesthufflepuff

7 comments

  4. Thanks to u/bubushkinator I learned a little more about pitch accent, thank you! To expand on pitch accent here, I believe 図書館 has a “middle high” 中高 pattern where the second morae “sho” has a high pitch while the rest of the word has a low pitch. A word I’ve heard way more frequently spoken in Japanese that matches this tonal pattern is ひとつ, which I think is also a good example of how つ can get devoiced when it has a low tone.

    Here is a YouTube video pronouncing 図書館

    https://youtu.be/_zssvALxV7k?si=kfANupMHMddSNaqE

    Feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes, just wanted to share what (I think) I learned. 🙂

  5. There’s a whole big thread here with some American kid in Tokyo pretending to be Japanese and claiming that the rhyme doesn’t rhyme… I just want to note how sad I am that even this sub is getting invaded by AI slop. 🙁

  7. The arguing about rhyme and reason us just like a bunch of alarm clocks buzzing, “Well akshually!” without even showing the time… or something.

    The concept of rhyming (as we’re using it here in English especially*) is so broad that obviously it encompasses anything ending in “-an”, with caveats.

    You’ve got five vowels and the nasal n to work with, so simple “rhyming” isn’t considered interesting or clever in the first place. Anecdotally, a Japanese music teacher whose Beatlemania rivaled my own and who had memorized basically every one of their songs–as his profession, mind you–had no idea what I was talking about when I brought up the concept of rhyming lyrics. That’s how not-a-thing it is.

    *If there *is* some Japanese standard of “rhyming doesn’t exist unless pitch accent”, maybe cite some source–even just a word for what you’re referring to.

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