Comments on: How do you say “FAIL” in Chinese?

By: clorenzo

clorenzo — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:27:43 +0000

对阿！

By: S

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:25:00 +0000

yeah, mine means ‘horny’. Which means I am forced to visit england under an alias, but that’s ok, I can come up with at least two.

By: K

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 02:30:12 +0000

Hey you guys have to know that a signle Chinese word can have many meanings.
If you are looking for a particular meaning, you have to choose a vocabulary, which is usually combined with two or more Chinese characters.
e.g. 敗 has the meaning of lose, to be defeated, to ruin and to damage, but 失敗 means fail >^

By: Terry

Terry — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:34:58 +0000

Reminds me of the girl who wanted a tattoo and patronized a Chinese restaurant by the name of Jade Gate in San Francisco.

There were cool Chinese characters under the name on the menu, which she thought were the Chinese translation, so she swiped the menu and had those characters tattooed over her mons.

It was months later, when she finally found out that what she had tattooed over her “Jade Gate” actually meant “Cheap and Tasty”.

Poetic justice, I say.

By: smiddenkidden

smiddenkidden — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:03:19 +0000

really? seriously? tattooing isn’t like hawking sunglasses at the mall. if you tell that vapid soulless zombie lookalike that the huge sunglasses that are currently taking up 99% of her face look really super hawt, oh well. just one more poptart wannabe running around looking like an even bigger ass. tattooing bullsh*t on people’s skin is not just irresponsible as a person, it’s terrible for your business. tattooist aren’t like they were 100 years ago, just some shady guy in the back of a shop, smoking and slinging ink. today they’re artists, many of them with art degrees and years of apprenticeship to their name. they work hard establishing their name and reputation, so throwing random designs on people that can reflect badly on them as the artist isn’t something they want to do. i know quite a few guys who won’t touch kanji, etc at all. it’s just too hard to know if it’s really correct and they’re not willing to put a mistake on someone for life. a good tattoo artist won’t put money over reputation. their reputation is all they have, it puts the food on the table. lose your reputation and you might as well be just some guy slinging ink in the basement of a crack house.

By: Lolcatz or Layla n Amentia or whatevs

Lolcatz or Layla n Amentia or whatevs — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:40:42 +0000

This is my name in Japanese:

アマンダ

By: caitie

caitie — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:07:48 +0000

no kidding, and most of these “masters” learned the language through kingdom hearts, anime or their online “girlfriends” abroad. i went to the defense language institute AND studied at Korea University while working as a linguist and i STILL know how far i am from being bilingual. let’s stop tooting our own horns and tearing each other down, huh? maturity, children. go ahead, call me a hypocrite. at least i have credentials to back up my horn tooting.

By: skwirly

skwirly — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:53:49 +0000

I really want to have a bunch of t-shirts printed up with “stupid white person” in chinese so that i can sell them.

By: jessalley

jessalley — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:50:47 +0000

That tattoo is fail and funny!

By: jessalley

jessalley — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:35:37 +0000

that tattoo is a fail!

By: 光る

光る — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:04:31 +0000

You spelled your name wrong, sayanara, it should be さよなら, sayonara.

… this just goes to show you, you can’t mention complicated languages without a resulting string of boasts of mastery of the language.

By: Ninny

Ninny — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:25:41 +0000

http://www.hanzismatter.com/

By: sayanara

sayanara — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:52:38 +0000

A workmate once got a load of chinese/japanese scrawled up his arm, and wouldn’t tell what it meant, so I spread it around that it was his order at the takeaway, for when he was too drunk to speak. Knowing him, it probably was…

By: John

John — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:45:51 +0000

I lived in Japan a while, many foreigners keep their katakana, but some find kanji that sound like their names to use, and its very acceptable, as many japanese names themselves dont have any meaning.
I didn’t because its impossible to get any japanese words that sound like the name John.

By: Katie

Katie — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:32:20 +0000

So random Torchwood/Doctor Who reference? lol.

I would like to see that.

By: clickclick

clickclick — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:49:08 +0000

May be in English, but not necessarily in another language.

By: Holly

Holly — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:55:39 +0000

It’s not the tattoo artist’s job to do research on your ink. I mean what fun would it be if they had to turn away all of the douchebags that want something really, really stupid permanently inked onto their body because it’s not “morally right” to tattoo them with stupidity? The artists would never make any money!

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:17:18 +0000

“Ireland” in Japanese would be “アイルランド” = “Airurando”, so that definitely isn’t what she got.

This reminds me of the one time I was with a friend who was getting a tattoo, while flipping through one of the portfolios in the shop there was a picture of a girl who supposedly had “Love. Laugh. Life” written on her back in Japanese… unfortunately whoever did it just changed the font on their computer to Japanese and typed out the alphabet, so it came out as “フマヨナ。フチユムネ。フノニナ。” which is definitely not what she was going for.

I wish artists would do research before they’re like “Oh yeah, I can permanently etch Japanese into your back.”

By: Bramblears

Bramblears — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:19:05 +0000

so do I! i used to send things like: “Do you like waffles? Yeah we like waffles!” “A duck walked up to a lemonade stand” “Sonic screwdriver” “Have you seen a blowfish driving a sports car?” and “String rules!” and send them to my chinese friends until once I wrote in “I like traffic lights” and one of my friends pointed out to me that it somehow roughly translated to “I like gay men”

By: Stormy

Stormy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:58:19 +0000

I love tying random words into Babelfish.

By: paws4thot

paws4thot — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:22:37 +0000

Eirinn is an Erse (Irish Gaelic) word: Erin is a poetic word. In context, they both mean ireland.

By: Mya

Mya — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:16:10 +0000

EIRINN means Ireland. Not Erin. The two words are completely different. D:

By: Me

Me — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:58:19 +0000

Actually the most (perhaps all) names have a meaning…

By: Nono

Nono — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:51:12 +0000

So how do you call those westerners who make fun of Chinese people for being bad at English? Engrish?

By: smith jones

smith jones — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:36:41 +0000

i like the binding contract one rather a lot. i used those exact words in my wedding vows…. better than a promise if you ask me. especially because it actually is a binding legal contract

By: April

April — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:06:34 +0000

Maaku (Mark) would actually be マーク. Long vowels are represented by bars in katakana.

By: Word

Word — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:57:33 +0000

WORD!
Do something special. Picture your best feeling and get it on your skin. Thats so much better than copy and paste from *Place Culture/Language here*.

By: Lola

Lola — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:56:38 +0000

Not in Japanese, any foreigner word or name in Japanese should be written in Katakana with the closest possible solution, kanji would never be used, unless, like you said, you can translate the whole name like Lucy to Hikari, but that’s is rare and also not an exact science.
EX : Lucy = Rushi = ルシ
　　　Mark = Maaku = マアク
　　Alex = Arekusu = アレクス

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:55:26 +0000

The romanticism around asian character tattoos seems to come from the need to be mysterious, graceful, and educated. It’s mysterious because only “you” know the “meaning.” Of course, this doesn’t work out because most people don’t really know a lot about the language or the characters, so they think they have a really meaningful tat. I think the important thing in that case is what the tat means to YOU/the owner, not its literal translation. Graceful because the characters are often beautiful aesthetically. And educated because, before the frenzy of getting these characters tattooed, it might have been a very cultured and educated thing to do, if the client actually knew about the character they were getting. I think the asian tats would be appropriate if the person truly appreciated the culture the symbol came from and understood its meaning, beyond looking it up on google (knowing where it comes from, how it is used by people in that culture, etc.) Otherwise, for people who just want the romantic idea of having some pretty symbol that is very meaningful to him/her and mysterious to others, you might as well concoct your own symbol or choose something that has been meaningful to you for a long time, instead of just borrowing something from someone else’s culture and pretending it means what you want it to. That’s all.

By: H

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:46:00 +0000

I hate to tell you this, but “strange” and “mysterious” are synonyms. Like, I mean, in English.

By: none

none — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:16:55 +0000

How dare these chinese ppl make fun of westerners for being bad at chinese! It’s waaaaacist!

By: D. Thomas

D. Thomas — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:28:29 +0000

I think that if you get a tat in a language you don’t know and are relying on the artist to translate, You deserve to fall prey to his whimsy. Than you have a constant reminder that research is paramount. Oh and p.s., your Dragon & Tiger symbols are reversed. If that was on purpose, kudos, I love it.

By: Everlasting Slopgobbler

Everlasting Slopgobbler — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:40:07 +0000

looky here has it written as ookina chinGO…should be chinKO

By: Jojo

Jojo — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:02:55 +0000

Not making fun of Asian tattoos, but of people who don’t bother to find out what they are getting, or assume it means something it doesn’t. It could be any language and still a fail.

By: Ayeka678

Ayeka678 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:53:50 +0000

I have the Japanese character for “strange”. I felt it was a most apt description of me. Unfortunately it is the same one that Britney Spears has (if you want to see what it looks like. Apparently she thought it meant “mysterious”)

By: curlycake

curlycake — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:39:55 +0000

Erin means Ireland, and could have been translated!

By: Meowth

Meowth — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:13:50 +0000

Your lovely (?) is not as straight as you might think.

By: Toby

Toby — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:51:40 +0000

The main purpose of the tat site is to highlight tattoos that are ugly, in bad taste, or just cheesy, so while the point may not fit in perfectly at Engrish Funny (like the middle tattoo being correct), it would’ve been important for Ugliest Tattoos to point it out because, well, it’s really ugly. Really.

Also the two other tats are “close enough”, sure, but it’s emphasizing another Ugliest Tattoos point — that people should actually do a bit of research before tattooing something on their body, which just makes them look careless.

By: Misti

Misti — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:55:53 +0000

My sentiments exactly, though you worded it much better.

By: CHT

CHT — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:54:06 +0000

stop COPY & PASTE from translators

YOU dumbass

By: An Cat Dubh

An Cat Dubh — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:53:29 +0000

If you walk around the pathway by the beach at Eilat (the ‘Tayelet’), you can see tonnes of booths offering Chinese character tattoos. It’s kinda funny they’re all upside-down or left-to-right…
Oh, and by the way, ‘dragon’ should be 龍. That’s the pretty traditional character. The simplified ones make you look simple and uneducated to the common Chinese.

By: //Ann

//Ann — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:09:19 +0000

Actually, I think it was more of an ad for the tat site, trying to capitalize on an imagined or manufactured tie-in. It wasn’t a great offering here, and probably not there, either, but I wouldn’t rank it a FAIL. Maybe a C-minus – blah, h-hum, but not entirely horrible.

By: hikari

hikari — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:42:33 +0000

Which is exactly how a lot of names are transliterated in to Japanese, unless your name actually has a meaning that you can translate and use, e.g. Lucy, which means “light”, can be translated to “hikari”.

By: Lesser Grapefruit

Lesser Grapefruit — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:47:18 +0000

Chingo? I thought it was chinpo or chinchin…

By: Vince

Vince — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:37:40 +0000

I think he’s pointing out how utterly fail this episode of Engrish Funny (?) was.

By: Vince

Vince — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:36:35 +0000

Irony: that’s exactly how early Japanese writers adapted the Chinese characters they “borrowed” to write out Japanese.

As usual, the most recent EngrishFunny’s attempt at making fun of asian tattoos falls utterly flat, just like the last one did.

By: L.

L. — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:28:56 +0000

The tattoo doesn’t belong to ‘Kris’ dumbass, you’d know that if you could read.

许诺 or 誓言 would work better.

By: SeeEff

SeeEff — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:17:44 +0000

@Queen V: It seems obvious to me that Junkyard’s point is that while this “feature” was mainly supposed to be about these tats meaning something other than what the recipients thought they meant, with ostensibly hilarious results– and yet the 3 “favorites” provided as examples turn out to be rather un-hilarious in all 3 cases, totally correct in one case, and pretty darn close to the intended meaning in the other case. You may disagree, but it seems clear that Junkyard was calling this a premise/humor fail.

By: Queen V

Queen V — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:49:18 +0000

Get a life. Oh, the irony of me posting that…

By: Queen V

Queen V — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:45:46 +0000

What is the point you’re trying to make? you’re jsut randomly going to repeat stuff that article said? Oh you’re so edgy!