What time is it? It appears to be StudyOke! time! Today, we're going to look at Angela Aki's Answer, and how to talk about math in Japanese.
About the Song
Angela Aki's path to J-Pop success was not an easy one. With
a Japanese father and Italian-American mother, growing up in a rural town in
mostly rural Shikoku made her an automatic outsider. Moving to the US, she started her path a secretary in Washington DC, but soon
quit to pursue a career in music.
After playing music in a US club, she was able to get work
with Japanese music companies and moved back to Japan. Still working odd jobs
and without a major contract, Angela continued writing and composing. Her
mini-album One was the highest selling indie album of 2005. This got her the
attention of famed video game music composer Nobuo Uematsu and a spot writing
and singing Kiss Me Good-Bye for Final Fantasy XII.
While Angela Aki isn’t a multi-platinum megastar like some
of the other artists we've looked at for StudyOke!, her determination and
persistence is inspiring. A complete unknown in 2003, in 2006 she
became the first solo act ever to play Tokyo's Budokan hall - just her and her piano. This strength and
determination shines through in her piano-driven pop that compares well to Ben
Folds Five (who she has collaborated with).
Answer was the title track of Angela's third album, and
while it wasn't released as a single, it is a personal favorite.
Today's Topic: Doing the Maths
There are several great grammar points in Answer that we
could look at, including a few we've covered in the past (bonus points – is 冷たくしてしまう/tsumetaku shite shimau used
in the 'to do completely sense' or the 'crap, I did it' sense?). But Answer has
one thing that you'll see in almost no other J-Pop song: math.
Now I can barely do math in English, so having this catchy
song definitely helped me learn how to math in Japanese. Answer starts out with
a presumably male character jokingly/seriously asking the singer to write a
song for him. The singer tries, but expressing their relationship in words
proves too difficult. Instead, she decides:
昔から言葉より数学のほうが得意で
何気なく計算を始めたら
Since I've always been better at math than words,
I started calculating without thinking...
Wow, that’s the complete opposite of me – and kind of
surprising for a singer-songwriter. At any rate, ending the sentence with a
dangling ~tara indicates that the thought will continue in the next line – in
this case, in the chorus:
友達と恋人を 足してそれを２で割ると
答えはあなたなんだと気がついた
Tomodachi to koibito wo Tashite sore wo 2 de waru to
Kotae wa anata nanda to ki ga tsuita
Okay, so “friend and lover add that by two divide and...” That got real complicated real fast. Before we start unraveling this
equation, let’s first look at the basics of math in Japanese.
Get it?
Okay, now that we've looked at each operation
individually, let's look at Angela's math again:
友達と恋人を足してそれを２で割る
Tomodachi to koibito wo Tashite sore wo 2 de waru
So first, we look and see that there are two distinct
mathematical operations going on here, joined by a ~te verb (tashite). That
means that the first math problem must be resolved before the second one is
applied. And what is our first math operation? Tomodatchi to koibito wo
tashite:
(Friend + Lover) = X
The second operation is sore wo 2 de waru - so divide the
sum of Friend and Lover by two:
(Friend + Lover) / 2 = X
But how to resolve this strange equation? According to Aki,
once she did the math, the answer was:
答えはあなたなんだと気がついた
Kotae wa anata nanda to ki ga tsuita
(Friend + Lover) / 2 = You!
Note that the verb 割る (waru) should be used when speaking
of mathematical division. Later Aki uses the phrase:
喜びも悲しみも あなたと分け合える
Yorokobi mo kanashimi mo Anata to wakeaeru
分け合える (wakearu) can also be translated as "divide," but with the sense of splitting up between people. In
this case, Aki and her Friend+Lover are sharing happiness and sadness, dividing
it between themselves. This is why she "feels the meaning of life" and why he is her Answer.
There are other strange equations scattered throughout
the song, but I'll leave them as an exercise for the reader. They follow the
same logic and grammar that we discussed above, so you shouldn't have any
trouble teasing them out.
Still, Answer only covers two types of math – addition and
division. Let's try making an equation of our own with subtraction and
multiplication!
友達と恋人を引いてそれを２で掛ける
答えは独身二人と気がついた
Tomodatchi to koibito wo hiite sore wo 2 de kakeru
Kotae wa dokushin futari to ki ga tsuita
Subtract "Friend" and "Lover" and then
multiply that by two and then -
I noticed that the solution was two singles
Hopefully your personal math of love works out more like
Angela Aki's than that example. Until next time, keep doing the maths and keep
StudyOkeing!
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