Today's japanese lesson.

Today's phrase is 間違い, (まちがい)、meaning "mistake." I learned it while reading a manga and saw it used several times in rapid succession. As a verb, the spatial kanji at the beginning is chopped off: 違う (ちがう), and although the English is usually written "That's wrong," the correct translation is "That is a mistake," or "You are is mistaken." The word "wrong" in Japanese is 悪 (わる), and often comes across with a connotation of deliberate mischeif or maliciousness.

The sentence that caught my eye and made me look this all up is this one:

こりゃ何かの間違いだ。 間違いない！
I'm sure this is some kind of mistake. No doubt about it!

I especially liked the way 間違い was used twice in the same word bubble: once to convey its commonplace meaning, and in the second used colloquially. A better translation of the second sentence might be, "No mistake about it!"

Uh, okay...

Someone is going to have to explain to me how the Kanji Learner's Dictionary, which until this evening I have sworn by as the best Japanese dictionary for a third-year student like myself, could possibly be missing the word 誰, だれ, meaning "Who." As in "誰ですか？", "Who is that?" How is that even conceivable? Is the word "who" not one of the 2,230 most common words in Japanese? I think I use "who" in daily conversation a lot more often than I use "dishcloth", "feudal domain", or "slack".

A friend of mine who knows more Japanese than I do says it's probably because it usually is spelled out, だれ, rather than Kanjified, but it still seems like a weird omission, especially since hentai is hardly supposed to be run-to-the-dictionary reading.

I should probably have more slack, though. ね？