Mr. International
Lest anyone believe that Red Sox Nation, or the American nation, has the market cornered on Matsuzaka Mania, check out the Nikkan Sports page dedicated to "Dice-K" coverage. It's all in Japanese, but there are pretty pictures. I don't recall this ever being done for Ichiro or Matsui. We're through the looking glass people....I had to comment on the picture below. I love these kids. What a great effort in asking for Matsuzaka to sign their ball. The Japanese is perfectly awful, but score one for effort. I have to think that they typed English directly into AltaVista's BabelFish and it spit out this Japanese. Excellent.
posted by Mike Plugh @ 10:07 PM
10 Comments:
cool... but what does the sign mean?
It says something like:
Mr. Matsuzaka, how about you can signature my sport of baseball. (a statement, not a question.)
Broken Japanese or not, that's still a really cute picture.
The sign reads, "Mr. Matsuzaka, you can, please, write your name on my baseball." Daisuke might have a little problem understanding the kid's intention if this is his first time to see a sign like this. But, I'm sure he will get used to something like this after a while and be nice to the kid fans.
Mr. H,
It actually doesn't say anything about the kids actual ball. It says "sport of baseball" or "yakyu". If the kids wanted to have their ball autographed they should have called it a "ボール", as in soccer ball (サッカーボール), probably. They also used the noun form of autograph rather than the more useful "サインに" which is common usage for "to give a signature or autograph".
Still, as mouse said they are very cute kids and I think they did great. Forgive my pedantic commentary. ;)
I thought using どうか while making a request was rather rude, but the kids didn't know and I don't think Matsuzaka would mind. He'd probably get a kick out of it.
No...the phrase "どうか" means very close to "please". It's kinda proper etiquette.
But I guess Dice-K might be a little bit confused in reading this since the way the kid uses "できる" is very weird. Nevertheless, they are cute.
So Mike -
I'll be heading down to Florida in a week or so... what would the proper (and polite) phrase be to ask for an autograph?
[bonus points if you would give both the kanji and phonetic 'spellings']
Thanks a lot.
"Matsuzaka-san, sa-i-n wo onegai-shimasu!"
松坂さん、サインをお願いします！
this is what Japanese fans would say.
(Mr. Matsuzaka, could you give us your autograph, please?)
thanks very much... we'll see what happens.
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