My Chinese Wife Diary (Web Comic / Blog)

Chou Toshio

Chou Toshio

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My Chinese Wife Diary

Hi guys, I'd like to introduce you all to something that has gotten me completely addicted over the last couple weeks. It's a web blog (comic?) drawn by a Japanese illustrator, retelling the odd, funny and romantic adventures living with his wife from China. Actually, it was my Japanese girlfriend who introduced this to me. Maybe I should write a series called "My Japanese Girlfriend Diary"???? The story is told in "Yon-Conma" (Japanese 4-panel Comic) format, commonly used for simple humor and daily life.


Let me introduce our main characters:

0intropic.png
837640dd.gif



Jin-san's comic/blog is a beautiful mix of funny and romantic, spinning together the delicious irony of cross-cultural and cross-gender differences. I hope you can all enjoy (and maybe learn a bit culturally!) the comics I will post here from his blog.

(Keep in mind, My Chinese Wife Diary is currently a completely free web comic, but exists only in Japanese-- so, I'm scanlating it... that is translate and editing it for English. If it's just Yon Conma I can manage somehow... please forgive the amateurish scanlations...)

*Also make sure to read this RIGHT --> LEFT, as it is a translation of a Japanese comic.
*Because the writer often writes in bits in Chinese (instead of Japanese), I will try to leave those parts in, giving you the Japanese/Chinese reading of the characters (assuming I can read the Chinese... generally can...) and keeping the cultural flavor he intended when he wrote it.

Please enjoy! (and comment, post, etc...)




1asexpectedofjapan.jpg

Original: http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/keumaya-china/imgs/a/f/af5db1f9.gif



sfree.jpg

Original: http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/keumaya-china/imgs/a/5/a58a1b1e.gif
(Take a look at it, editing that Lightning bolt panel was HARD-- I actually drew in lightning bolts...)



3happinessisclaspingaha.jpg

Original: http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/keumaya-china/imgs/9/a/9a12868d.gif

^Happiness comes, even to Otaku. TT^TT



More when I get the chance!
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._____.

I don't know... Fate? New World Order? Omicron? Someone wanna help here?

I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that they carry their own toilet paper and throw it in the trash can after use (and have stinky restrooms). Someone want to clarify??? 情教我們中國的廁所！！
 
Chou Toshio said:
....

....

....

._____.

I don't know... Fate? New World Order? Omicron? Someone wanna help here?

I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that they carry their own toilet paper and throw it in the trash can after use (and have stinky restrooms). Someone want to clarify??? 情教我們中國的廁所！！
Click to expand...

About 10-15 years ago, Chinese people brought there own toilet paper and just tossed it into a pit and a janitor would come clean it up every so often (worst job ever probably). Most big cities have toilets/toilet paper now since about a quarter of the people there are tourists. Nobody steals the toilet paper anymore (thank god).
 
@NWO--

some hero said:
Now i know why you are so into everything Asian.

Anyways, while i tend to avoid romance when possible i'll give this a try.
Click to expand...

I'm actually an Asian American (half Chinese and half Japanese). So if Yue and Jin have a kid, the result will be like me lol. So I like to think my obsession interest in asia is natural. btw, I've left Japan, but I've started a grad school program that has the second year in China soo...


Good to know NWO, thanks （明白了！！）; hope they're doing that in Guang Zhou too. Imma guess BYOP was still typical in Shen Yang at the point when Yue first went to Japan (as a high school student, she's 28 now).


@Kittenmay-- I know right!? Don't worry, next couple of chapters will about Food/chores
 
It's pretty cute! But I have to admit that there's something that really bothers me about how Jin is designed compared to how relatively cutesy everyone else is (after checking out some of the other comics). I'm kind of interested in finding out what's going on in those comics on page 83 where Yue ends up crying in bed.
 
Oh, well that chapter is really cute... I won't spoil it (it's one of the chapters I'm planning to translate...), but just be assured it's nothing offensive... really cute...
 
I'm interested, but could you please translate going forwards and not backwards? I'd enjoy it a bit more if we started from the start of the comic.

EDIT: Oh, I'd mistakenly assumed the ones on page 1 were the oldest given their relative lack of coloration compared to these; clearly, it was a smart idea to ignore the dates.
 
^breh, this is the start of the comic... The older chapters are in the later pages... the newer chapters are the ones on page 1 etc...

However, I am going to jump around a bit. I doubt think there is as much point to translating chapters that are either not as funny, or are simply too hard to understand for western audiences. I will definitely translate some of the chapters that make fun of language (since there are a lot of them, and they're essential to the story), but those that rely heavily on Japanese proverbs or Chinese speech patterns that rely too heavily on the reader's knowledge of those subjects to be funny... I may skip over some. Same with culture that people are likely to be totally confused by.

Anyway, two more chapters:

4japanisagoodcountry.jpg

Good yeah?

A note about "yeah"... Yue says it a LOT in my translations, at the end of a sentence. The reason is because Yue says "ne?" ネ？（ね？） a lot in the original Japanese.

Ne is used in Japanese frequently, as a word indicating the speaker's intention to confirm information that is generally agreed on / understood (or relatable too). In English, it would be like ending a casual sentence with "yeah?" or "right?"

Exp:

今日はいい天気ですね？
Kyou ha ii tenki desu ne?

Today we have good weather yeah?

ボトルは青いビンですね？
Botoru ha aoi bin desu ne?

Bottles go in the blue bin right?

However, in Yue's case, she often uses "ne?" incorrectly-- often using it when conferring new information or affirming her own opinion.

"Yesterday, I went to fish market and bought three fish yeah?"

More "Yue-go" (yue-speech) later!

5ittastyuz.jpg
 
Hey Chou, it could be the fact that I'm Canadian, but I find that "Eh?" is also a really good translation for ね. But then that would make Yue just sound Canadian... hahahahaha

Thanks for translating these, sadly my kanji level is too poor to understand a few of the finer points but I really appreciate the cultural differences especially on the Japanese side.
 
Yoshi King said:
Hey Chou, it could be the fact that I'm Canadian, but I find that "Eh?" is also a really good translation for ね. But then that would make Yue just sound Canadian... hahahahaha

Thanks for translating these, sadly my kanji level is too poor to understand a few of the finer points but I really appreciate the cultural differences especially on the Japanese side.
Click to expand...

funny, i was just about to make a point like this

i find when i speak japanese over here, however fragmented it is i still sound a bit better than i really am due to how comfortably i use 'ne'. as a canadian, it just feels like second nature.

edit: also this is super cute, thanks!
 
You're right about Canada's "eh?" overlapping pretty well with the Japanese ne?

In Hawaii (where I come from), people say "yeah?" to end their sentances a lot in a similar fashion, so I used that example (not sure if this is often used on the mainland US or UK/Aus/NZ)
 
You can ask Limi or probably a lot of other users, German has flavoring words (I think they're technically called modal particles) that really can't be translated without making it sound terrible. These are funny but can't compete with KOREAN COMICS
 
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