Warning: This blog post is about the Japanese language. If you're not learning Japanese, this post is probably not interesting to you.
A friend who had traveled to Japan brought back the book "Japanese Stories for Language Learners: Bilingual Stories in Japanese and English" by Anne McNulty & Eriko Sato, illustrated by Rose Goldberg (StoryGraph link). It contains five short stories, in English and in Japanese.
I'm going to translate these five stories, one sentence at a time, and walk you through the translation.
The title of the first story is 浦島太郎 (うらしまたろう, Urashima Tarо̄). It's the name of the main character, where Tarо̄ is the given name (and a common name for a Japanese man) and Urashima is the surname.
The first kanji of the surname, 浦, means "inlet" or "seashore, beach" on its own (also pronounced うら, ura). This is one of the jо̄yо̄ kanji, the roughly 2000 kanji taught in Japanese primary and secondary school, and you're supposed to know it for the N1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), the last of the JLPT tests. (Unless indicated otherwise, all kanji mentioned from here on in are jо̄yо̄ kanji.) The standalone kanji is the only common word containing this kanji.
The second kanji of the surname, 島, means "island" on its own (also pronounced しま, shima). (It can also mean the territory or turf of a gang or a prostitute.) This is JLPT level N2. There are 17 common words containing this kanji. You might encounter it as the "shima" in "Hiroshima" (広島, ひろしま, literally "the wide island"), the 6th largest city in Japan.
The first two kanji together are not a word, only a name.
The first kanji of the given name, 太, means "fat" (noun) or "fatty" (noun as prefix) on its own (pronounced ふと, futo). This is JLPT level N3. There are 24 common words containing this kanji, including 太い (ふとい, futoi) meaning fat, and 太陽 (たいよう, taiyо̄) meaning the Sun.
The last kanji of the given name, 郎, means "son" (as a counter) on its own (also pronounced ろう, rо̄). This is JLPT level N1. There are 82 common words containing this kanji. Combined with 太, the combination 太郎 literally means "first-born son."
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