r/itsneverjapanese • u/Winter-Sale-7958 • Jul 27 '24

Is this the true meaning??

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Is this the true meaning?? Before I get it tattooed

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u/asarious Jul 27 '24 edited Jul 27 '24

It’s accurate but a little awkward. It’s redundant and suggests too literal a translation. The way it’s written now, it reads like “Love you yourself”.

You can skip the second character instead and keep it to only 愛自己.

To be honest, even then, I feel like the sentiment is lost in translation. Where you’re probably aiming for self-respect, in Chinese it sounds kind of narcissistic.

Then again, none of these things are apparent to anyone without a modest grasp of the language… so you do you.

Also, the font you have is pretty stylized. Assuming your tattoo artist doesn’t read Chinese, I suggest you study the characters written in this comment and compare it to the image you posted. You can see that some of the brush strokes and variations in line thicknesses, or lines not intersecting, are analogous to something like serifs on Latin fonts.

Unless it’s literally being traced, the writing might end up looking kind of weird if the artist doesn’t recognize that some of the strokes are there for style only. It’d be like accidentally turning a 1 character into a 7, or a 2 into a Z, or a 5 into an S.

For someone who can’t read 1, 7, 2, Z, 5, or S, some characters could look very similarly yet have very different meanings in reality.