A single turn of the heart machine!

心機一転
shin.ki.i-.tten

Literally: heart – mechanism – one – turn

Alternately: A complete change (for the better) in one’s emotional state in response to something. A fresh outlook on life. Turning over a new leaf.

Notes: There are many ways to get this one wrong: for shinki, 新規, 新気, 心気, and 心器 are all possible renderings that people may try. All are incorrect. This does offer an interesting insight, though, into how people’s minds interact with kanji. It seems that the phonetic and semantic information is easier to retrieve than the associated visual symbol, leading people to use kanji with the same pronunciation that produce related, or at least plausible, meanings.

The image for... an internet-radio channel? - of songs that supposedly can help you achieve 心機一転.

The image for… an internet-radio channel? – of songs that supposedly can help you achieve 心機一転.

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
This entry was posted in Japanese, Yojijukugo and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s