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Just for fun, I'm curious about how native speakers do mental translation from Gregorian calendar year (e.g 2011) to Japanese era name 年号 (e.g. 平成２３年), and vice versa. Do you have special and preferably fun ways like mnemonics or children songs (something like the ABC song) to help you do the translation on-the-fly?

p/s: Due to subjectiveness of this question, I'm totally fine if this is made into community wiki.

Lukman
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    I doubt that this is a question about the language. – Tsuyoshi Ito Jun 19 '11 at 15:46
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    There have to be some difficulty years to deal with: 1989, 1926, 1912. Luckily the post-Meiji Japanese governments don't change era names every few years to have a better luck, so it's much easier. – Boaz Yaniv Jun 19 '11 at 17:02
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    I flagged it asking to make it community wiki. :) – Alenanno Jun 19 '11 at 17:52
  • does japanese applications usually show date based on gregorian or japanese era? – Pacerier Jun 19 '11 at 22:46
  • @ito: should be a valid question since it is uniquely associated with the Japanese language. We should talk about this in meta – crunchyt Jun 19 '11 at 23:59
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    @crunchyt: I do not think that the use of Japanese era names is uniquely associated with the Japanese language. – Tsuyoshi Ito Jun 20 '11 at 00:17
  • @Tsuyoshi - Let's discuss this over on Meta - http://meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/271/should-uniquely-cultural-questions-be-acceptable-in-jlu –  Jun 20 '11 at 12:47
  • @Tsuyoshi, do you or anyone know how to move this question to meta? I think it (and particularly cruncyt's answer) would be good over there :) – silvermaple May 26 '12 at 14:13
  • @silvermaple: I already expressed my opinion, and I do not think that this question has any place on japanese.stackexchange.com or meta for that matter. That said, moderators can move a question to meta with a single action. In principle, users with high rep points can first vote to reopen the question, and after it is reopened, they can vote to move it to meta. – Tsuyoshi Ito May 26 '12 at 16:33

1 Answers1

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From experience, I find Japanese people having lots of trouble converting between Japanese and Gregorian calendar years. I regularly surprise people with my ability to do that as follows (Japanese calendar years are often represented with an alphabet character like S or H.):

Showa Era (1925 to 1989)

  1. Subtract 1900 (e.g. 1976 - 1900 = 76)
  2. Subtract 25 (e.g. 76 - 25 = S 51)

Heisei Era (1989 to 2000)

  1. Count forward from 1989 (e.g. 1989 = H1, 1990 = H2, ...)

Heisei Era (2000 onwards)

  1. Add 11 to post-2000 Western date (e.g. 2010 = H21, 2011 = H22, ...)
crunchyt
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