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pelamis22 (Offline)
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Seishinryoku kanji tattoo - 12-21-2010, 07:29 PM

Hello

I want to have a kanji tattoo and I've picked 精神力.

What do you think about it? Especially how its sounds and looks for a native Japanese person. I want some pompous epic saying, quote or phrase.

Seishinryoku seems right as long as we translate it into 'strength of power'
'strength of will', 'power of will'.

In european languages when we say 'strength, power' we mean 'strong power' and sometimes we add the adjective strong. How it is is in Japanese?
The word seishinryoku is neutral or points to strong seishinryoku?

This is how I see it: In our life we have to overcome dozens of troubles and problems so we need (strong) seishinryoku to cope with them, and we need seishinryoku to achive our goals like interests and hobbies so with a lot of effort we can master them( like playing piano or basketball). When we have seishinryoku we put a lot of effort in what we do and we work hard to obtain what we wanted and for what we try so hard. If we dont have seishinryoku we r lazy unreliable and so on.

Pls share your opinions.
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ryuurui (Offline)
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12-21-2010, 07:52 PM

Tattoo needs to find you and not the other way around. Also, it is not so important what it means to others, but what does it mean to you personally.
If you need to ask other people an opinion about your tattoo, it means you should skip it this time, and wait till you really ready for it. When the day comes, you will not have to ask.
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pelamis22 (Offline)
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12-21-2010, 08:25 PM

I am pretty sure what it means for me and thats why i want to make this tattoo.
My question is rather linguistic. My Japanese is not so advanced to actually 'feel' this word.

Many people have kanji tattoos with their names so such tattoo is phonetically similar to western name but kanjis together has no meaning or make it gibberish so thats why it may sound funny.

Another thing is that I want to be sure that in Japanese seishinryoku really means 'power of will' and refers to some extraordinary part of our being. You know to avoid such situation that someone can tell me that eg. seishinryoku is just a word meaning 'mood' or 'humour' and u can be in a good seishinryoku when you got bonus check or in a bad seishinryoku when u argued with ur gf.

So i just want to make sure that the word seishinryoku refers to some spiritual , magic part of ur life not to everyday routine
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ryuurui (Offline)
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12-21-2010, 10:29 PM

精神力 means force of will, emotional strength, as in power that comes from within. 精神 is mind, soul, heart, i.e. your spiritual "you".
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