I’m buying more and more pencils in no small part because of this forum so I’m considering upgrading from ebay, which everyone here seems to believe is overpriced, to proxy buying directly from Japan. Is there a glossary of common kanji/kana search terms? I’m thinking pencil brands and pencil technical terms. I’m not asking specialist collectors to share their secret sauce to summon underpriced Pilot automatics on demand, just how to write “Mitsubishi”, “Pentel”, “double knock”, “executive”, “sliding sleeve”, etc. Or should I just rely on the automatic translation on buyee?
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No secret sauce except I try to keep it simple. I will also limit things to the MP category most of the time or you get too many results to sift through. After using search terms, it’s good to also browse the MP section, sorting by new arrivals because you’ll come across items that you didn’t see in your searches but should’ve and can figure out why and adjust. Although sometimes sellers are extremely lax in what they put in their posts and no sane search term will find it.
| Side Knock | サイドノック |
| Double knock | ダブルノック |
| Mechanical Pencil | シャープペンシル |
| Pentel | ぺんてる |
| Pilot | パイロット |
| Faber-Castell | ファーバーカステル |
| Staedtler | ステッドラー |
| Staedtler Limited | ステッドラー 限定 |
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Most of us started by running terms through Google translate… especially the brand names.
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In the Pentel Catalogs Dropbox directory, I have an Excel sheet, _Japanese Translations.xlsx. This is primarily Pentel related, but a lot can be used for any pencil/pen.
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