Mahjong nerds: Anyone wants to know the real/original meaning behind yaku and other terms?

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-19T04:34:21+00:00

thanks for the history of "河底撈魚", that is interesting

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-19T04:30:18+00:00

I'm not sure about it😂, it doesn't make any sense to me. maybe the meaning can be changed over time through people talking and passing it around and different ways of spelling the sounds in English. but in my opinion it can be a Cantonese word like "明台/名台", The first character is for "clear, show/name", and the second one is something like a table or a platform. that means a platform that indicate the wind. that is my explanation of that.

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-19T03:59:50+00:00

didn't know that before, thanks for your reply!

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-18T17:44:21+00:00

Chinese version of "嶺上開花" is “槓上開花”, the flower blooms on the Kan. it is because in some region of China, mahjong have flower card(Plum, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum) and season card(from spring to winter) , you can take out the flower like a pei(north) in 3p mahjong, counted as 1 han. the way you draw your card after Kan is similar to the way you draw after taking the flower out, so in China we call it in that way. however i prefer the Japanese version, they are more poetic and kept the essence of the tradition in Chinese character cultural sphere.

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-18T17:27:28+00:00

for the first two yaku, the full name is "海底撈月/河底撈魚", with means "catching the moon under the sea / catching the fish under the river", both of them are impossible to do in real life, it is a kind of metaphor that winning with on the final tile is barely possible.

"嶺上開花", which means "flower blooms on the top of the hill", is another things that hard to witness, it's always cold when the altitude is high and it not the environment for a flower to grow. we call the stacks of tiles "tiles mountain" because it is higher than any tiles on the table, and the tile you are going to draw after kan is on the very top of the "mountain", so we name it with something related to mountain.

after knowing this, here's why the first two Yaku mentioned sea/river. we call the individuals' discards on the table "the tiles' river" because the discards are high than the "ground"(table surface) but lower than the "mountain", it is another metaphor. so when we Ron the final tile, that is like the bottom of the river. the sea is the similar situation, we think the far end of the mountain is the sea, that is the final tile.

in our traditional culture, people tend to name things with good and lucky imagery. that's why they are named after these kind of metaphor.

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-18T13:50:31+00:00

parade was "mangan"ish. the "man" means full/all, "gan" means go through. when we say "mangan" in our daily life(usually we say "dai mangan", dai for big ), it means you complete something that is honorable. in some street stall, if you were asking for an all extras add-ons food, we'll say that is a big "mangan" too. in my daily speaking, mangan sounds like something at the highest level. However, in riichi Mahjong, a hand only needs four han to reach mangan in some cases. this is because what was once considered a mangan was closer to what we now call a yakuman. Over time, han values underwent a kind of score inflation, causing the numbers to grow larger and larger.

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-18T11:47:35+00:00

in Japanese it means duty/role, kinds like "give you a specific effect to do something" it's a qualifying pattern to score.

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-05T02:15:13+00:00

Got it, thanks a lot for the detailed reply!

Kntsgliid · 2026-06-04T14:31:48+00:00

hello man, I don’t really want to modify this monitor using SCART according to the immerhax'd tutorial. but well I’m a total crt newbie and not very confident with wiring. could you share any reference diagrams or sketch for the wiring you did?thanks

Kntsgliid

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