Roused by @optiMSTie’s example, shall we expand our Japanese poetry to the next level? The tanka style involves five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, five syllables in the third line, seven syllables in the fourth line, and seven syllables in the fifth and final line.
A tanka doesn’t need to rhyme, and punctuation/capitalization are entirely up to you. Here’s an sample of a MST3K-based tanka:
Torgo? Ladies man? His hand feeling all around The wives are not pleased Especially The Master We may have to massage him
The thread caused me to look up some stuff, because the Japanese language phonetic structure is a bit different than English, and I wasn’t sure that syllables would make much sense. I believe they use “length of pronunciation” or “beats”.
As an example, in English “Tokyo” would count as 3 syllables. In Japanese it’s written 東京 which is phonetically written as とうきょう and sounds like Tōkyō where each of the ōs are pronounced over two beats and the y is not really a syllable, so its 4 beats in Japanese.
Also, I believe the character ん which mostly sounds like an n counts as a beat. So something like tempura in English which is 3 syllables would be てんぷら in Japanese and count as 4 beats.
From what I have read the rules for haikus and such are a bit weirder when converted to German and French, but I haven’t looked into it too much.
