1 "Anshin shite" is very common, and it means "be at peace" literally. Gerund and (polite) order are exactly the same: it is called "te form".

2

I wonder if what I was hearing was a regional accent, then, or pronunciation drift. The "n-sh" definitely had drifted to become an "s", but that's the kind of thing that can happen. (The English analogy is the way that "going to" has become "gonna".)

So while I've got your attention, I've heard another one. Sounds to me like wauri and they translate it as "sorry". I just now heard it in TM:GXP and I've also heard it in DBZ.

3 Warui. Meaning is pretty close to "My bad", both literally and as to the level of formality involved.

4 Thanks for the help! I've been making a bunch of changes to my "Next hundred" list recently, mostly based on help I've been getting from youse.

5 That appears to be directly taken from Chinese. The first character "an" is used to indicate peace, contentment, safety, or the like. The second character "xin" indicates the heart. Thus, AnXin (pronounced ann-sheen) would translate directly as "peaceful heart". Babelfish translates it as "relieved" -- But my Oxford Chinese dictionary says it means "feel at east" or "set one's mind at rest".

I often find very close affinity between Japanese written characters (the Kanji, i mean) and the Chinese definitions, even though the pronunciation usually differs. Which makes sense, I guess. This one seems to be directly transferred, characters, meaning, and pronunciation. Interesting.

6

Sometimes the Chinese meaning of the kanji is a big hint. Probably more often than not, in fact.

But it's not uncommon at all for kanji to be used strictly phonetically, without regard for the Chinese meaning. That's pretty much the rule in names, but it happens in other places, too.

My favorite example of that is 馬鹿野郎

馬 ba horse
鹿 ka deer
野 ya civilian life
郎 rou son

The whole is baka yarou which means "stupid scoundrel". In practical use it's just a stronger form of baka, the all purpose insult. It's apparent that it has little or nothing to do with the literal meaning of the kanji. They've been used phonetically.

I don't have any examples to hand, but when I'm scrounging in the dictionary I commonly come across cases where the same word, with the same meaning, can be spelled more than one way, using different kanji. The kanji in question are not close in meaning, and it's apparent that these are cases of homonyms where a standard spelling hasn't been nailed down. In those cases, too, the kanji are being used phonetically rather than for meaning.

As to anshin 安心 it's a noun. (If Babelfish made it "relieved" then it's blown the part of speech, because "relieved" is a participle.) One meaning of it does refer to Buddhism, but that one is pronounced anjin rather than anshin.

7

Also, language is a living thing. Words change in meaning over time. The kanji used in Japanese were borrowed from China a long time ago, several centuries. There was a long period of mutual contempt in which there was not much cultural cross-mixing, and during that time some kanji in Japan drifted in meaning, in some cases by quite a lot.

So even in some cases where a kanji is used for meaning, it still doesn't mean what the Chinese would think it meant.