Notes taken with a 0.7mm pencil.
J. is back with vegneance from his trip to Japan and reports that Kakitori-kun, a kanji practice game for DS, was updated. Unfortunately, I have already suggested my family members to get me 250man kanken. It is an improved version of the 200man kanken, which I have. J tried both and liked Kakitori-kun better, so I wanted to try it out, but it’s too late. There’s no brand loyalty here, I just wasn’t informed in time.
The gum wrappers come with puzzles on the wrappers, all in hiragana for pre-schoolers.
The question is: “〇なかにことばをいれてネ”.
Once I figured out that “irete” means “insert” in this case, I was able to guess 4 out of 5.
The mailman delivered a surprise package today: Canon Wordtank G70 that I ordered from White Rabbit two days ago.
God I love capitalism.
Incidentially, White Rabbit was also cheaper than eBay sellers, to say nothing of generic stores like GoodsFromJapan. I credit J. Greely for the reference, he had gotten his DS games from them. Oh, and Amazon.co.jp sucks: their Wordtank is geographically restricted.
UPDATE: SDB has a point, a PC connection would be quite useful. In my case, actually, it was a tough choice between The Green Goddess (which was de-romanized for the 5th edition, banzai) and the Wordtank; neither option allows interaction with PC. The Wordtank won because a) it contains the Green Goddess (unlike other electronic dictionaries, most are based on Genius), b) it’s chaper, c) I can take it along to my imminent trip to TAF in March.
A banner in a local restaurant is a print of Mitsuo Aida’s writing.
It says, “つまづいたっていいじゃないか にんげんだもの”, all in hiragana. Still, it took me quite a while to figure it out, largely because of “du”. The word in front is actually “tsumazuku”, “to stumble”. Ergo, “It were ok for me to stumble, I’m only human”. Or something like that.
I don’t have a foggiest idea when it is appropriate to use “du”, so it’s one of those mysteries.
This is how far watching anime can take you:
Level: 4, Section 1: 89, Section 2: 71, Section 3: 164, Total: 324, Result: Pass
In practical terms, this is not enough to watch raws indiscriminately, but in most cases the second pass with subtitles off is doable.
The Successor of The Game With The Longest Name Ever, or, in short, KanKen 250man, throws the following at me sometimes:
I completely failed at solving this, but J. Greely has a more extensive background (do you know why a 5-yen ball has 9 characters on it?), so he ovecomes this difficulty easily:
I cannot figure out one excercise in the Kanken 250man. It shows something (usually a kana), a counter, and two choices: “haneru” and “tomeru”. Do you happen to know what it wants me to do?The correct answer is “haneru”. The question is: “does the fifth stroke of kita end in a stop or a hook?”. Yes, this one took me a while to figure out. :-)
J.-sensei OTZ
UPDATE: Most computer fonts are useless for this kind of thing. Here’s the “kita” on your computer:
Here’s how it looks at my current rig at 56 points (Fedora Linux 9 Alpha with Firefox 3 Beta using vague system defaults):
And here’s the picture in Kyoukasho font which J. Greely was so kind to send along:
Before I broke down and bought a Kyoukasho font in OpenType format, I found lots of links to a Ricoh Kaisho font online, hgrskp.ttf. It appears to have been widely distributed with their printer drivers, and passed around ever since.
Kaisho is the basic, stroke-accurate calligraphy style. Kyoukasho was designed for schoolbooks, and is the shape of a standard book Mincho with the stroke style of a Kaisho.
The idea seemed simple enough: play the game, learn kanji. And it went pretty well for a while. But when I hit level 3, I realized that it’s completely unworkable. The problem is, I need to take the material in small dozes, to allow kanji to get digested. But KanKen only has 10 levels for 10,000 kanji… and the distribution is progressive. I don’t know how many were at the level 1, I knew most of them. Level 2 was about 80 kanji: a shade harder. Level 3 went for 230 kanji thus far. By level 5 I’ll have to take 800 in one go.
I’m starting to think that I made a mistake; should have gone with Kakitori-kun.
Regarding the bust size chart J.P. linked at the very bottom, Ubu asks:
I had assumed that the Japanese text was a translation of their names, but if you look at it, there’s English punctuation throughout. In fact, Eila Juutilainen’s is only a question mark. So what are they saying?
It’s a bit tough for me to figure out, but these phrases appear to be their remarks in regards to their chart position. I looked up a couple of them:
Sakamoto: 泣くな宮藤 (”crying Miyafuji” (?) [Please feel free to e-mail me if you know what this actually means — Author.])
Perrine: 屈辱 (くつじょく)です…ね (”humiliating, isn’t it”)
Sanya: 特に…何も (”nothing in particular”)
Or perhaps they are just general character notes. In that case, Perrine is humiliated by Mijafuji’s friendly terms with Mrs. Sakamoto, and not [only] her bust size.
You know, this Japanese thing is kinda fun.
UPDATE: Andrew emails:
泣くな宮藤 = Don’t cry, Miyafuji. Adding な to the end of a verb produces an informal negative imperative form. Basically, it tells someone not to do something. So 食べるな = Don’t eat, 見るな = Don’t look, and so on. One wishes that all of Japanese grammar were so simple…
Thanks. If I wanted to say “don’t cry”, I would use “泣かないで”. Which may not be correct; no idea where I picked that form.
UPDATE: J.Greely emailed with:
Nakanaide is a request (”Please don’t cry”), shortened from nakanaide kudasai; nakuna is an order (”You! Don’t cry!”).
[] The process for Index Ep 4 went something like:
Raw: Very superficial understanding. Overall impression was that the fight scene was unnecessarily interrupted by an over-long dialogue between Touma and Kaori.
Chinese sub: My Chinese reading isn’t all that good either, especially for traditional (rather than simplified) characters but I did get the gist – even though Touma got KO’ed physically, he won the debate on points.
Quality English sub: Oh, this all makes sense. All that blah blah/pera pera was important background and plot information. The viewer was given the history, present situation and future to-do alongside Touma and also, at least in my case, empathy with his rejection of Stiyl and Kaori’s methods.
I noticed recently that many people (well, bloggers) started doing this kind of thing all of a sudden. We try to watch raw even though honestly our Nihongo is just not there to support such habits. I know I have, although I am struggling to take the high road: I write more interesting parts down and translate. I had to do it with Frank’s problems with Mr.Eclair in Paris-ben 03, for example.
I’m not implying that Aroduc or Kuro watch raws without understanding what’s going on, not at all. And it’s not certain if I actually see a real movement towards raws or and artefact of the way blogospehere gives voice to the old guard. I dipped my toes into raw waters back when Manabi aired, so this takes time and time to develop.
At about 2:58 into ep.10 of first Nodame, Mine yells what sounds like “mihadomo(ga)”. It is translated as “groupies”.
Sadly, I was unable to find it in any dictionary. It’s either mispronounced/misheard, a compound word, or a slang that hasn’t filtered down into dictionaries yet.
UPDATE: Ryan added in comments to his secondary feed at Google (unfortunately, there’s no permalink — Google, you suck!):
In light of the slang, I believe it has a sarcastic tint to it 見張共, literally it probably refers “watch-guards” but not quite on the level of stalkers… I can feel the meaning, but can’t find a better term in English. I guess
Interesting. According to dic.yahoo.co.jp, only “miha” is a word, but not the compound.