The voice actor in JP is also pretty good, was it Shimono Hiro? Yeah.
The problem is that he’s so talented you really get to hate the character because of how annoyingly he screams all the time.
2 Likes
I empathize with him. After all, 人喰い鬼 are pretty scary 
I don’t really want a main character I can empathize with like that. Like being scared is obviously reasonable, but there are levels, and basically trying to escape every time because he’s scared doesn’t make a good main character.
If it was more about him being brave despite being afraid, that’d be 100 times more interesting.
1 Like
I disagree, I think he has a very strong personality and presence 
I’ll agree with you on the presence.
1 Like
don’t forget what he’s capable of when he sleeps… lol
Also check this fire remix
Demon Slayer: Zenitsu Theme | EPIC VERSION (Zenitsu vs Spider) - YouTube
Not explicitly stating the topic if it’s “you” or “me” is quite common in conversation, I think.
3 Likes
I didn’t say he grows lol THAT’S ANOTHER REASON I HATE DEMON SLAYER! The characters are exactly the same as they were from beginning to end.
1 Like
They dared remaining loyal to their true self in such a mutable world
1 Like
Even the villains. lol
1 Like
I mean, yeah.
He’s asleep, I’m not going to give him credit.
1 Like
Japanese names are the same as Japanese words - simply incredibly hard to memorize for me 
I only remembered Tanjirou because it was mentioned here the other day.
Convincing, innit? 
Still wrong. 
Sorry for misleading you!
Yeah I guess because it’s a suggestion the topic must be “you” I guess…
Hehe so my instinct was right…
I think he’s just a required character in the grand scheme of things. You know, some people like to identify themselves with the “hero” and some like to identify themselves with the “weak person”.
Hmmm, I see. Did I mention I prefer reading books? 
Non-conversation text is just so much easier to read for me …
Hahaha you are going straight for the challenge, aren’t you? I started reading it but dropped it after some time because it was just too difficult for me. Not necessarily the Japanese (although there are quite some old kanji) but there are … conversations 
and I often had a hard time understanding who was talking at the time, and about what. Also it doesn’t help that the story jumps around in time and place without warning. (I read a review where somebody said they didn’t understand the story in English!). If you are up for a classic I can highly recommend Oe Kenzaburo though.
3 Likes
Where are you from? Surprisingly for me Japanese words are easy to memorize, and I’m not sure why but maybe it has to do with the fact that reading romanized japanese as if it was italian I still end almost always very close to intended Japanese pronunciation (that is to say they are two vocally similar languages maybe?)
いえいえ、sorry for being so slow, ごめん 
How long ago? How long have you been studying japanese? Did you do another attempt? I’m just here ready to follow your trail 
but I actually have an enormous amount of patience with looking up vocabs and grammar points, so I may endure. That book caught my curiousity 
Oh shit, I thought it was going to be an easier run. I already imagine that this will be a big problem because while I’m patient and focused, by spending too much on analyzing the little things I often lose the big picture…
Definitely open to classics suggestion, just bought this one 
(I have some thousand¥ credit on my japanese apple account, I’m just stockpiling books and mangas ) Edit: just realized it’s the author name, the book I bought is 個人的な体験
1 Like
about books and stuff
I’m German, and the issue is not about getting the pronunciation right - it’s about memorizing the kana, if you will. Each word is super-short, and mostly the sound combinations don’t make any intuitive sense to me and I have nothing to hook onto for memorizing.
I studied or dabbled in quite a few languages, and they became increasingly easy to learn because they are all set in the Germanic and Romance language families (those are English, Latin, French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch in that order), so the more languages I learned the easier it got because each word is always “just like that word in that other language but a bit different” so I get more and more connections. But Japanese is just 100% outside of that and each word is just a random combination of sounds to me.
I read it with the Advanced book club, we started Oct 2020. I started studying Japanese almost 6 years ago, so that was after 3 years and a bit. I had passed N3 at that point.
No, not yet. My understanding of spoken language is slowly improving, though, so I guess in a year or two I should give it another try.
Nice! Happy to read it with you any time 
So far I only read one story by him. It’s called 飼育 and he received the Akutagawa Prize for it. I think you can only get it as part of a short story collection though.
5 Likes
Because I was thinking about this I was looking for examples of omitted-but-changed-topic, and I found this in the book I was reading as an example not in dialogue. I’ve changed the character name to avoid a potential content-spoiler issue. Content warning for sexual harassment/groping (sorry, it happened to be what the paragraph was about), though.
Context: Harumi has just encountered her father’s boss; he’s very drunk. Harumi is our viewpoint character, and in fact this text is part of her remembering this unpleasant event.
父の上司ははるみに抱きついて、唾で光る口元をはるみの頬に触れんばかり近付け、濁声で言った。
(可愛いなあ。松本の娘にしちゃですぎだ)
そして、いきなりはるみの胸をつかんだのだった。突き飛ばそうとしたが、恐ろしい力でつかまえられて、動くことができなかった。声も出せない。
(Harumi manages to push the guy off in the next paragraph.)
In this text, in the first line the topic is set up as 父の上司, and that continues after the line of dialogue. But in the last two sentences in bold, the unstated topic/subject is clearly はるみ, even though there’s no explicit はるみは there.
1 Like
ahh I see, basically you have no anchor when memorizing japanese words… on the contrary, i feel like a lot of japanese words are “familiar” to me, not sure why. I was exposed to so much japanese thru anime in the last 5 years, (basically zero earlier than that, and anyway the focus on the language itself was still totally absent but yet some vocalizations somehow stuck in my memory).
felt the same at very fist but this only lasted 3-4 months and to this date I’m feeling very familiar with words.
sounds like definitely too much for me now
need to buy that as well
Oh, thank you very much! (And I admire the author for describing the drool-scene so vividly… 
)
This is very interesting. I need to watch out for this more, I guess. I mean, in this specific setting I would clearly have gotten the topic switch (because it doesn’t make any sense the other way around) but I wonder how often I confused myself by misreading a scene where this happened in a somewhat more subtle context (or harder-for-me-to-understand context).
Appreciated!
2 Likes
Haha after that first sentence I immediately wondered whether you had watched a lot of anime or something. I never did that (and still don’t) as I’m not that interested in watching stuff (no matter the language). I like to read though. That explains everything, I guess 
I’d love to discuss that story! (and read the others as well at some point)
1 Like
Interesting to see how even DeepL is confused about this piece of text
Yes, I believe so! I receive support from the hearing sense as well with vocab acquisition!
Consider that I will seek for existing book clubs and if I cannot find anything specific I will make a thread by myself as I did here, so if you see my name somewhere interesting in the feed just give a check!
1 Like
I guess it’s not being familiar with the sounds of names or words in general.
Any time I read manhwa or manhua, I can’t remember the names because I don’t have anything to connect them to, and they all sound similar to me, which is something that objectively happens with Japanese as well. 
Like, Youko, Yuuko, Tanjiro, Ichiro, Jiro, all the 子 s and すけs and まるs.
3 Likes