In 夜市, we also found a random kanji inserted in the middle of a sentence towards the end. The printed version was fine.
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How does that ev報en happen?
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At least, in English, it’s easy to spot. It was just next to a kanji word, making it extra evil.
Edit:
Oh, now I remember.
Next to 門, of all things. Makes it sounds like it could be a thing.
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I still can’t believe it did not belong there 
It made so much sense to me…
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Apparently that’s close to what happened with The Emperor’s New Groove’s movie script:
“Are you Dave Reynolds? I’m from archives. I just need the final script for Emperor’s New Groove . They didn’t send one down.”
I go, “What’s that?”
He goes, “The final draft, the whole final script.”
I go, “No script.”
He goes, “There’s no script? What are you talking about?”
I go, “We don’t have a script. We never wrote a script. We just made the movie.”
He goes, “You’ve got to have a script. Archives has to have a script.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Tell them to go see the movie. It’s in theaters right now.”
source: An Oral History of Disney’s ‘The Emperor’s New Groove’
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Finished 蜘蛛ですが、なにか 3! With this main book finished, and my English reading complete (ish), I am hoping to take a little time to focus on book clubs. I’m behind on 3月のライオン, reading along on セーラームーン, a new volume is starting for both ゆるキャン△ and フルーツバスケット, and I’m at least going to try 不可解なぼくのすべてを. For novels I’m reading along with 君の名は and thinking about trying to catch up on 容疑者Xの献身. I’ve read the latter before but it was one of the first books I read in Japanese, so I’m sure to get more a second time through.
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how was it? does it start getting a plot?
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I just found this thread and made myself a row in the table, hopefully I remember to come back and update it sometimes! My goal was to read 1 novel a month, and I’m actually close to finishing my third even though it’s only February, so definitely making good progress so far lol.
Bookmeter is amazing too, I can’t believe I didn’t know about it before now! Guess I’m going to spend this evening moving my whole spreadsheet into bookmeter 
(I’ve got a question for anyone who’s used to the service though, is there a way to sort manga from novels? I want to keep them separate for my own tracking, but bookmeter seems to lump them all together.)
Good luck everyone, and I look forward to reading with you all!
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You can make separate bookshelves (本棚). You will have to manually put them in there though.
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I was messing with the bookshelves a bit, but is there a way to get the page count of a particular bookshelf, and maybe even display that on my profile instead of the total? Basically I don’t want to inflate my main page count with manga, I’d like to have separate tallies for each type if possible…
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I don’t think it’s possible, sadly. That’s why I do not add manga on bookmeter myself. (I use mangare )
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can’t find a url for it.
@Naphthalene Can you explain this one thing from 本好き book 6 to me?
Book 6 stuff (minor spoilers)
This is regarding the 金属活字 stuff.
ここで使われている基本文字三十五文字には、アルファベットの大文字小文字、日本語ならひらがなとカタカナのように、同じ音で二種類の文字がある。当然、両方の活字を作ってもらう。母音は五十ずつ、子音は二十ずつあればひとまず足りるだろう。
基本文字三十五文字には同じ音で二種類の文字がある。その両方において、母音は五十ずつ、子音は二十ずつで活字を準備してもらうというのが、ヨハンに出した課題だったが、まさか冬の間に全て終わるとは思っていなかった
So there are 35 characters in the alphabet, both uppercase and lowercase, so 70 total. Now, my confusion is coming from the 母音は五十ずつ、子音は二十ずつ part. It seems like this is saying she’s having 50 copies of every vowel and 20 copies of every consonant made. But that sounds like a lot! The other thing that’s throwing me off is the fact that 35 x 2 and 50 + 20 both equal 70. So part of my brain also wants to interpret this as saying there are 50 vowels and 20 consonants in the double alphabet, just so I don’t have to imagine poor Yohan making several hundred of these. But having 2.5 times as many vowels than consonants in a language also sounds bizarre to me. I can’t find a single language with more vowel sounds than consonants, let alone to that degree. Plus, the ずつ has me strongly believing the first interpretation is correct, even if it means Yohan is making hundreds of these.
So is this just an unfortunate choice of numbers by the author and my first interpretation is correct? Is this even remotely ambiguous to someone who knows the language well?
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蜘蛛ですが、なにか 3 thoughts
I enjoyed it! However, I’m starting to feel like I’m reading the lead-in to a story and that I might be more suited to enjoying the lead-in than enjoying the story itself. I loved following Spider around in this new world as she’s figuring out how it works and gaining skills and exploring how to use them and getting stronger and overcoming obstacles… That was by no means gone in this volume, but it felt different, and the parts with the humans were longer and plottier, and honestly I still don’t care at all about anyone but the main character (though I like the other parts for their worldbuilding, which adds to my enjoyment of the spider bits, I just don’t care about any of the characters, which makes me want those sections to be short and snappy instead of lengthy interruptions of my spider adventures).
… Yes, there does seem to be a plot, but I don’t think I’m supposed to understand what it is yet (or if I am I’m not doing so). Maybe I’ll figure out more next volume. I’m not very genre-savvy, and it’s (of course) in Japanese, so I know I’m missing hints and nuances etc. Someday, through my own power, I will know all the things. OR someday, I will decide I’m not enjoying it enough to keep going, and spoil myself for all the things.
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Some updates:
Game Stuff
I finished with 幻影異聞録♯FE Encore! That was my main focus this week, and I really enjoyed it throughout! I pretty much flagrantly binged it but don’t regret the time spent, so that’s a good sign!
My interest did flag by the very end, and technically I didn’t beat it (stopped in the last dungeon), but I don’t hold that against the game at all, I just like to stop and part on good terms with games when I notice I’m playing it just to finish it, not to actually play it, if that makes sense.
If there’s a criticism, it’s that there aren’t really a lot of twists or turns or character dynamism plotwise, and the climax relies too heavily on name-dropping Fire Emblem references to give things Import the same way Marvel movies do with their own references. Which is fine, I just… don’t know anything about the plot of Fire Emblem so that didn’t do a lot for me.
That said, my memory of the game will focus much more heavily on the positives: the extremely endearing vibe, fun character animations, and the addictive system that effectively piles more and more and more unlockable effects onto the battle system.
Language-wise, it was kind of wild to realize how quickly I can skim dialogue in a game like this now!
At first it was great listening/shadowing practice because I would read along with the voice actors… but as I got more and more feverishly invested in the RPG system and less invested in the details of the plot, I started clicking through those pretty much at English speed and still got what was going on! Granted a ton of that was just the tone of voice, and the situations not being exactly complicated…
Every time I stop and realize “oh huh it told me to go to the NE corner of the map and buy a donut (or whatever) and I just knew what to do and did it without even thinking about it” still feels really cool though!
Language tidbits:
- A director named 鱈知乃 九炎 (har har har) たらちの くえん (it’s a play on Quentin Tarantino)
- A character with a heavily exaggerated comedy gaijin accent, who somehow also sends texts that way, in exaggerated katakana?? (I’ve thought too much about this… why does he text like that???)
Anyway, as much as I enjoyed that it was also kind of exhausting and I’m very much ready for shorter, calmer, and heavier things.
So as a complete change of pace, the next game in Japanese I’m gonna play is ポートピア連続殺人事件 ! Digging into aging Japanese adventure games is one of the main attractions to me about this whole project, so I’m excited!
Prose Stuff
I was focusing on the above, so I haven’t read much more Dirty Pair, but I’m going to try to focus on it the rest of February.
I mentioned I was worried about the cheesecakey tone going in, and even from the chapter and a half I’ve read so far… I don’t think I needed to worry after all! It’s just fun to read about two rowdy best friends and their monster cat getting into space adventures while wearing hot pants all the time for no particular reason. Gender politics in pulp adventure-wise, I’d definitely take that over like, James Bond, personally. they feel like full-fledged forceful characters and I don’t get the impression (fingers crossed) the book is going to force them into gross situations, so I think I’ll enjoy reading this.
Manga Stuff
Wandering Son will have to wait, it turns out! I actually ordered the rest of the volumes I don’t have… but they’ll be shipping to me via sea mail, so… it’ll be a little while, and I don’t feel in a rush to start the two volumes that are already mine.
What came a lot quicker is the next volume of my favorite manga, ダンジョン飯, along with a really cool world guide!!
Dungeon Meshi / Delicious in Dungeon is wonderful, and the super thoughtfully constructed characters and world are the best part of it, so if there’s anything I’ll eat up a guidebook about… especially since there’s new manga pages!
週刊プロレス Stuff
A lot of the reason I’m behind on these is that in my head it’s like “oh I’ll read an article or two a day!” and in practice I’m much more of a “binge whatever I’m hyperfocusing on until it’s done” type of person… and that remains true. But I’ll probably finish this next issue this weekend.
The main thing I learned from it so far is that apparently to be the beloved, incredibly talented and popular face of a wrestling company, you also have to be kind of a scatterbrain, because, coincidentally or not, Hiroshi Tanahashi’s “Dragon Note” column and Mayu Iwatani’s “The Buchake Talk by Mayu Iwatani” (that’s… the official English title they give it… the Japanese title “岩谷麻優のぶちゃけトーク” makes significantly more sense) are both separately about forgetting things:
Tanahashi forgets his phone all the time and has to be told by the interviewer to designate a specific pocket to always put it in so he knows exactly where to check (I do this without being told, but on the other hand I’m not incredibly gorgeous and talented, nor am I an 8-time IWGP heavyweight champion so…)
and meanwhile Mayu relates a story about when she forgot to bring her wrestling trunks to a match and had to wear Starlight Kid’s pants.
I figured this was because they’re both lovable goofballs, but Mayu offers a… worrying alternate explanation:
(not that she’s wrong… wrestling is definitely not good for your long-term health… but hopefully they’re fine!)
Anyway, here’s a picture of esteemed wrestling legend Akira Hokuto with Paddington Bear:
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It is, and it does! But at the same time, take an A4 page full of text (e.g. research article in my case) and count the a.
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Ahh, I wasn’t taking into account how it’ll actually be used. I didn’t understand the process at all until the explanation around where I got that second quote from. Now it makes some sense, though I should probably find a YouTube video on it or something.
Thanks!
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First, the printed version is faxed to them…
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I don’t know how things are done over in Japan, but where I work, we can now send faxes…without a fax machine. Sure makes it easier to work from home when I need to send a fax, and the recipient will only accept it if they think it’s from the fax machine sitting near my desk in the office.
But to be on thread-topic, I finished the final chapter of Saliormoon today =D Been reading one chapter per week since January of 2020. Just have a few side-stories to read, then I can consider starting reading Sailor V (which for some reason is not available to purchase digitally).
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