I’m beginning a playthrough of danganronpa in japanese, and some expressions in the introduction made me scratch my head (no spoilers, those are the first few mins):
そんな、超が何個も付くほど、超すごい学園の校門の前にボクは立っていた。
In the context, the narrator talks about a super prestigious school with super elite people inside. My problem is the part I put in bold, I have trouble seeing the “strategy” of the idiomatic expression, something like “as much as I can count them” as in “many”?
He then goes on to describe himself as a pretty ordinary guy, and use three expressions that I find really strange:
特別な趣味や趣向があれ訳でもなければ、ミュータントでもないしスタンドを出せる訳でもない。
I don’t understand the use of the conditional here: is he saying that he does have some hobbies and stuff, but he’s no mutant or anything, or is he saying that he has neither, as in not only/but ?
Official translation of the game says " Like, if you asked me what my favorite song was, or my favorite movie or TV show… They’d all just be whatever’s most popular at that particular moment." Here I read it as "if you watch a ranking show (like a top 10 tv show or something like that?), you’ll understand, it’s usually the thing that’s first there (as in, what’s popular). My problem is with the 一発. Two possible interpretations I see : either “it’ll hit you” (as in, it’s super obvious the moment you watch that show), or something like “bullseye”, as in “it’s exactly that”.
”王道”という言葉すら裸足で逃げ出す、まさに、普通の中の普通。
This expression is… really strange. Is he saying the that word "王道” is so far detached from him that it figuratively runs away barefoot from him? Is this a common idiomatic expression?
I hope that wasn’t too much of a wall of text, I’m always super verbose with my questions
Kind of - I’d think of it a bit like,
何個 - what # of items
何個も - any possible # of items
with the latter used to emphasize that there’s a considerable number, since that’s usually the kind of situation where you wouldn’t know the exact number.
So it’s something like roughly “(a school that’s so extremely impressive) that it has so many extremes associated with it” I think.
This one’s just a stock kind of phrase, meaning neither A nor B. I figure it’s pretty similar to saying, e.g. “I’m not a pilot, much less an astronaut.”
You could probably think about it in conditional terms as like, well if he doesn’t even have any special hobbies, he’s certainly not a mutant or a Jojo either.
I believe this just means “you’ll get it immediately if you look” and so the whole thing I think is something like “if you want to know my music taste, you’d get it immediately even just from looking at a ranking TV show, since the #1 there is probably it.”
The English official translations will probably be not too helpful for parsing exact expressions, unfortunately! Localization often has to work around them for one reason or another.
Close!
It does seem to be a phrase (I dunno about a common one). It seems to refer to when someone is so outcloassed by someone or something else, they immediately need to run away as fast as possible (i.e. before putting on shoes or anything).
So he feels so outclassed by ”王道” that he’d run away barefoot (figuratively).
Just a quick update to say that after a month of trudging through it, I finally finished the game!
Being my first time trying out real japanese content, it was difficult at first, but I’m so happy to have finished it! Couldn’t have done that without wanikani <3
A big help was the game2text software, of which there is a thread somewhere here. Also, I found a let’s play in english with full transcript that I could cross-reference when I wasn’t sure of some meanings.
The timed parts were super stressful at first since you have a limited time to read and understand, but I’m actually surprised at myself that I managed to pass them at the highest difficulty!
I feel so pumped for the sequels, thank you to all the wonderful people on this forum that provide such a great help!
