📚📚 Read every day challenge - Fall 2022 🍁🍂

That font is nothing special I already seen it in some games. Video games and visual novels use sometimes non standard font to probably make it look more interesting or mysterious.

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Today I read the next story in ボッコちゃん 7 pages. It’s not nice keeping a girl as a pet.
Also the next four pages in Konosuba Vol. 1.

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November 4th!

Today I read Chapter 29 of Happiness. Looks like the final chapter of this volume is going to be where it stops being unusually pleasant…

(Home Post)

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Rakuten digression

:thinking: I buy my books off Rakuten with a non-Japanese card, download the epub, and remove DRM. Hope that doesn’t happen to me.
Anyhow, while I’m glad you have a system that works for you now, in case you want to backup your old purchases I’ll just throw out there that the English Kobo/Rakuten and the Japanese Rakuten stores are linked, you just have to sign in with your JP account (it will not be the main login but one of the SSO options. Something like ‘Sign in with 楽天ID’) and then you can go to your books and download the epub.

A relative (who is not particularly old) has her phone font as comic sans and I can’t for the life of me understand the appeal, but she says it looks friendly.

Mood.

Ah! That’s why it looked so familiar! It’s used in Japanese shows to subtitle things that aren’t normal Japanese speech! I struggle to read it fast too :melting_face:

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Perhaps historical sound changes make it this way? It is listed as a separate reading, but it’s the only vocabulary there.

There is even 問屋(といや), but not the primary reading.

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Summary post

I’ve been very busy! I managed to complete my October drawing challenge, and transitioned right into NaNoWriMo :sweat_smile:. I actually have been getting all of my reading/translating done, though I haven’t had the time to update this thread.

I translated three shows over the past few weeks. The first was from October 14. There was a contest of sorts where three women who were competing in TJPW’s “夢プロレス-dream on the ring-” project had exhibition matches, and fans were asked to tweet out which of the candidates had moved them the most during their match. I ended up getting distracted during the show trying to translate the twitter instructions for my followers, haha, though I’m unsure if my translation did anything to really help.

The voting did end up coming sort of down to the wire (the top two candidates ended up tying), but of course with this being pro wrestling, well, you never know if the result was worked or if that was actually how the numbers shook out…

The next show was on October 21, and it was Arisu Endo’s hometown show! She’s still in the rookie class, so she ended up being unable to get the win even in her hometown (Japanese wrestling frequently likes to give the hometown hero a big victory to send the crowd home happy), but she did look great in the special gown she had made for her entrance:

TJPW had a show a few days later, on the 24th, which was a special show for people who were Wrestle Universe subscribers. I didn’t have a transcript for this one (and there were no backstage comments), so it was really more listening practice than reading practice :sweat_smile:. I relied on an English recap of the show written by another fan to figure out what was going on, though I caught lots of bits and pieces on my own.

I didn’t do any translation for this, but the photos from it are extremely good because none of the matches were conventional, so I can’t resist sharing them.

One of the matches was Miu Watanabe vs Yuka Sakazaki (both of them hold the top two singles titles in the company right now), except instead of wrestling, it was basically a cooking contest. They did a series of three minigames, and the winner of each game got to pick better ingredients, and then they both went backstage and cooked a meal with those ingredients, and the referee tried both of the dishes right before the main event and picked the winner based on which he liked better.

One of the minigames was a drawing contest:

Here are the two drawings. Miu's art is rather infamous, so I was looking forward to what she did here, and she did not disappoint (hers is the second photo):

Here are the finished dishes. Yuka's (pictured first) was the winner, despite the fact that when she carried it out, she accidentally dropped the tomatoes on the floor and then put them back on the plate like nothing had happened...

I did actually get to practice a little reading, because they wrote the names of the ingredients on two sheets of paper, which the wrestlers got to choose between after each minigame.

After that, they did a “人狼ゲーム4WAYマッチ” (Werewolf Game 4-Way Match) which was… exactly what it says on the tin! The wrestlers all got assigned a role (three were citizens and one was the werewolf), and if the citizens pinned the werewolf, they won, but if two of the citizens got pinned, the werewolf won. Naturally, the match featured a lot of arguing, lying, and betrayal.

There was plenty of other nonsense, but this post is getting long enough as it is, haha.

TJPW’s last show was on October 29. This one honestly didn’t have as much work for me, the translator, but naturally that doesn’t correlate in the slightest to the popularity of the translation posts.

My tweet with the translation for that show was the first time a stranger ever produced a meme based on something I’d translated (it’s a joke referencing another wrestler, so it may be less funny to non-fans haha).

My friends said that this means I’ve made it. I guess it definitely did give a publicity boost to my account. It’s funny to see a quick joke post someone slapped together in minutes get more likes than the translation I spent hours working on, but such is life, I guess :sweat_smile:.

I gotta say, I do hope twitter doesn’t go under, because I don’t know what the global wrestling fandom would do without it. It’s nice to have a place where Japanese-speaking and English-speaking fans and wrestlers can all interact and share their love for this weird artform all over the world.

So far, November is looking a little quieter for me, as far as the translation workload goes. Which, thank goodness. I actually have been reading a little bit more of volume 3 of 大海原と大海原, since I am currently caught up on TJPW! But that won’t last very long, haha.

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Home post

Day 34:

Priority: :x:

Free choice: :mag: 硝子の塔の殺人.

Extra: :shallow_pan_of_food: ダンジョン飯 4.

Read-aloud: :gem: 伯爵と妖精 (小説) 1.

Mandarin?!: :merperson: 伯爵与妖精 1.

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I was trying to read ユージニア today, up to 1.5 but ended up having an Adventure in De-DRM’d ePubs :tm:
I’ve been reading 死仮面 in Apple Books and 体育館の殺人 in Neat Reader, and both have been working fine. No weird text displays, can highlight to my heart’s content, etc. So I tried ユージニア in Apple Books and it was going great until I noticed words going missing…

(Nothing here should be spoilery for ユージニア, the part I’m showing is all early background stuff)

Words missing in Apple Books

Loaded it into Neat and it was visible but uh...

I then tried Margin Note 2 which looks good, but shows something is unusual about that character

I tried highlighting it and Margin Note treated it like an image, not text. So that was interesting. I was all set to continue reading in Margin Note until I realized…it does not display page numbers or percent read.

Send help :melting_face:

edit: I just realized that because it’s an image, it’s probably black font with a transparent background. Setting Apple Books to not be black background/white text fixed the issue. Crisis averted!

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November 4 :maple_leaf: Home Post

Read a bit more ブルーロック today! Not really sure what the new situation is yet so excited to see where that goes, though it’s the end of an era :') (I also finally got a 馬狼 icon, I might change it to a different one but either way he’s here!! :tada:)

Honestly I mostly ended up watching ロマンティックキラー today? I kept seeing it around and it looked wild and it sure is :joy: It’s a lot of fun though, I’ll probably watch more when the mood strikes. I’m not active in the listening challenge thread at the moment but with Japanese subtitles it’s a little bit of both haha.

I bought it too :laughing: I mean there still could be something to that, like Harvestella especially is using it in dialogue boxes so like… not subtitles. Maybe it gives it more of a cinematic quality? Who knows :man_shrugging:

I feel like that could be it yeah, like さ in that font sure doesn’t look like anything else :joy: if you make them all weird enough they’ll definitely be distinct lmao, :sparkles: magic :sparkles:

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Bingo! Edit: I also haven’t checked this thread in a while and your posts were the first things I saw when this thread loaded, so apologies for being late to the party and feel free to ignore this!

Under the cut for length

Things are still very traditional here, so the idea of elopement is pretty serious. The idea in western style weddings of the father walking the bride down the aisle giving her daughter away can be very important to many families. Now it’s still a tradition, but probably not that big a deal in the bigger picture (but I could just be projecting my own opinion).

In Japan, there’s a similar tradition of the boyfriend visiting his partner’s parents and politely requesting the father of the house to give away his daughter. My husband described the image of the man bowing with his head to the floor shouting 娘をください! like some kind of samurai era flick.

(This conversation came up when my husband was regretful he couldn’t pay a proper greeting to my dad in person before we got married and I shrugged it off saying my dad is just cool that I’m happy so lighten up, lol).

Anyway, this whole process is seemingly important because unlike western societies where women can keep her last name, Japan is not up with the times so she switches from her family name to her new husband’s name and joins his family register (where the man is always the head of household because, Japan).

To put it simply, the man is always the head of household in the family register, and the line continues when his son has kids but any daughters inevitably leave the register (technically still on it as an asterisk). If a couple decides to skip that whole process and live on their own that means they’re cutting ties to a whole network of people.

You usually get congratulatory money when you get married from relatives but if you’re cutting ties, then you can’t depend on that. Japanese women typically go back home to have their mother help her after giving birth, but that might be difficult if your parents were against the marriage. Maybe they’ll love their grandchild or maybe they’ll hate them because they hate their father.

This is also true in some American states as well, but you need to get two people to sign as witnesses for the marriage. If you’re not an adult in Japan, then those signatures have to be the parents.

Also interestingly, when people get married here, they don’t announce their marriage but announce they’ve registered their marriage in the family register. Just yesterday one of the teachers announced this: 先週、入籍しました。

When I told people of my marriage, my husband told me this is what you say as well. So I guess during proposals, you would say 結婚する? or if you’re married you’d say 結婚している but announcing a marriage sounds like a transaction at city hall. :sweat_smile:

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Fascinating stuff, thanks for the insider’s view! So if two people elope, what happens to the family register? Are they erased from their families’ register? Do they start a new one? Or does it never ever happen?

入籍しました sounds so romantic…

I’ve noticed it’s a rather wonky ebook in terms of formatting. Look how some (not all) furigana appears for me.
Screenshot 2022-11-05 at 09.31.56
Trying to select the character to look up in the dictionary results in the app crashing, so I guess it’s an image or there’s something else wrong with it.

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We encountered the exact same thing in 殺人出産 🤰🔪 Book Club ・ Week 1 - #14 by Kappa421 :exploding_head:

So weird what editors come up with…

@Hantsuki Thank you very much for the detailed explanations! It all matches my expectations, because, Japan :sweat_smile: but I didn’t know all the details. Great to have a first-hand report on this.

Thanks for the heads-up! Will be on the lookout for any issues.

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:books: :video_game: :maple_leaf: :fallen_leaf: November 4

Busy day so I just read a little わたしの幸せな結婚 (6% → 8%). I was sad to have to stop reading which ironically is a good sign…

Rakuten answer

Hmmm, that’s interesting. I read they’d stopped accepting foreign cards so I assumed that was the reason but maybe it’s just my card that’s the problem? Further investigation might be required.

Oh, I actually have my old Rakuten books in epub format, they were the easiest to get and I own a kobo reader so it was the most convenient, so I was pretty bugged that I couldn’t purchase from them anymore… I was more thinking about other shops I’ve used like BookWalker or EbookJapan where you can only read though their app so dictionary lookups become really cumbersome and I have no way of storing the books in case the shop shuts down.
Thanks for the info!

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Rakuten reply

I just recently set up a Rakuten account and bought my first books with a foreign credit card (beginning of October, there about), so unless that literally changed in the last couple of weeks, then maybe it is your card. :frowning:

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November 5th
:maple_leaf:Home post:maple_leaf:

Aria: the masterpiece volume 1 – progress report
Yesterday: read up to page 37
Today: finished Chapter 1. :smiley: Continued up to page 66

I could dedicate more time to reading today and I managed to read almost 30 pages. Besides, I finished the first chapter which had a nice little twist at the end regarding the company president reveal.

I think that I’ll be able to make the most progress per day during the weekends and due to that I already have a change to my daily routine in mind which I’ll probably implement once December arrives.

Some words of note

知能 (ちのう) intelligence, brains
並み (なみ) same level as, on par with​
ほぼ roughly, approximately
制服 (せいふく) uniform
お手並み拝見 (おてなみはいけん) show me your moves! show me what you’ve got
独学 (どくがく) self-education, self-study

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:maple_leaf: :turkey: November 5th :turkey: :maple_leaf: (Home Post Link)

mmmmmmm tired but can’t sleep so we do some studying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Read:

  • からかい上手の高木さん chapter 10, 11
  • Tae Kim 166 → 183 – lots of casual speech and slang stuff. Most of this I’ve learned through linguistics stuff, and also seen used quite a bit. Ease of articulation is a hell of a drug; human mouth lazy why say many sound when few sound do trick. I hadn’t seen a description なんか as a kind of filler word before, but I think i’d been subconsciously treating it like one instead of trying to figure it out, so that works out :sweat_smile:

My eyes might be getting worse, I had some real trouble reading the difference between き and さ on some words today. But this did finally motivate me to learn how to use the wildcard search feature on jisho. Lots of words I don’t know have at least one kanji in them that I know, so should help out quite a bit when I don’t have (or can’t read) furigana.

Good Words

烙印「らくいん」ー brand, mark
賭け「かけ」ー bet, wager
雨宿り「あまやどり」ー taking shelter from rain
勢い「いきおい」ー influence, authority (noun!!)
ギャフン ー being argued into silence, speechless
成績「せいせき」ー results, score
範囲外「はんいがい」ー outside the range of, outside the scope of

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Replies

I knew some of this, but having it tied together neatly with your own personal experience with it was interesting to read! I hadn’t really considered that elopement was straight up “off the 戸籍 with you!”

I feel a lot better knowing that even if I hadn’t de-drmed it it still would have these issues. I was very frustrated for a bit last night thinking I’d have to revert to the proprietary app!

It’s a very odd choice indeed. I wonder if I’ll ever meet a Japanese book publisher and can ask them… There was that publishing blog I came across, maybe they have an email :thinking:

Like @MissDagger I have purchased from them recently, and in my case only a few days ago.
I’m glad you have your epubs though! I agree, having to use the proprietary apps for the other stores is so limiting, and always leaves open the chance of losing your books one day.

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:house:
Nov 5

I was going to skip reading today, because I’ve had a super busy weekend and am drained of energy. But I found myself randomly picking up my physical copy of 魔女の宅急便(2)on my bookshelf, and to my surprise, I was able to read the first four pages easily and without using a dictionary at all! (There were only about five words/phrases I didn’t know, but as I spent my childhood ignoring unknown words in the novels I read and eventually learnt them from context, it doesn’t bother me.)

If I have enough time and energy tomorrow I’ll get back to 人間椅子。

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I’ve been exhausted for the last week. I ended up not reading yesterday - did stare blankly at Spy Family and 夜カフェ. Today I had the day off apart from a couple of hours from home this morning, so I basically lay around reading.

5/11 14 pages God Bless the Mistaken (week’s reading), 25 pages シャドーハウス (both chapters for this week), 15 pages Orange, 1 page Spy Family.

I need to check as I may have read a bit more of Orange. I’m doing well on some clubs but behind on others, such as Spy Family, which I’m running… lots of dialogue in the last week’s reading which is holding me up.

I may choose to read ahead on シャドーハウス, as this week should give me more reading time but the following 2 weeks are busy. But I should catch up on the rest first.

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Nov 5, Sat of Week 6 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

  • かがみの孤城 (上) 44% => 45% (Start of Ch.4 August)

Yesterday, I almost finished Ch.3 July, so a little bit; then start of the new chapter (month).

Well, a little more of parents’ help; and hiding things from parents.

  • Read aloud 人間椅子 0-45%

Although I think I understood the gist from the previous reading, I think I don’t understand enough comparing with the book club. Partly because of forgeting early things when focusing on single sentences, and vocabularies, too much? An excuse, whatever.

Used Bookwalker hover to Google Translate to help with pronunciation a little, although I mostly remembered the readings.

That half a book took like 35 minutes. (Truncated silence with Audacity.)

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