📚📚 Read every day challenge - Fall 2022 🍁🍂

:tiger2: :books: The Tanuki Autumn Onsen :hotsprings: :raccoon:

20221104 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 68.30% :mirror:

Wagahai-cat is traumatised by a mirror.

:fallen_leaf: Japanese found under the leaves :fallen_leaf:

Meowords

離魂病「りこんびょう」ー Sleepwalking
下瞼「したまぶた」ー Lower eyelid (also: 下まぶた)
鵜呑み「うのみ」ー Swallowing without chewing


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Yeah, it was definitely a time of large (and fast paced) change, looking at old photos of the time, photos with even something like a 10 year difference show radical change in the landscape of the cities. Can’t imagine how much of a societal impact that’d have, really made me appreciate reading this, it’s like a snapshot of the time period. It’s a great piece of literature - at first (before reading it) I thought it was just going to be a amusing story about a snooty cat, but there’s so much social commentary in it on the side-lines (and that’s only the bits I pick up on, I’m sure there’s much more).

(and the books you mention sound interesting, I’ll have to make a note of them, thanks!)

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This is something I’m often guilty of :sweat_smile:
I know that chewing is very important for digestion, but I often eat too fast and chew too little… Need to fix that :sweat_smile:

Btw, it’s interesting that jisho lists it only as a noun and not as a suru verb.
So, it seems, you can’t say 鵜呑みする
Instead, there is an entry 鵜呑みにする – you need to add に before adding suru… :thinking:

P. S. Sorry, I’meowt of likes :cat2:

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Omg yeah I know why I know that font, it’s the Zero Time Dilemma font! I only lived with it for like thirty hours, why would I know :joy:

image

I did some investigating and it seems to be called ニューシネマ. It seems like it’s the go-to font for subtitles (especially in like film) which makes some sense for like ZTD, but is also funny since we’re talking about how hard it is to read :laughing: guess Japanese people don’t feel the same way!

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Welp, I guess I looked unnecessarily deep into it :joy: :joy: . Looks like they just simply like to use it.

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@rikaiwisdom @natarin Dang, I thought you were onto something too rikaiwisdom. But nah, just liked font. :joy:

Maybe it makes each hiragana and such look more distinguished from each other, so at a glance/quick look you’re less likely to confuse them?

Or maybe its just become a common font and now we learners of Japanese are stuck with it. :joy:

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November 4th
:maple_leaf:Home post:maple_leaf:

Aria: the masterpiece volume 1 – progress report
Yesterday: read up to page 26
Today: read up to page 37

Reading was cut short today again. While ten pages seem like more than yesterday, that’s not quite the case because there was less dialogue overall and I may as well regard them as a handful of pages.

I noticed that I almost reached the end of chapter one, so tomorrow I’ll be in a position to say that I completed my first step on the way towards reading the whole volume. :slightly_smiling_face:

Some words of note

ぼちぼち little by little, gradually
キンチョー tension, nervousness
我を忘れる (われをわすれる) to lose control of oneself​

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:fallen_leaf: Day 35, 4th of November :maple_leaf:

:open_book: Back to my Home Post

Read more of Kiki, but I mainly did grammar stuff using my horribly meticulous process I use to decipher sentence structure. It’s now almost 11, I really gotta stop. But it’s so fun…

I’ve also transfered my transcriptions into Obsidian, which is where I keep all my notes for grammar points. Now I can link to them directly by clicking the hyperlinks in the text.

Just learning grammar points in order of whatever textbook you use is less fun than actually learning them in order to puzzle out a book you want to read. But maybe that’s just me.

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Home post :bookmark: Nov 4 :maple_leaf::fallen_leaf:

・本好きの下剋上 12 (24% → 27%)

Came across some expressions today:

何食(なにく)わぬ顔 - innocent look, nonchalant look
そうは問屋(とんや)(おろ)さない - things don’t work that well in the real world, it won’t be that easy
寝耳(ねみみ)に水 - bolt from the blue, great surprise

Didn’t know 問 had the とん reading.

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November 4 :heavy_check_mark: :rose:

ユージニア, -4%

I started reading ユージニア a day before the official start of the ABC. I’m really enjoying the writing style so far, very intriguing.

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Huh, I’d always just assumed that word was ateji :slight_smile: Wonder if it turns up in any other words.

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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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