ぎょっと ー Being startled (onomatopoeic word) 陰惨「いんさん」ー Sadness and gloom 胸底「きょうてい」ー Bottom of one’s heart 陰鬱「いんうつ」ー Gloomy; melancholy; depressing; dreary 官吏「かんり」ー Government official; public/civil servant 寮生活「りょうせいかす」ー Dormitory life 粗暴「そぼう」ー Rough; wild (in a behaviour sense) 辟易「へきえき」ー To be fed up with; to be tired of; to be bored with 肺浸潤「はいしんじゅん」ー Infiltration of the lungs 診断書「しんだんしょ」ー Medical certificate 歪める「ゆがめる」ー To bend; to warp; to distort; to disfigure 性欲「せいよく」ー Sexual desire; lust 滞在「たいざい」ー Sojourn 別荘番「べっそうばん」ー Caretaker of a villa 登校「とうこう」ー Going to school; school attendance 本郷「ほんごう」ー One’s hometown デッサン ー Rough sketch (from the French: dessin) 聴講生「ちょうこうせい」ー Auditor 白々「しらじら」ー Growing light (like at dawn); pale 画塾「がじゅく」ー Private painting school 淫売婦「いんばいふ」ー Prostitute (out-dated kanji form) アトリエ ー Studio; Workshop (French: atelier) へどもど ー Flustered; stuttering 美男子「びだんし」ー Handsome young man 浅黒い「あさぐらい」ー Dark or tanned skin ポマード ー Pomade (hair wax) 含羞む「はにかむ」ー To be shy/bashful 敬意「けいい」ー Respect; honour 与太者「よたもの」ー Hooligan
Kanji Form 煙草「たばこ」ー Tobacco; cigarette
Other Forms
馴れる ＝ 慣れる「なれる」(to get used to)
Extremely Confusing Word
ビイル
I was like, what on earth is a biiru? Then it suddenly dawned on me… it’s just ビール.
After all the yard work, ca 4 hours. I’ve not gotten around to reading more Zenitendou. Instead I did some sampling of a couple of books/manga to figure out if I want to order them. I need to do an order soonish, so it was needed anyway.
But tomorrow it will rain and rain (unfortunately I couldn’t finish all I needed before the rain ), and rain some more, and rain means read day, right? So hopefully I can make some good progress on Zenitendou tomorrow so I can figure out if I want more of it. ^^
Today was really hot here in the UK, so the company I work for gave us all the afternoon off to go and enjoy the sunshine.
I used my afternoon to do some JLPT practise questions, and then went and sat in my garden on a blanket and read two chapters of Yotsuba.
It was a very lovely afternoon
I’m looking forward to the fourth Saikawa & Moe book tomorrow. I’ll try pacing myself by reading a bit every day instead of a bunch during a short time. That way, I won’t risk reading ahead of the book club and I can read SAO afterwards if I want to read more.
Went to sleep super late last night, so was a bit tired today. Reading out loud did the trick, even mom talking loudly on the phone in the background didn’t distract me while I was reading.
So I found out today that I may be mildly anemic, which would explain some things. Like the tiredness and lack of energy not entirely explained by my not-the-best sleep schedule that will sometimes affect me, like today. Yeah I did not do much today at all after I got home from work.
It’s fitting that I’m reading the 夏祭り chapter (22) of クールドジ男子 today, as my town has a little carnival set up downtown today.
It’s バディミッションBOND era now It’s like… darker than I expected actually? There’s some real angst in these characters, there’s a lot going on. I’m definitely getting a crash course in police slang but also aggro shounen-type terms to an extreme degree, アーロン is just like that huh I think he’s called people about twenty variations of trash by now so that’s fun.
Dramatic shot!! Really highlighting アーロン’s ridiculous character design lmao. It’s even more exacerbated half the time because ルーク just looks like a normal guy and then アーロン’s like that But yeah hero seems to be a word with a lot of weight behind it in this game… there are a lot of memories and feelings tied into it, it’s definitely gonna be recurring theme I think.
But yeah characters had a real bad time today actually? I got some アーロン backstory about how he was just a kid surviving on his own and he stumbled upon the others also like starving to death and they convinced him to stay despite his aggressive hesitance, and how アラナ’s little brother had just died of starvation and they were all in a really bad place emotionally and physically… it’s really messed up actually? アーロン backstory dark, and it seems like a lot of the reason he does the things he does is so he can support the other orphaned kids and just… it’s all really sad actually And then in the current time ルーク just got straight up tortured, like?? He was a broken man for a lot of it, that was rough. There’s a lot of messed up stuff going on and it feels like just the tip of the iceberg really.
It’s not all angst though of course, lots of fun screenshot opportunities as always:
This アーロン face kills me lmao; I have a really bad feeling about him saying that though, definitely feel like we’re gonna see him cry and it’s gonna hurt me!! Yikes for that
This man hates planes, he’s really like “you want me to trust a hunk of metal?? I trust these fists only” Thinking about it now there’s probably an angsty reason for that too but for now it’s fun, ルーク’s just like “wow his one weakness ” haha
He’s many things People were applauding him and he was like “if anyone wants to meet up later for a ~rendezvous~ keep clapping!” and the crushing wave of second-hand embarrassment I felt as only ルーク kept clapping, the deafening silence, oof. But the きゅん face They’re all a hot mess for real.
So yeah all still going well! Keeping up with 海辺のカフカ hasn’t monopolized my time the way I thought it might so that’s nice, gives me time for plenty of other chaos haha.
June 11th-17th
Haven’t kept up much with posting but read all but two days. I’m headed out on another trip so I might not be able to post much until I settle down there.
This week I started even if tempest, not far in yet but so far it has a lot more formal language than things I’m used to since the setting has nobility, lots of new vocabulary related to that as well. I can never remember the different 爵s (to be fair can never remember the order in English as well ). So far it seems like a good game to get more used to reading this kind of speech. Then I read volume 6 of マグメル (new character at the end ) and half a chapter of Flesh&Blood which I’m having a lot of fun with so far. Finally I tried to finish 夜は不思議などうぶつえん before I leave, couldn’t make it quite to the end but I’m about halfway through it, it’s a pretty light story (with a lot of zoo/animal vocabulary) about a girl working part-time at an old zoo that’s about to close down who ends up working a night shift and discovers that the guy who works the night shift has the strange ability to swap bodies with the animals. All of the animals have different speaking patterns so It’s funny to think that when they’re talking they all just look like the guy. Also finally able to look at my hours for LOOPERS, the switch says 10 hours which really means somewhere between 10-15 hours which is a little closer to the average play time than usual for me.
Posted this way too soon because my keyboard got stuck - the shift key got stuck on super activator mode or something and this somehow caused it to be posted when I pressed enter.
Today’s reading was also about making awkward mistakes in public
Japanese found in the tall grass
Learnthings
案内者「あんないしゃ」ー Guide; usher 絨緞「じゅうたん」ー Carpet; rug (also seen as: 絨毯 or 絨氈) 案内嬢「あんないじょう」ー Usherette ボーイ ー Boy, but can mean bellboy; waiter etc. ぎこちない ー Awkward; clumsy; stiff 吝嗇「りんしょく」ー Stinginess 半狂乱「はんきょうらん」ー Half-crazed; frantic お釣り「おつり」ー Change (from a purchase eg.) 円タク「えんタク」ー One-yen taxi (in Taisho & Showa periods) ポンポン蒸気「ポンポンじょうき」ー Pop-pop boat, toy boat with a simple steam impeller (like the one in Ponyo!) 目的地「もくてきち」ー Place of destination 朝帰り「あさがえり」ー Coming home in the morning (after a night out or the like) 電気ブラン「でんきブラン」ー Denkibran - cocktail of brandy, gin, wine, curacao and herbs 危懼「きく」ー Fear; misgivings 白痴「はくち」ー Idiot (an offensive word) 同類「どうるい」ー The same kind; accomplice 円光「えんこう」ー Halo
I read this weeks chapter of Yoru Cafe, which was Chapter 11. As usual it took a long time, but I’m just happy that I’ve broken through the mental barrier of feeling like I can’t read blocks of text, so I don’t really mind if it takes me ages!
There was a bit I struggled with in the middle of the chapter today. A lot of people were speaking and I was finding it difficult to work out who was saying what, but even though I may not have worked it all out correctly I definitely got enough to understand what was going on, and I think thats enough
Read two more pages of Zenitendou today. And felt like I’d been hit over the head with a mallet. Page 12 was harder than the others so far. Here I thought I could happily waltz into this book, and honestly with the help of the book club threads I figured out everything. And asked for help with a breakdown to fully figure out a sentence.
But I really hope I can pick up the speed a bit.
I think I probably spent 1 hour today too, although I didn’t check closely. I’ll look forward to when the Orange book club starts because I’ll be back to reading something I can actually fly through (in comparison to my current snail pace).
Who’d guess I’d get really good at casual language before narrative sentences? Not me anyway.
Maybe I just need to get used to the author voice.
Oh, fun (Swedish) cultural thing about that emote there: (I’m feeling like I’m all bummer, so gotta bring up the fun/energy.)
So crossing your fingers like that in Swedish is usually done behind your back when you’re telling a lie, a kinda get out of jail free card kinda gesture. Like this isn’t a lie, because I’m crossing my fingers behind my back or kinda it’s fine because behind my back I’m acknowledging this is a lie. A very kid thing to do. Example: when telling their parents that “yes, I did my homework, can I go play with my friends now?” when they haven’t done their homework.
That emote feels very weird for me to use for wishing or luck. In Swedish, we hold our thumbs for that (making fists with thumb in the middle/on the inside) “hålla tummarna”. So if a Swedish person ever responds to your message that ends with with , especially if you are wishing them luck, now you know why.
Break a leg!
(No, I really mean it. BREAK YOUR LEG. )
Haha for Germans it’s the same with both ^^ (at least it used to be when I was young )
I must confess it was sort of the same for me, back when I tried to read it. I just thought it contains way too many unusual vocab which slowed me down enormously….
So far it isn’t the vocab holding me back. Mostly the more complex sentences that exist in narrative. And probably some author voice stuff.
But then, vocab is kinda something I have to look up a lot whatever I’m reading, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that it isn’t holding me back more than I’m used to.
I didn’t know that. Cool. Gestures can be so hit or miss whether they mean the same thing (or maybe whether they exist or not) even with culturally similar countries. ^^
Funny enough, where I grew up in the US, crossing your fingers behind your back had the same meaning as you describe, but crossing your fingers anywhere else would be the “hope” meaning.
That said, the area I grew up in also had a “neighborhood” (such as you could call it in such a small, rural town ) called New Sweden, so I wonder if that meaning seeped in that way?
More Swedish culture than I would have imagined have survived in areas (Minnesota for example) where a lot of Swedish immigrants settled in the US in the mid to late 19th century (and early 20th century) so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
I started 光のラブレター ch 1 雨上がりのメランコリー, reading 11 pgs and leaving off on pg 32. We pick up 3 days after the prologue. Midzuki’s been worrying over the love letter because 1) as she rarely talks to any guys other than Kaito, she’s of course never received a confession, and now here she has, and 2) she has no freaking clue who it’s from. It’s signed Satou, and while it’s a common surname, there was no one by that name in her class in first year, and though she knows she must have come across this guy somehow, somewhen, she just cannot think of anyone. Thus has she been worrying these past 3 days, even to the point where she doesn’t pay much mind to her jealousy over Ritsu and Kaito. Finally she decides to write him a reply and asks for a response either in her shoebox or in person, but it’s left between the pages of こころ again. Yeahhh this book’s like 270 pgs long, you’re not gonna meet him on pg 30 lol
Oh my god, but what if she does. What if he’s the 図書委員 on duty when she checks out that sweets magazine whom she thinks is brusque and unfriendly. If he has library duty, he could know who she is without her knowing him, and he could know which book she’s always reading! (And that she’s left a reply in it.) There’s not much else reason she’d take particular notice of him right here either unless he’d turn out to be the mysterious Satou-kun.
I played a little bit of DQXI today, not much more than just to get the bunny suit and complete the quest I needed it for.
Some vocab of note:
紛れもない (まぎれもない) [expression, い-adjective] certain; unmistaken; evident; obvious; without a doubt
堅苦しい (かたくるしい) [い-adjective] formal; strict; ceremonious; stiff
奥手 (おくて) [noun] late bloomer
背表紙 (せびょうし) [noun] spine of a book; binding of a book
ぶっきらぼう [noun, な-adjective] curt; blunt; brusque
I started off by reading chapter 7 of 海辺のカフカ; not a particularly eventful chapter from what I remember but it’s cool being able to read a whole chapter in a sitting relatively comfortably! I remember the days of spending hours and hours going through like 3 pages of a book haha so it’s nice to have like… a new standard
I also played some more バディミッションBOND because obviously; I’m still having a lot of fun with it! There’s definitely a lot of variety in speech patterns which is cool but challenging. I don’t really know how to describe how モクマ talks but like… he sure says some things I’m out here running into specific phrases like 化けの皮を剥ぐ and 十人十色, and he genuinely uses おたく as a second person pronoun which might not be that weird but I certainly haven’t seen it, and it’s not like he’s polite really He’s a time!
Same! I’m not aware of any particular Swedish influence where I’ve lived (I’m not a historical expert so grain of salt ) so that’s interesting, I’ve never really thought about it
The June Tanuki Den: Date 20220617 
Japanese found in the tall grass 
I’ve not gotten around to reading more Zenitendou. Instead I did some sampling of a couple of books/manga to figure out if I want to order them. I need to do an order soonish, so it was needed anyway.
), and rain some more, and rain means read day, right? So hopefully I can make some good progress on Zenitendou tomorrow so I can figure out if I want more of it. ^^
I think he’s called people about twenty variations of trash by now so that’s fun.
But yeah hero seems to be a word with a lot of weight behind it in this game… there are a lot of memories and feelings tied into it, it’s definitely gonna be recurring theme I think.
” haha
June 11th-17th 
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, especially if you are wishing them luck, now you know why. 
)
)
so it’s nice to have like… a new standard 