About an ogre who eats people. One day he swallows VERY STRONG MAN who fears no stinking oni, and finds being inside the oni peaceful. Conveniently, inside the oni stomach there are three strings hanging from the… “ceiling”: one to make him sneeze, one to make him laugh and one to make him cry. The three important emotions of a well-rounded oni.
So naturally he pulls all three at once to see what happens. The oni is in so much pain he spits the man out and says he’ll never eat another human again.
The other story is an Aesop fable, it’s only a few sentences but I had to click it because of the cute frogges:
Japanese found in the tall grass
New Things
長閑「のどか」ー Tranquil; peaceful クシャミ / くしゃみ「嚏」ー A sneeze, the kanji isn’t seen very often. Also, you say “くさめ” twice after someone sneezes to protect them from dying early. 日照り「ひでり」ー Drought; dry weather
Step by step of how to sneeze in Japanese
Step 1: は、
Step 2: は、
Step 3: はっ、
Step 4: はくしょん！
Today I was going to read this weeks BBC assignment of 夜カフェ - but I’m still a bit under the weather and wasn’t sure I’d have enough brainpower for a novel!
So instead I read chapter 15 of Mitsuboshi Colors, which was fun. I had to look up quite a few words, but they were mostly words that I’m not surprised I didn’t know yet - including 便秘 constipation and めんたい Alaskan Pollock.
Afterwards she will just casually drop something like んち (as in someone’s home ー>のうち) on my head midsentence so the entire thing becomes unparsable. Actually, now that I mention it, I believe I already had seen it a handful of times, oh well. Also, I’m a bit bitter that it’s kinda hard to pick up on Yotsuba’s wordplay and I’m probably missing lots of jokes.
In addition today I watched 借りぐらしのアリエッティ and since I’m pausing a lot and mostly read subs I count this as reading, don’t at me. It went really chill mostly because there wasn’t much dialogue at all. Sadly, lots of things stacked like 動けなくなっていたところ (something along the lines place where I was stuck) still trip me up a lot.
I won’t start the second volume of Yotsuba right after, I’m thinking about switching up to それでも歩 because I really really wanna catch up to the book club and I really enjoy the book but always was like two volumes behind schedule. Or I’m better off to 不可解のぼく since it should be a tidbit harder and better for practice in general, go figure.
(without context I could be completely off so if this is irrelevant feel free to ignore) but in case it’s helpful, a lot of times when ところ is in kana like that it’s referring to more of a metaphorical place, like a point in time. So it’d be like “the time where I’d just become unable to move” or more naturally like “right after I became unable to move (got stuck, etc.).” It could totally be a literal place though, just depends on context!
Read 7 pages and finished the chapter for かがみの孤城 🪞 Week 20. Progress was a bit slow today. This part contained some uneasy conversations between the characters and perhaps that meant more unfamiliar vocabulary and roundabout expressions than usual.
The kids now only have one more month in the castle after this and stuff is going to happen, I think
Today (and yesterday) I translated 11 pages of よつばと！I was traveling yesterday and didn’t have the energy to post anything except a bit of venting I’m visiting my parents for Easter so I don’t know what my study schedule will look like, except that I’ll continue reading よつばと！ and I’ll be reading on Satori starting Wednesday probably:)
The flowers above the “Day #” links to my post for the previous day, and the flowers below link to the next day, except for the latest day ofc, they link somewhere special
I’m sorry if you know all of this already, but just to make sure we’re on the same page:
The stuff that comes before 人 (in this case 生えてくる) is called a “relative clause”, and it modifies 人. In English, relative clauses usually come after the noun (e.g. “the man who is walking”) but in Japanese they always come before the noun (e.g. 歩いている 人). We also have the verb 生える which means “to grow” and it is intransitive, so it means “something grows” and not “someone grows something” (that would be the transitive verb 生やす). Unfortunately, in English the transitive and the intransitive partners are often represented by the same word, so we need to be a bit careful about that in English.
So, coming back to our example sentence, we have two relative clauses:
生えてくる 人 - person for whom something grows
生えない 人 - person for whom something doesn’t grow
Now Japanese is a very context-heavy language, and thus I inferred that they must talk about the wisdom teeth.
You may wonder why it can’t be “person who grows (up)”? That would simply be another verb. 生える is only used for plants, teeth, beards, fur, horns and those things. This is pretty hard to tell from a J-E dictionary, but if you look up the word in a J-J dictionary you can learn about these nuances: 「生える」の意味や使い方 わかりやすく解説 Weblio辞書
It’s Saturday, and it was sunny today which meant some lovely chill reading in the park
I read from page 74-104 三毛猫ホームズ🐈. Given that ホームズ kind of needed to become our protagonists cat I did have the feeling that perhaps 森崎 might not be too long for this world Continue to love ホームズ🥰
I also finished the second volume of ギヴン today. It was so emotional, those cute gay music boys and their trauma Slightly unexpectedly, the end of volume 2 also took me to the end of what the anime season (but not movie) covered, which I wasn’t expecting so quickly. I haven’t watched the movie yet so need to decide whether to do so before picking up vol 3 (like I have the self control…)
Thank you for the detailed explanation !
Just to make sure I understand correctly: in addition to grammar reasons, the meaning (“person for whom wisdom teeth do not grow”) comes from the fact that the used verb 生える can’t be applied to people? Because I think with a different verb, for example 引っ越す (to move (house); to change residence), the same てくる construction 引っ越してくる人 could mean “the person who moved into nearby”?
Finished chapter six. Another interesting one. Thoughts: So we learn that 玉葉 is frequently targeted and has lost more than half of her maids due to poison. And now it is Maomao’s turn to be the 毒見役. I like the characters so far, they’re clearly not dumb.
I’m sure there was something else I wanted to write, but sleepiness is rendering me unable to form coherent thoughts. Will try reading earlier in the day tomorrow.
Bit of a weird day, because of the structure of this VN. So in the original version, if you didn’t get locked into a route (by just doing side events or spreading yourself thin between characters) it seems there was a “bad ending” where your character never finds much to commit himself to on the island. Well, that still exists in this version, but Umi’s route sits alongside it as an alternative, which means there aren’t really hangout events prior to the cutoff point. And so… while I could have seen if I had any more side things I hadn’t seen, I spent today mostly passing time by playing the monster battling game haha.
And that was entertaining! I reached rank 20 or so (you start at 38 IIRC). There are short conversations before and after each fight, and with that plus a few real scenes I did hit ~5500 characters, but it took a long time. And weird almost contextless battle chatter is not super fun to puzzle through! Strangely that made this one of the hardest days for reading I’ve had in a while, and the weight of the constant unfamiliar words and sentences framed in ways I don’t fully get is becoming a little much. It’ll pass like these feelings always do but… well, we’ve really all taken on a large challenge here.
I got higher than this, but there’s the ranking page, heh. 島モンファイト is a bit easier than learning Japanese
Today I encountered ばかりに (“simply because/on account of,” refers to reasons for negative outcomes), so yet another mark in the metaphorical N2 grammar checklist.
My favorite new word is ワイドショー (a TV talk show more or less) because I love 和製英語. It’s a “wide show” apparently.
These past few days have been so incredibly hectic - I just couldn’t find the energy to log on and make a post daily. On top of it all, my phone got bricked and I was left without internet access most of the day. So I ended up reading random things here and there, here’s a list:
A story about 招き猫 (招き猫になったネコ) that prompted me to google the history and the different legends surrounding it. I always thought they were super cute perched in different storefronts - never knew they had such an interesting story behind them
An NHK easy article
The first paragraph of 小さな闇 by 吉本バナナ - the second short story in the book I had bought. I would’ve read more, but the text is so heavy on katakana and god do I suck at reading it… Gave me a proper headache.
Yet another kitty story: ネコの茶碗. Encountered 品物 in the wild - coincidentally failed the review earlier in the day. I think I’ll remember it now.
Oh, and just so I don’t forget - I actually encountered this bad boy at an arcade I went to (photo from wikipedia bc my phone is bricked and my pictures are gone ):
Was busy all day, so only read one story about viruses and white blood cells. I like this book so far: the grammatical complexity is almost just right, so that I have to think about it and learn new stuff, without being overwhelming.
Tanuki Den (aka Homepost): Date 20220409 
& 水の枯れた沼のカエル 
Japanese found in the tall grass 
definitely feel you
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