三毛猫ホームズ speculation (having read up to chapter 2.4)
Theories in reply, probable spoilers but I avoided names
The first description of him is on page 68. Doesn’t that sound a bit like the way the killer is described at the beginning? Also, we’ve been hearing here and there that he’s tired from having done something the night before, or he was on some kind of short trip. Then in chap 2.4, we meet his wife, and she definitely thinks something is up with him. The conversation with his wife seemed like a big flag to me, so big that maybe 赤川 is playing with us and it’ll turn out that he just has a gambling problem or something.
Although… When I just re-read the descriptions of the two murders, are these actually the same guy, or was the second one (p 122) a copycat? In the first one we’re told that he looks like a super ordinary salaryman. The second one has a nice coat and seems handsome and gentlemanly-looking, like, say, the guy on page 150. The second girl knows that a murder happened but it’s inconceivable to her that this guy did it, so maybe she does recognize him. Is 「でも管理人はー」something that a person from outside the campus would say? (Maybe the answer is “yes”) If it’s 150さん, he’d have an easier getaway than most.
I read six pages today and finished the book from Graded Readers, Level 0, Vol. 1, Book 4. It’s about a girl’s friend who came for a visit and stays for lunch. The elder brother is a pest. I learned how to set a table for a Japanese meal.
I just checked where 2.4 leaves off and there is a major plot development at 2.5 which makes me think this theory is less likely It’s still possible but IMO it’d be an odd twist given what happened. Though if you’re right (post 2.5 spoiler) I’m worried for 晴美!
Just reread the passage in question.「でも管理人はー」doesn’t seem unusual to me. A dorm having a 管理人 seems normal to me, and probably somewhat expected for a girl’s only university dorm. Also as the killer seemingly frequents the girls at this university, he could have heard about there being a caretaker before.
Page 6 has the coat reference:
でも、来ているコートは高級品だし、そんなごまかしをやりそうには見えない
it’s in reference to her thinking he won’t skip out on paying
Page 122:
Day 7-9
Apr 7-9
Finished the rest of the chapter of 車井戸はなぜ軋る. Yes!
The “Solution” part is somewhat not unexpected to me. I’ll talk more in the ネタバレ section in the book club (to be posted later. I will attach a link). I really like the story because it is presented as a chronological order series of letters from 鶴代 and news reports. It is very creative. I don’t remember reading other detective novels using similar techniques. I can feel the sensitive personality of 鶴代 while enjoying the puzzle-solving while reading, knowing what 鶴代 wrote was only from her own perspective.
By the way, I tried to make my first Anki sentence mining deck using the story. But, for now, the cards I made are 1) sentences with 1 new vocab/expression, and 2) I would need context to understand those new vocab/expressions better. So I’m not adding words with precise meanings, such as 到達、実否、凄惨（which have equivalent Chinese）to the sentence mining deck.
Words of the day:
さきたつ=先立つ: 先に死ぬ
肝腎=肝心: very important
しょいこむ=背負い込む: carry the responsibility
一部始終: from the beginning to the end
俄然: suddenly
ハタと: suddenly。これは多分擬音語だ。
I’m wondering if it’s possible to automatically update the “Days Completed”, by counting the check marks on user’s home page. (Have not looked into Wanikani’s API yet)
Things are gonna slow down a bit for me for a variety of reasons. Today I did less because on a lot of Sundays I play (online through Tabletop Sim) the Arkham Horror Card Game with some friends which is fun but takes a very long time and is, itself, a minor brain burner. I like board/card games but most of the ones I play are the types with a 70 page rulebook that people make jokes about, haha. So I finally finished 3400 characters and… whatever, that’s fine. I’ve been feeling kind of discouraged the last few days anyway so maybe it’s for the best. Most of my reading was characterized by forgetting a ton of things I think I should know and fumbling through some sentences (and a few dialectic/slangy type total unknowns) but I mean… I’m self aware enough to know I’m probably just focusing on them these days. Is what it is, my mood is struggling to bounce back.
I think I’ll be able to continue reading something every day, but my birthday is relatively soon and then over the weekend for Easter time I’m going out of town to visit my family (which, given my history of doing so badly with covid even that type of small scale gathering is something I rarely do but… going to have to take the risks at some point, I guess). So I’ll be fitting in reading there, but it can’t be the VN, and I’m not going to type updates on a phone.
In case you needed more evidence I’m tired, I messed up cropping the image earlier apparently, so it’s shorter than it should be. What I wanted to point out is I assume there’s a joke here about 漁師 and 猟師 both being りょうし… but then it occurred to me that I’m pretty deaf to pitch accent and I can’t be sure they are actually pronounced the exact same, heh.
Interesting new word is カナヅチ (has kanji but was written this way when I encountered it and it seems this use tends to be more likely to use kana) because it means hammer, but it also means someone who can’t swim. And that latter meaning was how it was being used here.
I’m travelling in the afternoon, so I made sure to read beforehand.
Read from page 32 to page 49 of 君ノ声 today! I had to read it twice (skimming the second time) to understand it properly, so it took me almost an hour.
Long-ish summary of the events within those pages and a sentence I couldn't make sense of
I misunderstood. Kyougoku (the businessman) is able to hear the voices of everyone’s hearts but Nana’s.
After Nana runs off, Kyougoku returns to his office? living quarters? defeated, and thinking that not being able to hear someone’s heart/thoughts is worse than hearing them. (Just roughly translating here, sorry lol). Sometime later, he comes across Nana’s mother rebuking her for being impudent (生意気). With his ability to hear her thoughts, he overhears her contempt for Nana. She sees the hairpin and says ‘諏訪部の家を舐めてるとしか思えない.’ I got stuck on the 舐めてるとしか思えない bit. Right afterwards she says ’とんだ安物だ.’ Not sure what とんだ means either but I assume it’s emphasising the ‘common’ quality of the hairpin. As in, not fit for the noble Suwabe family.
Nana is prostate on the ground in front of her mother but her mother proclaims she is destined to never be loved. The engagement to Kyougoku will for sure be broken, therefore she has no use for the hairpin. “How much can it sell for, I wonder?” she says.
At this Nana tries to take the hairpin from her, and it ends up on the ground. Nana covers it with her hands while her mother attempts to step on it. Watching from the bushes, Kyougoku decides to intervene.
He confronts Nana’s mother, and she implores him not to tell anyone about what happened. Kyougoku says he can’t leave his 婚約者 in a place like that, and in exchange for his silence, she should get permission from the Suwabe 旦那 (master of the household) for him to take Nana.
So he leaves with Nana, and tells her that if she does not want to go with him, she should release his hand and slap him. He will know how happy she is by the tightness of her hold.
And then the section ends with 「コレヲ運命トイフノデショウ」, which probably means something along the lines of ‘this is fate/destiny.’
I like your handwriting! Looks very smooth and natural.
Day 10: April 10th
What did I read?: ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂 Vol 2
How much did I read?: 4 pages
How long did it take me?: 24 min
Boy, I took a break after 4 pages with every intention of reading more later, but other things got in the way and distracted me On a sort-of related note, my goal for this week is to stop spending money. No new transactions. If I feel like I want to buy something, I’m going to read instead, until the urge goes away - that’s the new plan xD stg, someone needs to just smack my hand away from the mouse and throw my phone out a window, I am the worst impulse buyer in the world
ANYWAY, I’m really interested to see where this next chapter is going - the set up is that it’s a girl who wants to have awesome fortune-telling skills (because apparently fortune telling is the Hot New Thing with her friends at school).
I learned a word that feels very appropriate for this thread: 読みふける - to be absorbed in reading!
くぎづけ - being stationary; being rooted to the spot; halting; freezing (idiomatic expression - the kanji are 釘付け, like you’re being nailed to the spot lol)
謎めいた (なぞめいた) - enigmatic; puzzling; mysterious; wrapped in mystery
はち切れる - to be filled to bursting; to burst
I am probably the least tech-/script-savvy person on this forum so I’m not sure if or how that might be possible haha, but hopefully someone else will have an answer! ^^ It would be convenient, that’s for sure (I myself forget to update that top post fairly often lol)
I found it in Jisho, looks like you pretty much got it from context though ^^
I'll take a stab at this one (though someone else can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!)
I think 舐めてる here is the 4th definition on Jisho (to look down on (someone); to make fun of; to put down; to treat with contempt; to underestimate). So basically saying, I can’t help but think/feel that you’re making fun of the Suwabe family name/treating the family name with contempt (by wearing the hairpin - like it’s such a cheap hairpin that it’s an insult to their status?). More literally translated, I guess it would be more like “I can only think/feel that you’re making fun of the Suwabe family/treating the family name with contempt” (by wearing that hairpin)
諏訪部の家を舐めてる - treating the Suwabe family name with contempt
しか思えない - can only think/feel, or can’t help but think/feel (sorry, I feel like this translates awkwardly in English lol, but it’s just the としか~ない grammar point)
Second real ending achieved! I’m sitting at right around 55 hours so I’ll probably end up around 100 hours again, which based on how much longer I’ve heard VLR is than 999 is a definite improvement! We shall see though
VLR stuff
I got 天明寺's ending! And man was it an endeavor, it went on so long but the end… クォーク’s letter about how 天明寺 raised him and everything they went through, the cream soda… my heart but like if that’s 天明寺's ending, I have absolutely no idea what to expect for クォーク
In other concerns, hologram ゼロ’s whole spiel about how humans don’t know what they’re living for and only a higher-order being possibly could? Uh yeah that’s ominous, what are we talking about concern
Yayyy, congrats!!
I think at this point I’m obligated to proffer Zero Escape No but if you enjoy the mystery and character interaction aspects of Ace Attorney it might be a good fit! I might be biased since I haven’t messed with AA in Japanese in a while (it scares me lmao) but with the voice acting and such I think Zero Escape’s generally more approachable.
Assuming the pitch accent info isn’t lying to me (which is probably a big assumption lmao) they seem to be the same! Yomichan also has 漁師 marked as sensitive, interesting
I don’t know what ‘sensitive’ means in this context, but it seems to be the preferred title for the industry. Googling gets me hits on salary expectations and job FAQs. They even took the domain name: https://ryoushi.jp/
I actually already came across this in the past! I have no idea how much to trust random Reddit responses so I’m not really taking anything here seriously, but this thread is the only real info I found on that topic when I looked in the past. I do know the NHK indeed has lists of words not to use, but it’s surprising if this truly used to be on there for some reason. It’s the term this visual novel uses pretty much exclusively for the people at the harbor who fish, anyway.
So it seems to be a pretty outdated tag either way, but based on that I would guess it’s just like… too direct? Not honorific enough? Like maybe お漁師さん would be (or would’ve been) more proper, idk
So that thread reminds of the various language changes that I’ve learned about being driven / having been driven by cultural changes. As an example, I have twice accidentally said 看護婦 and been corrected to say 看護師 (gender neutral). There is/was also some controversy about the ども kanji in 子供 at one point. I just googled it and found this article which on skimming seems on point.
Maybe we should make a “fun investigations into Japanese words and phrases” thread if one doesn’t exist already
Very tired today from work, plus I spent a lot of time thinking about/working on a fic (new fic, though old idea I randomly remembered about today), so I didn’t get much reading done. No GREEN or 2.43, unfortunately. But I did read a bit on Satori Reader.
I started 壁の穴 today and read ch 1-3. Maybe because the simplicity makes it seem like a children’s story, I was a bit surprised when they killed off two of the newborn little sisters.
I’d never realized until today that 完璧 isn’t written with 壁. The bottom radicals are slightly different. I added 壁 to my known kanji today, so when I came across 完璧 in ch 3 and it had furigana, I was confused because I know I’ve already learned 完 on WK so it’s already on my known list, and the second one’s—oh, it’s not “wall”! Even though I’ve started paying more attention to radicals since starting WK (I still have trouble with 縁, 録, and 緑, though, but I’m starting to have an easier time more quickly distinguishing between 諦 & 締 and 識 & 職 when the context doesn’t help me), I never noticed that.
It’s still possible but IMO it’d be an odd twist given what happened. Though if you’re right (post 2.5 spoiler) 
I’m travelling in the afternoon, so I made sure to read beforehand.
I’m sitting at right around 55 hours so I’ll probably end up around 100 hours again, which based on how much longer I’ve heard VLR is than 999 is a definite improvement! We shall see though 
but like if that’s 天明寺's ending, I have absolutely no idea what to expect for クォーク 
