📚📚 Read every day challenge - Spring 2022 🌸 🌱

Japanese Language Reading
1888

That’s the charm of ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 and 荒木 and ディオ.

May 15, Sat :cherry_blossom: calendar post

Week 7 of Spring 2022’s additional progress

I read an intriguing chapter of ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 today, so I’ll make an exception of writing more frequently.

Vocabularies of Note

  • ずたぼろ - shattered, in pieces - 襤褸(ぼろ) = rag, ずたずた is an onomatopeia
  • タフ - tough (but I don’t get what tough means anymore… :thinking: :interrobang:)
  • ダイナマイト - dynamite (I serious think along the line of 大生意図, :laughing:)
  • 不(ふ)敵(てき) - cheeky (rather than “peerless”)
  • 眼(まな)差(ざ)し - gaze (I include this one because WaniKani failed to teach about まなこ (e.g. 血眼) and まな)
  • 汚(お)点(てん) - dirt
  • 噛(か)ます - to force into someone’s mouth; to bluff / to wedge a wood
  • 血管(けっかん) - blood vessel
  • 抉(えぐ)る - to dig into
  • 歴(れき)史(し)上(じょう) - historical; important events
  • さっさと - quickly
  • 口(くち)車(ぐるま)に乗(の)る - to be brought in by wits
  • 施(ほどこ)す - to perform a ritual - 儀(ぎ)式(しき)をほどこす
  • 名(な)付(づ)け - christening, naming after (parents / family / namesake) - 許嫁(いいなずけ) = financee, also comes from this
  • 引(ひ)っ掛(か)け - trap, trick (question)
  • 外殻(がいかく) - outer shell (without the Furigana, I would imply a wrong reading {がら}.)
  • 取(と)り出(だ)す - to bring out
  • コロッセオ - colosseum (Italian spelling, JMDict only have コロッセウム counterpart)
  • ピアス - piercing (on mouth, nose)
  • 解(げ)毒(どく)剤(ざい) - antidote
  • 好(こう)敵手(てきしゅ) - worthy opponent
  • ブラックユーモア - black humor
  • 重(じゅう)婚(こん)罪(ざい) - bigamy (having two spouses, usually prohibited by law)
    • カーズ refuses to marry him, lol.
  • 賭(と)博(ばく)師(し) - gambler
  • 駆(か)け引(ひ)き - bargaining (reverse order of 引っ掛け)
  • 知恵(ちえ)の輪(わ) - (next chapter’s title :rofl: - phrase with a special meaning) mind puzzle

Names in Katakana, but have unshown English spelling

And English spellings are also chosen officially by the author (荒木), perhaps.

I have less than 1 day left of JOJO part vol 1. I’ll see what I can do.

Regarding Furigana generator

Regarding Furigana, I feel that I don’t want to bother improving the UserScript anymore. It’s easier to read visually to put it on the same line, using a punctuation (.) to separate phrases (and I might consider putting on the bottom row as well, if need arises). Furthermore, it is easier and more copy-able to include the Okurigana this way.

There are some edits and discussion below; but the edit is for #anchor URL

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1889

And I love that about both :slight_smile:

If it makes you feel any better, I’ve seen videos of Japanese people complaining about the readings too lol

I disagree. The way the script works now is easier and it’s more like how furigana is natively added to texts imo

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1890

Thinking back, it is true; although making the script works for those whose don’t install the script is a pain. And naturally, it shouldn’t impede me (the only one who use the modified script) either.

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1891

Home

Tired today after work, so I didn’t do all that much.

DQXI and Heroes arrived today, about 2 weeks earlier than expected. I was thinking that a 無双 would be easier to start with since there’s probably less story I could potentially miss, but I’ve been doing pretty well with ゼルダ無双, so I could probably play DQXI next and be fine, especially since you advance the dialogue in cutscenes manually (unlike in ゼルダ無双, where it’s automatic). But I’m still going with Heroes I first because of Terry. Terry, you asshole, I am coming to love you!

I actually got started early on 夜カフェ for once (started reading before the ch 7 thread went up, and also, I’d thought weeks started on Sunday but it just ended up being Saturday evening in my time zone, but the start date is listed as 5/14, so I guess I was misremembering lol) and read all of ch 7, which comes out to 13 pages of text. Hanabi seems to be taking two steps forward and one step back, but she’s still making progress!

When I picked up my Switch, I first finished that one story quest in ゼルダ無双 partly because I’d rather not leave them unfinished if I can help it, and partly because I’m not sure what’ll happen if I close the game when I’m in the middle of a level. After that, I broke out DQ Heroes and played the first two levels. The cutscenes in this are auto-advance as well, and I definitely missed some things said to me while on the battlefield (especially in that fight with the dragon at the end of the first level; if I looked away I’d die, and I was concentrating too much on staying alive to pay any attention to the audio either), and there aren’t any furigana at all, so it’s definitely more difficult. Not helped either by me being too tired to look things up more than usual today. I generally still seem to be doing pretty well though?

Ah, but I’ve really missed DQ and its soundtrack… I don’t think I can really say I grew up with DQ (that was Animal Crossing) since I was already a preteen when I discovered it, but DQIX was one of the first games I got when I got a DS and is one of my favorite games, so DQ still really carries that nostalgia factor.

Some vocab of note:

異変 (いへん) [noun] unusual event; strange occurrence; strange phenomenon; something abnormal; change (for the worse); accident; disaster

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1892

But it already works for people who don’t have it installed though? New users often ask me how I added furigana

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1893

It’s a Discourse-level hack by the author, rather than standard Markdown - [Userscript] Forum: IME2Furigana - #26 by Sinyaven and it gets converted before saving; then converted back before being edited.

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May 14th (Calendar Post)

Busy day so I couldn’t read as much as I wished.

夜カフェ => 14 pages (41 min)
ハロー、メランコリック！ => 29 pages (57 min)

Some fun panels from today’s reading:

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:stuck_out_tongue:

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ふんー

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アレ？

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Random Oshimi talk

Oh, it seems that’s 血の轍… he also seems to have another currently releasing series, おかえりアリス.

I’ve only read one other work by Oshimi (Aku no Hana, and read it in English), and he definitely seems to be a pretty peculiar author - I haven’t quite formed an opinion on his style yet, but Aku no Hana definitely had some moments of brilliance that I am hoping to see again in Happiness. Then again, Aku no Hana also had some really weird stuff - I guess I’ll see how Happiness goes before deciding if I want to check more of his other work…

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1895

I read the first volume and commented about it in this thread. It was one of the most stress-inducing things I had read in a long while. I am a bit curious about how it goes after that, but I feel like it would only get worse plot-wise, so I decided against it for my own sanity :sweat_smile:

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1896

I decide to fix it anyway, with some pre-processing; and the actual original text is still kept, nonetheless.

The style seems to be slightly different from 血(ち)の轍(わだち). A little too painful for my tastes.

Though, I read the whole first volume of おかえりアリス (which is free for a limited time), but only a few pages (10 pages) of 血(ち)の轍(わだち) (which is also free). I would say, the latter, albeit feels a little scary (with a hint of mystery), looks interesting so far.

I looked into 惡(あく)の華(はな) as well. It seems that the author like this kind of style (which I didn’t really expect).

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1897

May 14 :cherry_blossom: Home Post

I played a bunch of Zero Escape and Story of Seasons today; they’re both a lot of fun! Story of Seasons is a nice brain break when ZTD gets heavy :joy: it’s a wholesome delight truly. ZTD continues to be absolutely wild as well; we went in like alien transporters today? wild. There was a fun callback goof to シグマ’s cat-talk thing:

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So yeah all in all a good reading day! I’m definitely feeling more up to my normal brain energy levels now that finals are over so that’s good :muscle: back to my regularly scheduled chaos haha.

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1898

@omk3 Seems like you’ve been finding 告白 reasonably interesting, right? My reading has somewhat infected my fianceé’s choice of books to read in English, and she was just talking about considering this as the next book she reads. Must admit I tend to skim the titles of stuff people are reading cause I may or may not be able to read the title anyway and I know what very few books are called in Japanese anyway haha. But as soon as I saw the premise about the teacher, it clicked for me that it’s what you’ve been reading. I think she’s leaning towards picking it. Honestly I’m pretty curious now, too.

Plus I have a tangential connection to, and thus interest in, the author because I’ve seen the little miniseries based on her book Penance (贖罪). I had some issues later on but it had very interesting ideas, helps that I love the director (Kiyoshi Kurosawa).

While I’m here, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about chaos as a thing to be scheduled :thinking:

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1899

I’m a living contradiction :laughing:

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1900

I also have this one on my list! :laughing:

Maybe it would be a good idea to nominate it in one of the book clubs? Unfortunately it’s a tad long for the Intermediate club (clocking in at 320 pages), so it should go into the Advanced club. Any takers? :grin:

Also, regarding Flesh & Blood, there seem to be quite a few people who are interested in it - maybe we should set up an unscheduled discussion thread for it so that we can more easily discuss it without hijacking this thread too much?
I’m just a bit hesitant to create a thread that has “Flesh&Blood” in its title as it may attract all sorts of attention…

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1901

I’ve been planning to read it at some point :sweat_smile:

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1902

Please feel free to nominate it then :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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1903

I’m really liking it so far, yes, and it’s only getting better. Its writing style is very interesting, you dive in knowing nothing and trying to understand what’s going on, if anything, because it’s all innocent enough at the start. And then the bombs start dropping one after another. Each chapter is written from the point of view of a different person, and always adds something new to the puzzle (which didn’t even look like a puzzle at the start). The themes are a little on the brutal side though. No horror or anything, but all sorts of sensitive subjects are explored (or sometimes just get honorary mention). I thought of writing a list of warning tags, but it would be spoilerish, and honestly, I’m not finding it that bad. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who’s looking for a good-feel book or tends to shy away from unpleasant topics in books, but otherwise it’s been a whole lot of fun. And I remember enjoying the movie a lot (although I only remember scattered scenes and not much else) although the friends I went with seemed a little freaked out, so there’s that.

I commented before that this book would be so much fun to read in a book club (lots of speculation and food for discussion on all sorts of (often controversial) subjects. I’m only sad I’ll have already read it and will only get to watch the fun instead of take part if it gets picked. :smiley:

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1904

This sounds like a good idea! Also allows for different paces of reading as unless you are all at the exact same place it can be easy for things to get lost in this thread. Could always go for F&B and lots of pirate emojis haha

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1905

What kind of attention are you thinking it will grab? Surely it’d make sense to include the full title in the first post right?

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1906

So there is this book series whose two main characters are called Saikawa and Moe, and the author was ingenious enough to label that series “S&M” :woman_facepalming: When I posted the main thread for that series, a few people came by and commented on that - which is not inherently bad, but I thought that since the Reading threads are visible globally, you know… But maybe I’m simply overthinking this. :woman_shrugging:

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1907

Ok, it’s done :blush:

EDIT: Just-In-Case-Pinging @eefara @sycamore @Naphthalene and everybody else whom I forgot :sweat_smile:

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