📚📚 Read every day challenge - Winter 2022 ☃❄

Last night I read three pages from ぴこぷり and thirteen pages from Death Note. I found some interesting words.

お化け------おばけ------ghost; apparition​

おばけ and ばけもの are a class of ようかい. The term おばけ refers to things that change, and is often translated as ghosts.

19 Likes

The best お化け is of course the Sumikko Gurashi obake
obake

14 Likes

Lmao I believe that 100%, very much tracks based on the vibe and the digital root coming up like two seconds in. I’ll mentally prepare, but that should be interesting :eyes:

Right?? Most of the words and phrases I don’t generally know are super cool anyway so I’m not even mad about it. Thank you, I’m glad I have good taste :joy:

Ahhh that makes a lot of sense!! I still haven’t gotten to their actual names yet so it’ll be fun seeing how they all work :eyes:

5 Likes

Same! I’ve been thinking about getting into visual novels as well and was browsing Steam but felt utterly disappointed. I’m also interested in knowing where you all get your VNs from :wink: .

They also seem a bit pricey, but I hope the duration and quality makes up for it.

5 Likes

Today’s reading was https://j-town.net/2022/01/11330101.html - today I’m running short on time because of my mini-rant below, so no vocab list. It’s another ‘oh no! situation’ that ends up happy. Man thinks he’s about to be oyaji-hunted and ends up getting unexpected kindess.

Slightly off topic moaning about a book I started reading

I started reading ロクヨン (Eng) after trying and failing to read it in 2020 and omg, it’s still kicking my butt. I’m copying out sentences for Anki and just look at these:

お門違いの栄転話に出世欲をくすぐられることもなかった。

大義も定見もなく、ただ警察の権威を貶めんがために失策を論う昨今のマスコミは看過できません。

保険を掛ける意味合いから過去の勤務経験者を充当するのが警察人事の常道

^That last one is just part of a sentence! Pages and pages of long, complex sentences with less common words and set phrases I don’t know yet. It’s like diving in Aozora all over again except it’s a novel and not digestible short stories.

Like the writing is gorgeous but also…send help! :white_flag: I’m sure it will make me grow but it’s going to be a rough first couple of chapters.

18 Likes

:tiger2: :books: Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220203 :books: :raccoon:


Tanuki Scroll XXXIV: 節分! & 節分の鬼! :beans:

Hope you’ve got some beans ready because today is Setsubun! [節分] :beans: :japanese_ogre:

鬼はそと!福はうち!

The first thing I read was the “on this day” section of Hukumusume, and it explains all about the history of Setsubun - it’s a pretty old tradition! This year’s lucky direction to eat your Ehomaki in is:

北北西 (北微西) - North-northwest!

鬼はそと!福はうち!

The story is a cute little story about an おじいさん who lives by himself with no family left. On the night of Setsubun he can hear all the village having fun with their families 「鬼は~、外! 福は~、内!」.

He returns to his lonely home and finds out an old demon mask and throws the beans around by himself, but he says: 「鬼は~内、福は~外」. Suddenly there’s a knock at his door, it’s some demons! They’re happy that someone wants to spend time with them, and then even more demons turn up. They have a big feast with lots of Amazake and have a super fun time. :japanese_ogre:

☆ Learnings ☆

New Words

つきもの「付き物」ー Essential part (of something)
追儺「ついな」ー Ceremony of driving out evil spirits
ヒイラギ「柊」ー Holly (tree), specifically False Holly
えほう「恵方」ー Favourable Direction; Lucky Direction
かんぴょう「乾瓢」ー Strips of Dried gourd: Kanpyo.
伊達巻「だてまき」ー Rolled omelette with fish paste. Also a woman’s under sash (for kimono).
でんぶ「田麩」ー Finely shredded seasoned fish.
ズカズカ ー Without permission; Rudely barging in; Without hesitation

Historic Eras
慶雲「けいうん」ー Keiun era, May 704 - Jan 708. Also read as きょううん.
室町「むろまち」ー Muromachi Era, 1336-1573.
応永「おうえい」ー Ōei era, Jul 1394 - Apr 1428.
文安「ぶんあん」ー Bun’an era, Feb 1444 - Jul 1449.

Deities
歳徳神「としとくじん」ー Goddess of Lucky Directions
七福神「しちふくじん」ー Seven Lucky Gods

Kanji Form!
恵方巻「えほうまき」ー Ehomaki sushi roll (uncut). Tasty! Look up recipe maybe?? :eyes: :eyes:

Additional Meaning
極楽「ごくらく」ー This is on WK as: Paradise… and pretty much no other information. It’s Sukhavati, the pure land that is associated with Buddha Amitābha.

23 Likes

I’m going to respond to the VN talk later but I don’t have the time just yet, just wanted to say something to this while it’s on my mind – if you have a script on hand, have you tried importing it into Game2Text? I haven’t done it, but that should be able to fix the sentences for you, I think.

I know the struggle though, I’ve spent too much time trying to mess with settings. The light preset worked decently well on Ace Attorney overall, but it made it so that the occasional red highlighted text was absolutely invisible to the program, haha.

5 Likes

Summary Post

February 3
星の王子さま, p. 18-26.


18 Likes

Thanks so much! I actually managed to get it working this evening! Think my laptop just couldn’t handle having the game and the captured video on screen at once and so everything was weird and stuttering but tried it using a monitor today and it works well! Very excited! I saw someone also using it with switch games (using video capture to the laptop) as well when watching videos to see how to get it to work so might be able to unlock yomichan on switch games too which would be a game changer!

7 Likes
VN talk is probably going to be long so I'll collapse it

Yeah… Steam is a decent resource still, and I’ve gotten some things there that I want to read (Ace Attorney trilogy, Little Busters, Musicus, etc), but it’s certainly hit or miss. Unfortunately a Steam sale JUST ended today, heh. I imagine you’ve seen already, but luckily Steam does at least clearly label language availability. Annoyingly, while both being made by Key (along with Little Busters), Clannad and the version of Summer Pockets without the extra content are both English only on Steam. Funny side note there, Little Busters is literally titled “English Edition” all the way to its name in your library, despite being the one to feature Japanese :expressionless:

That link I sent you also has various further links to some VN recommendations based on difficulty, and while I think those links can be hit or miss, that might be a good place to look if you’re trying to find more stuff that you might interested in.

I hadn’t heard about that, but it might be true? When you ask about where I got Summer Pockets, I’m hoping it’s not like this across the board, because Summer Pockets sells for like $80USD, which I find absurdly and prohibitively expensive, and well… going to have to let this sentence trail off, on the Wanikani boards. Summer Pockets is a hard one to recommend anyway because it’s common to have to change your system location to Japanese to make VNs work, but it’s not a huge deal. Nothing actually changes if you just tell Windows you’re in Japan. But the engine Summer Pockets uses, while not a common measure, goes all the way to checking your PC’s language and even time zone settings, and if anything is off from Japan at all, it refuses to launch. I… worked around it, but this game was a struggle to start, heh.

It won’t be quite that bad generally! I’m still in the process myself of working out where and how I’m going to get all my Japanese VNs, but the visual novel subreddit has a purchasing guide, and honestly probably the easiest way is to just choose a game and check its page on VNDB. They have links near the top to buy the games.

Danganronpa is wonderful, and you should play it, but it’s one I’d be concerned might not work with a texthooker so you’d need the more finnicky OCR, plus I do want to warn you about the class trial segments. I’m not sure how much you know about how it’s presented, but during those gameplay sections words are like spinning around and shooting across the screen and it’s all sytlized and chaotic. Might be a bit of an extra layer of difficulty.

Oh that’s excellent to hear! I just assumed it was an issue with the text not reading well enough, oops. Great choice of game, too.


Summary post

Summer Pockets: I’m managing… a bit more of the reading totally tripped me up today, but I’m also fighting off early migraine signs. Seems to happen to me a lot these days :\

The reading session was mostly fun, regardless. The return of a particular character led to the VN doubling down on its worst joke I referenced before, but otherwise, it’s increasingly starting to actually put its characters together in situations, as opposed to the isolated meetings, so those interactions are nice. Today I got my proper welcome to the island, which reminds me how slow I’m reading, haha

Today’s interesting but strange historical reference was to Tairo no Masakado, a samurai “notable for leading the first recorded uprising against the central government in Kyoto.” I need to learn more Japanese history… and culture… oh, and the language. Small order there.

Zoo 1: The fourth story has been a little rough with increased description, but I’m grinding through it, and I’m 71% through the book! I just wanted to briefly mention it because I was shocked to come to what seems to be a lightly sci-fi story? Thus far, seemingly a rather touching one about death and the nature of life. I’ll have to write about my total thoughts on Zoo 1 when I finally finish it, but I’m quite enjoying it! There’s a surprising amount of variety.

18 Likes

Just read the remaining 80 pages of Domestic Girlfriend Vol. 3. I really enjoyed it there were some funny scenes unfortunately I don’t have more volumes of it but I may pick them up during a sale.

Vocabulary list Domestic Girlfriend vol. 3
イチャイチャ flirting; making out
パイオツ tits​
黒子 ほくろ mole; beauty spot​
正門 せいもん main gate; main entrance N2
片思い かたおもいunrequited love; one-sided love N1
無理やり むりやり forcibly; against one’s will
若頭 わかがしら leader of a crime syndicate’s henchmen; young leading subordinate in yakuza group
長男 ちょうなん eldest son (may be the only son) N2
有り気 ありげ seeming to be​
ほっと with a feeling of relief; with a sigh of relief​ N1
団地 だんち apartment complex N2
末永く すえながく forever; everlastingly; for many years to come
短編 たんぺん short (e.g. story, film) N2
官能 かんのう sensuality; carnality
同年代 どうねんだい the same generation
申し訳ない もうしわけない I’m sorry; (it’s) inexcusable N2
気まずい きまずい unpleasant; awkward; embarrassing
冊子 さっし book; booklet; pamphlet
お揃い おそろい being together; going together
合宿 がっしゅく lodging together; training camp
振られる ふられる to be rejected; to be dumped​
悶々 もんもん here it means horny

20 Likes
VN talk

Thanks, will definitely check it out! By the way, from a quick skim it looks like Japanese like to buy games in physical form? At least there seem to be way more options to buy them physically than digitally :thinking: Or perhaps this has to do with the prevalence of consoles over PCs in Japan?..

Lol, just found it on one to the websites from the buying guide you linked, and it’s ¥8910 there vs $29 on Steam, so about 3x more expensive…

Hmm, sounds not so welcoming. Does the text disappear after all this movement? I think I could probably tolerate it (if it’s at all recognizable, because I imagine OCR won’t help in this case) unless it only stays on the screen for a limited time. In the latter case I don’t think anything would help, really, – not even a much better (but still not near-native) command of Japanese :joy:

Would you say that it uses a lot of difficult language in general? (Even if in English, just as an approximation of what to expect from the Japanese version.)


Summary post

February 3 update:
Read chapter 10 of よつばと! today. Yotsuba was surprisingly tame this time around, while Asagi was shown from quite an interesting angle again.

20 Likes

Summary post :bookmark:

February 3

本好きの下剋上 8
Progress: (45% → 48%)

Also read the lyrics of a few vocaloid songs, mainly by Neru.
It’s fun to revisit songs you’ve known since forever and manage to understand the lyrics with little effort.

And the epiphanies be like:
“ohhh, so the mesh of a hiragana word was actually those/that kanji!”
"oho, so that’s what the song really was about 0: "
Had lots of fun :smiley:

24 Likes
VNs

There certainly are a lot more listed options there. It probably is true that a lot of them come out on Switch, or older consoles, so a lot of those come from that? Japan has been a little slow to adopt PC gaming and digital sales along with it generally I think, with PC gaming itself seen in a somewhat derisive light for a long time due to all of the very adult games there. But this is all me speculating anyway… it’s probably true that even PC VNs are still being sold as physically boxed copies in a way we don’t tend to do in the west?

Mmhmm. Kind of absurd. When I talk about the enhanced edition of Summer Pockets being a thing that pushed me over the edge to learning Japanese, part of that is sheer aggravation at Key on a consumer side, too. See, they announced a new version of Summer Pockets with lots more content was being released at a time when I’m almost certain the game wasn’t out in English at all yet. Then they said they would wait and see if it got an English release based on how base Summer Pockets sold… but by then, I didn’t want to buy the game twice so I never bought the original version. Like, you can’t announce that there’ll be a better version and English players only get the privilege if they commit to the lesser one first, heh. I can’t be alone in that. They kinda sabotaged themselves.

I don’t think there’s anything with a true, unending time limit. I wanted to show you a quick video example but the problem is they put pictures with Xs over them where anyone who died would have stood, so there is no way to avoid spoilers. Basically how it works is a short conversation plays out, jumping between people as they say what they think about what happened. In this time, you’re looking for something that contradicts a piece of evidence you have, and you literally fire it at their words with a crosshair. You can slow it, but that’s meant to be for making the shot easier, and is limited. There will also be other words meant to be distractions and obstacles sometimes overlapping those words which could be a pain. Basically when the conversation is done playing out it’ll just restart, so although time is limited on each cycle, there’s no punishment for taking as long as you need. I forget which minigames are in which but sometimes you have to do things like spell out words yourself in convoluted ways, which could become a challenge, heh.

So… I can’t make any promises because this isn’t really the sort of thing you think about in your native language unless something is written particularly wildly, but I don’t recall it ever getting too specialized or weird. Just the sort of death and investigation vocab you’d expect primarily. Everyone has pretty exaggerated quirks which may or may not lead to over the top role language difficulty, that’s the main one I’d expect if anything.

5 Likes
Migraine talk that you can ignore if you want cause sometimes advice is annoying

I just recently managed to get my own migraines mostly under control and 2 major things helped me:

  1. Magnesium supplements
  2. Getting prescribed migraine meds from Nurx (telehealth company, takes insurance if you’re US based). Mine are the type where you take them when you feel it coming on and it helps stop it before it ramps up. Downside is that if it starts up in my sleep I’m SOL. :sweat:

There are some other supplements recommended to me by doctors (high doses of riboflavin is one I remember) but they didn’t seem to make a difference for mine.

That super sucks though and I feel for you. :frowning:

3 Likes

Home post

Day 33:

日本語: I read a fair amount of ミステリークロック and some of 機動強襲型令嬢アリシア物語1.
Read-aloud: We read two chapters of 7SEEDS.

中国語

中国語: I read an intermediate entry on Mandarin Bean, one page of 擅长捉弄的高木同学, and a bit of 孩子最爱读的中国民间故事.

21 Likes

Yesterday I finally finished the prologue of ifの悲劇、and today I read the first branch of the first part. (That’s why the book is called ifの悲劇, the author describes the developments twice, in a “what if this had happened, or what if that other thing had happened?” The book is split up into four parts, for which there exist two options. The first branch of the first part already added a weird and fun twist to the story, and I’m curious to see how the other branch will evolve.

Regarding 大聖堂, my Japanese friend writes daily short summaries of his (English) reading in Japanese, which he then uses in our discussions. I managed to convince him to send me his summaries every day, so now I get the bonus of reading the story twice: Once the real book, and once his summary. It’s very interesting that he sometimes even uses the same words as the Japanese translator :joy_cat: (he doesn’t know the Japanese version, of course, he is only reading the English one). And I must say, I’m really impressed how well he manages to keep up - the English text is not exactly easy to understand and contains quite a few words that even I don’t know.

24 Likes
Migraines

That is much appreciated, thanks. I might at least look into trying magnesium or something relatively simple like that, thanks. I can tell mine are triggered by light often (I know in the past I’ve had ophthalmic migraines with temporary blindness in just one eye, though recently it seems to be both?). So it’s frequently, but not always, sufficient to just get away from screens for a while, have a bunch of water, maybe an advil, that kind of thing. Then I at least escape with only mild pain, usually. I get the feeling skipping caffeine might also help, but I really really don’t want to drop coffee. This used to be a relatively rare occurrence for me, but it’s happening pretty often now…

The thing is, I had pretty bad long covid a while back (caught it October 2020, pre-vaccine days), and I’m in this sort of zone now where I am demonstrably better than I was at the worst of that, but I feel like there are a bunch of signs of lingering damage, though it’s hard to be sure :confused: . Like, it only just occurred to me to look into this, and it turns out increased migraine occurrence is pretty common in people who caught it (along with lots of other stuff I’ll resist ranting about, heh).

…anyway, that wasn’t quite what you asked for, heh. Just been a little tough recently. Many thanks for the advice :heart:

6 Likes

Wha… what?
*reads description online*
… what?

:joy: I guess I’ll have to read that at some point.
This is probably the fourth time it happens.
@valkow, official provider of book suggestions.

6 Likes
More migraine talk

Oh that sounds awful! Yours sound very different from mine (no visual issues with mine and OTC meds won’t touch them), but hopefully one or both of those supplements help. Magnesium is one of those things that really hard to get a measure on ‘deficiency’ through simple blood testing if I remember correctly.
Hopefully the long covid symptoms ease, I’ve heard a lot about them and it sounds miserable.

Best of luck in recovering in all ways :heart:

5 Likes