(SPOILER EDITION) Descent of the Durtle into Madness

What are all the books? If any of them are Japanese From Zero (volumes 1-3) I can post pictures of whatever page you need (tomorrow when I wake up that is).

Crazy cool how you guys got to this point! I don’t think I have any of the books on the list but I’ll check in the morning if this hasn’t been solved yet

Or an antiquie book shop. Japanese: The Spoken Language is from 1987

Here’s all the deets, augmented with edition dates. Format is:

Book Name (publication date)
ISBN-13
(ISBN-10, if that’s how the Tofugu article identifies it)
Book cipher code

Genki Workbook (Mar 2011)
9784789014410
89 41 3 12 31

Genki I (Feb 2011)
9784789014403
209 1 24 29 41 50 84

Minna no Nihongo (2nd Ed)
9784883196036
4883196038
36 2 10 45 130 4 55

Japanese for Busy People (Nov 2011)
9781568363851
1568363850
23 33 2 5 10 34 19

Japanese for Everyone (Jun 2008)
9784889962345
4889962344
50 4 33 8 13 434 4

Japanese: The Spoken Language (Sep 1987)
9780300038347
168 19 1 6 5 5 5 10 9

Adventures in Japanese (3rd Ed, Jun 2007)
9780887275494
0887275494
33 98 2 55 34 9 10

Japanese from Zero! (Aug 2014)
9780976998129
39 4 3 45 134 2 66

Japanese the Manga Way (Nov 2004)
9781880656907
1880656906
43 99 3 24 55 16 9

A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
9784789004541
4789004546
181 8 49 3 20 2 33

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Japanese from Zero 1, but make sure you have the identical ISBN number: 9780976998129 / 0976998122

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Well, I have to say, that jiddle has been pretty amazing so far. I’m really impressed by everyone (WK staff and durtlic church included, starting with @a-regular-durtle)
I’m a bit sad that I don’t have time to participate, but I enjoy reading about the progress anyway :slight_smile:

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Here’s upper half of page 36 of Minna no Nihongo, correct ISBN verified.

image

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So do you just need page 39 then or more? I haven’t been fully keeping up with the rules of how you’re getting information from these books.

Just 39, assuming character 134 doesn’t roll to the next page (most likely not).

Well… that’s unfortunate. Maybe we are going to discover that only four of the books yield actual words.

Or maybe it yields a full sentence leading to the next step…

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It’s possible (though maybe not likely) that we could translate the kana to romaji or standard keyboard. Or some other transformation.

But yeah, I’m guessing only some of them yield results.

If I skip numerals, that page of Minna no Nihongo gives me 毎晩休せす勉. The fact that doing exactly the same procedure on the DBJG perfectly yielded the English word “eating” suggests that something is wrong here…

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I agree not cheating at all.

Yeah, when I first started doing that, I got excited… “every night…” and then nothing.

So are we tracking which books we already have accounted for? Maybe I have one someone doesn’t?

I don’t think this page is formatted it a way that’s likely to contain one of the words. But here’s page 39 anyway (and 40 just in case).

JFZ pages

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Exactly.

Wonder if the solution to the previous puzzle is supposed to tell us exactly which books to read.

Wonder if we can back-engineer these books to fit into the four coded words. Maybe 00LB269G correlates to “Genki” somehow?

I am SO PROUD of you all! :slight_smile: This is real progress!! This makes me really excited :smiley:
But also, I was gone for like a day and y’all had all the fun without me :frowning:
ya durty buttholes :rage:

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Exactly what I was thinking. But since we (maybe) only have one keyword left to find, I’m going to see if I can track down some page images first…

Genki 1, Genki 1 Workbook, and Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar all had valid words.

So far, we have pages above from the correct version of Minna no Nihongo and Japanese From Zero.
They haven’t yielded good decodings yet, but maybe worth trying some alternative methods.

That leaves the following books not yet obtained:

Japanese for Busy People (Nov 2011)
9781568363851
1568363850
23 33 2 5 10 34 19

Japanese for Everyone (Jun 2008)
9784889962345
4889962344
50 4 33 8 13 434 4

Japanese: The Spoken Language (Sep 1987)
9780300038347
168 19 1 6 5 5 5 10 9

Adventures in Japanese (3rd Ed, Jun 2007)
9780887275494
0887275494
33 98 2 55 34 9 10

Japanese the Manga Way (Nov 2004)
9781880656907
1880656906
43 99 3 24 55 16 9

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