Yeah, much appreciated! I did just that. The two J-J ones I already had, I’m pretty sure I added because they were recommended… somewhere as relatively easy ones, when I was first experimenting with J-J. And to be honest these definitions still often have a bunch of words I don’t know yet, and can be long, so I get lazy if the word doesn’t look like one I need to dig into further. But this doe look more comprehensive and I’m starting to come across more instances where I need another opinion so this is a good addition.
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Are you by any chance reading Summer Pockets?
(Inari, rainbow butterflies - that looks familar 
)
I read it in English (and loved it!) but I think about revisiting it in Japanese one day (perhaps when Japanese release’s price drops a bit 
). How’s it going?
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Sure am! I restrained myself from playing the English version for a while cause by the time I wanted to, the expanded Reflection Blue version was already announced, but who knows if that’s ever coming out in English, so here I am.
I’m really enjoying it. This is my first visual novel (well, I read most of the first Ace Attorney before and that kinda nebulously counts), with previous experience just in some volumes of easy manga, Satori Reader, and just now a couple books on the side, so I’m moving slowly and leaning hard on the texthooker. At this point 5-6 thousand characters can take me a couple hours, but that’s better than when I started at least. With the assistance I’m finding that it’s a pretty good level for me in difficulty. It’s packed with new words, but what isn’t?
I read Tsumugi’s route, then Shizuku’s, and I’m on Ao’s now. I think Shizuku having a route is new to Reflection Blue. I’ve been putting off Miki for a bit cause I tried her first event and she piled on the unfamiliar city hall and utilities related words heh. I’ve saving Shiki for later too cause I got the impression her speech is also a bit harder, but I think she as a character is totally new to this version too.
But yeah, having a great time. In the back of my mind I have so many VNs calling to me but I’m gonna be on this one for months, heh.
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Yeah, that’s how it goes for me as well - although recently I’ve been pleasantly surprised, when in last two VNs I’ve been reading, I suddenly noticed that in lots of the slice-of-life dialogues I was able to read a few lines in a row without the need to look up anything. It was a great feeling 
(So far it seems that I’ve read ~30 VNs in Japanese, and around 90 in total - of course my pace dropped significantly when I switched to Japanese versions )
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Hell yeah, progress.
Realized I should probably clarify, when I say my first VN, I’ve read quite a few VNs in English prior to this. I rather like the medium. First Japanese only. But yeah, ~30 in Japanese is extremely impressive considering how long they tend to be.
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Just made a mistake while reading that I thought other people might be able to learn from. I can’t post the original sentence because…reasons, but I couldn’t remember which of the readings to use for 直 in a sentence like this.
部屋の雰囲気や、屋上のぶよぶよとした足元の感触に、直に触れている。
I checked, and sure enough: Its supposed to be じかに in this case rather than じきに. Not sure why my mind disassociated the two readings with the two different usages, especially when I’ve learned words like 直談判 that make it pretty obvious, but hopefully someone else can learn something from this.
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What’s the difference in connotation between 登る and 上る? Is there any?
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Essentially the same thing. If you take a page like 「上る(あがる)」の意味や使い方 わかりやすく解説 Weblio辞書 you can read the section [補説] to see in which case which form is preferred. But it’s just a tendency. You can use all three for everything and it wouldn’t be wrong.
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jisho tells you what kanji to use with what usage. I’m not sure how strict you need to be - you can substitute any of them and not be misunderstood, like @downtimes suggests, but I guess it would look bad in more formal writing
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I might be wrong, but I always saw 登る in reference to climbing mountains (登山する). I feel 上る refers to climbing in general.
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This indeed. 上る = small-scale things like stairs, 登る = large-scale things like mountains, 昇る = cosmic-scale things like the sun rising.
You can also run them through Google Image Search to get a generall feel for the difference (though admittedly a few of the same images show up for all three, because they’re featured on pages about “what’s the difference between these kanji?”).
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I know perfect translations from English to Japanese basically don’t exist, but how would I be able to express in Japanese that I miss someone without wanting to see them again? Like I know I could say 会いたい, but you don’t always want to see someone you miss. For example, if I broke up with a partner and although I never wanted to see them again, I still missed them. Would the closest Japanese just be something like:
元彼女と別れて悲しい
or 元彼女のせいで悲しい (questionable)
The only issue is that this puts the focus on you being sad because of some reason, rather than the nuance the English has. Is this just the trade-off you have to make when expressing this in Japanese, or is there a better way?
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Are you saying there’s a way to say you miss someone in English that implies you don’t want to see them (without explicitly saying you don’t want to see them)?
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Maybe “I miss what I had with my ex” would be a good phrasing in English?
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Then we’re kind of splitting hairs between “missing the person” and “missing the situation” but I guess Wantitled can explain more what they mean.
EDIT: Perhaps I just inverted it in my head. Not a suggestion that the English implies not wanting to meet, but that 会いたい does imply wanting to meet while the English doesn’t imply wanting to meet explicitly (I still think it would be pretty strongly inferred by the listener though, which is probably where my thinking went astray).
That being said, I do feel like いなくて寂しい is roughly equal in its not implying wanting to meet directly.
If the objection is merely that “to miss someone” is a transitive verb in English while いなくて寂しい is an intransitive verb plus an adjective, that kind of thing happens all the time.
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I think even just 「寂しい」 is a good replacement in this case as well, if you don’t want to go so far as to mention the now ex-partner. Yea, it technically translates to “lonely”, but I think its everyday usage expresses what the speaker is actually feeling more closely.
I think it’s easy to overlook the nuance of “missing someone” in English, where you can want to see them while still knowing that you probably shouldn’t/can’t.
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I meant missing the person, which was why I thought it was difficult. いなくて寂しい is good, but I feel like that suggests being in the situation of not being with them is the reason. Maybe that’s my interpretation though and it’s such an abstract thing, even breaking it down in English is difficult 
I think if most people broke it down in English, it would be something like “I am sad that I am no longer with my ex”, but I don’t think that represents the feeling of “missing” completely accurately.
I avoided 寂しい as, at least in English, “lonely” doesn’t have the right feeling to it, although it could be a case where I’ve just failed to consider the nuance of the Japanese equivalent.
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To miss means “To become aware of the loss or absence of; to feel the want or need of, sometimes with regret.”
Their absence is the thing that provokes the feeling… same as Japanese?
I think this is a pretty common thought among Japanese learners. I still struggle with saying I miss certain foods or activities from home without using something like 何かを食べたいなぁ. It’s one of the handful of phrases that’s super useful and I wish had a direct translation in Japanese.
It definitely has a slightly broader nuance in Japanese than in English, in my experience, which is why I suggested it. As an anecdote, we just had our 離任式 at school last week to say goodbye to all the teachers headed to new assignments. The phrase 「この寂しい日がいよいよ来てしまいました」, or ones like it was used in more than one of the speeches from students/teachers. I’d find this hard to translate into English as “This lonely day…” because describing a day as “lonely” just seems weird to me. I took it as more of a word to describe the sadness that comes with separating from a person or place. It even extends to the bittersweet side when someone is moving on to bigger and better things, like a promotion, graduate school, or a dream job.
Ultimately, I agree with you and think it’s incredibly difficult to properly convey the same meaning, at least in any sort of simple way. Running into these types of abstract ideas that don’t translate from one thing to the other has been the most frustrating part of the language for me. Especially when I’m being put on the spot to come up with a quick translation as if it’s as simple as plugging numbers into an equation.
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