Does Japanese have standard commands for dog training? In English the usual commands would be sit, stay, come, speak, etc… are there common or equivalent words used in Japanese?
I only know of お座り (おすわり) - sit - which I find hilarious because it’s originally a very polite way of speaking (but of course by now moved into the realm of standard usage),
and おいで - come - which is a standard way to tell a socially lower individual (e.g. a child, or in our case a dog) to come.
Whoa, you know cool dogs, I guess!
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Not yet, I’ve skimmed over it again from my English version, but since this is a Tokyopop title I don’t necessarily trust the translation as from the little bit I’ve compared it has some major rewrites and embellishment.
And the usage of ア at the front was weird, too. I could understand a whole word being written in katakana, but just the first character was 
. But I assumed this had to be some reference to some sort of idiom or expression. Oh well, I’m just leave it as an unknown to myself until I can get around to reading it unless someone else here has read any of this manga and has some insight.
Often with slang usage the okurigana gets left in hiragana, though
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So now I’m leaning towards it being derived from the idiom I found above. Having skimmed the story a bit in Japanese it does look like it has to do with Lupin getting away with framing someone and getting them arrested for a murder in his place. At least that’s going to be my going theory until I actually read it in full.
I guess as always, it’s not necessarily a good idea to just take random translations you find on Google to heart without some verification.
I don’t know if it’s just a stylistic thing by Monkey Punch but in lots of his sentences he loves using katakana even partially in phrases. Most recently I came across the phrase すり替える when doing the skimming I mentioned above that he wrote as スリ替える. Guess I can’t complain too much about the katakana practice.
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Wait a second, this is all just katakana english… (is that the joke?)
If you mean the speak command, that’s just the general command used to tell them to bark. Unfortunately I don’t know many dogs that speak English. Although I’ve known a few that make a good effort.
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There’s no joke… on the left there’s a Japanese command (for instance お手). Then an English command (hand, or shake, or paw). Then a katakana guide to the English pronunciation for Japanese people who might need help with that (ハンド, シェイク, ポウ).
It’s designed for Japanese people, not English speakers, so that’s why it looks like that, but you can just refer to the left side to see what the Japanese commands are.
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Oh, duh, I see it now. I thought the kanji on the left was breaking them into categories or something, I see it’s just giving multiple English translations. Very cool, thank you!
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Yeah, a few of them are categories and not literal things you say to the dog, like 褒める and 注目, but most are just direct commands.
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What exact meaning does 浪人する convey? Like, what is “someone who failed their university exams” as a verb? “To be someone…”?
A 浪人 is someone who failed to get into a school or get a job and has to spend time preparing for their next chance. So 浪人する means to do that. The waiting and preparing is probably the main part of it as an action.
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I can’t quite understand what facial expression this phrase describes:
口元をにやりと歪む
The context:
This is from the KonoSuba light novel. Kazuma is carrying Megumin on his back and tries to get rid of her. She’s begging to stay with Kazuma’s party. This attracts attention of the surrounding people who throw judgemental looks at Kazuma. It doesn’t help that Megumin is fully covered in toad slime.
Sentence:
めぐみんは口元をにやりと歪め・・・「どんなプレイでもでも大丈夫ですから！先程のカエルを使ったヌルヌルプレイだって耐えてみせ」
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If it helps, there’s:
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Thanks, I saw those definitions. But it didn’t help much with imagining this.
Actually, there’s a way to know how it can be interepreted by the native speakers.
They showed it as a mischievous expression with faint smile at the corners of the mouth in the anime.
But I don’t know if it’s the phrase describes a particular facial expression or just says it’s a “suggestive grimace/smile” and it’s up to the reader to imagine it.
Kinda reminds me of novels written in English that have phrases like “her lips curled into a smile” or something like that. Since にやりと can also just mean “with a smile” I think in this sentence it probably was just meant to convey that her mouth was twisting into a smile and not, say, a grimace.
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I’m a bit confused by this NHK Easy article about a new Shougi prodigy:
Sentence 3 explains that you need to win 3/5 for the 棋聖 title:
「棋聖」になるには５回の試合のうち３回勝たなければなりません。
But then sentence 4 only mentions him winning 2/3:
２人は３回試合をして、藤井さんは２回勝って１回負けていました。
Sentence 5 does confirm that he took the title:
試合は午前９時から始まって、午後７時１１分に藤井さんが勝って「棋聖」になりました。
But at this point it seems unclear whether it was 3-1 or 3-2 (it was 3-1).
Why leave this info out of sentence 4 and then never clarify the final score? Maybe they’re trying to build a little suspense between 4 and 5?
But then again, the headline already establishes that he won.
Hmm…
As far as i understand it they had 3 matches before and the score was 2:1 BEFORE this deciding game from 9am to 7pm (WTF is this normal in shogi???)
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