Word help needed

So I started with Chuukyuu e Ikou and there’s this sentence:

アムゼイやドロバンチなどの市場では、値段の表示がないことがあり、外国人は買い物がしにくいそうだ。

So, who knows what are those things? I mean アムゼイ and ドロバンチ…
:sweat_smile: :thinking:

Given the などの市場では, they sound like names for towns, streets, or perhaps just the names of the markets themselves. Something along those lines.

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That sounds pretty legit… Although I thouth it’s like some specific places only I’m not aware of :sweat_smile::roll_eyes:

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I got curious and searched a little, & it looks like they’re places in Bucharest–Amzei is a plaza there with a big market, and Dorobanți is a neighborhood.

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Wow :open_mouth: Cool to know, thank you so much. I tried to look of one but got some weird pokemon (or something) and gave up :flushed::sweat_smile: Thank you :clap:

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Sure thing! Yeah, deciphering katakana can be really tricky, lol. I’m trying to get better at it and got lucky this time. :sweat_smile: Searching アムゼイ got me to this Japanese travel site listing for Amzei Hotel: アムゼイ ホテル(ブカレスト)を宿泊予約 - 2022年安い料金プラン・口コミ・部屋写真 | Trip.com, which is where I got the spelling for Amzei and found that it was a place in Bucharest.

ドロバンチ was bringing up Pokemon like you said, but I figured from context maybe it was also a place in Bucharest, so I googled ドロバンチ ブカレスト and one of the top results was someone’s travel blog: ビール・お肉・特製スープ♪ (ブカレスト Bucureşti ) : ルーマニアへ行こう! Let's go to Romania !, which had the spelling Dorobanți. Then since I had spellings for them I could search them both in English and found out they were a plaza and a neighborhood, and there you go!

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That’s a rather diligent way to do a research… :star_struck: Thought I’m not good enough to read something like that and understand it :sweat_smile: … Also katakana… That’s still confusing.

BUT later in the workbook I figured it might be kinda targeted for Romanian learnes (?)… Because one of the exercises looked like this:
① ルーマニアの代表的な物( )。
② ルーマニアで最も知られている場所( )。
③ ルーマニアの伝統的な祭り( )。
And I thought… How would I know all of that? :scream:

Ah, like anything else it gets faster with practice! I like seeing if I can find things, and this one didn’t take too long. I didn’t have to read very much–mostly I looked and saw they were travel sites about places in Bucharest/Romania, and then I went “oh good, there are non-katakana spellings of the names I was looking for.” :sweat_smile: Mostly it was a question of seeing a bunch of katakana and forcing my eyes not to glaze over, lol. They can definitely be confusing!

And huh, yeah, that’s interesting about those exercises. :thinking: There weren’t any readings or anything beforehand that would help you finish the sentences?

Nope… Like not about Romania. There was general reading thingy, about fast food and how it’s bad for the health snd such. But those I presume are grammar exercises. And there was nothing to back it up. I can barely do the katakana readings I’m familiar with (mostly because I expect them to be written in one way and they are written like something completely different), and after seeing the task I gave up even trying to google some stuff about Romania. Because I couln’t possibly write the names correctly anyway… And I suppose if I google it in Japanese I’ll just drown in the sea of unfamilliar words and unfamiliar katakana written words :scream: So I just made it about my counrty (yeah, it was the easiest way not to give up on the book entirely, I suppose…)

Huh! Yeah, that seems really odd to give a bunch of exercises that the reader might not have the background knowledge for. But yeah, making it about your own country makes sense. :slight_smile: Good luck! I hope other sections of the book go more smoothly.

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