Learning Japanese From Zero

[vonPeterhof]

I was also surprised to see that 三階 was furigana'd as "sankai" (well actually, it was furigana'd as "kai" because the 三 didn't have furigana for some reason). 三階 was a word that I'd previously studied on JPDB, where it is listed as "sangai", and I often missed it due to failing to remember the unusual reading. But it seems like that was incorrect all along, or at least not universal. After seeing it in the wild as sankai, I went ahead and blacklisted it on JPDB. It's frustrating that I spent so much time trying to memorize a reading difference that turns out to not even be correct!

In my experience "sangai" is the "correct" pronunciation in that it's the preferred one in the media and in official announcements, but in everyday life both pronunciations are used and "sankai" isn't really seen as markedly dialectal. If anything, "sangai" seems to be almost nonexistent in western Japan: I heard from a teacher of Japanese from Fukuoka that he was "supposed to" teach "sangai" as the default even though he hardly ever heard it growing up. I'm assuming that the furigana is written as "kai" precisely because it's not the furigana for the whole word, either as the result of a conscious decision to use the unmodified underlying pronunciation on the single character, or just as a result of an algorithm transcribing all instances of 階 as "kai" with no manual oversight.

[golyplot]

As usual, there's little to say about Japanese, so I guess I'll talk about Ace Attorney some more.

I went back and looked at the transcript of Lettuce's death again, and noticed that the English version does have a hidden reference to blindness, it's just much more subtle than in the original Japanese. Therefore it seems obvious that it is in fact meant to refer to Machi Tobaye after all.

LeTouse:
Ask... wi...witness...

Apollo:
Witness... There was a witness!? Who!?

LeTouse:
...Cold... so cold... Witness...

Apollo:
You're cold? D-Don't worry, you're going to be fine! Help is on the way!

LeTouse:
...Can't s...see...

Apollo:
Hang in there, Mr. LeTouse! Tell me, who was the witness?

LeTouse:
The wi...witness...is ...si...si...ren...

My suspicion was further reinforced during Lamiroir's testimony, where she claims to have witnessed the shooting but only talks about the sounds and not anything she saw, claiming that she focuses more on her ears as a singer. I assumed that this was because it was actually Machi who witnessed it, and then told her about it later.

But then I was completely thrown by the reveal that Machi isn't actually blind anyway. It seems like that contradicts all the hidden foreshadowing earlier on. Now I have no idea what is going on.

Edit: Oh wow. So that's the "answer" they came up with. I'd actually considered it, but decided it was so stupid and nonsensical that it couldn't possibly be the case.

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Incidentally, I find it interesting that Machi's name was kept almost the same from the Japanese version. (He's Maki Tobaye in Japanese and Machi Tobaye in English). Even in cases where characters are very Japanese-themed, like Viktor Kudo or Wocky Kitaki, they've always changed the names to something else Japanese-sounding for the English localization. This is the first time that they've kept a full Japanese name intact like that, except that they then made a very slight change for no apparent reason at all. If you're going to all that trouble, why not just keep it as Maki?

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Another interesting bit is Klavier complaining that he had to take the taxi to the concert because his motorcycle broke. In the original Japanese, he instead complains that he had to take the train, which comes across very differently because everyone takes the train in Japan. That line makes him sound like an entitled rich person, something that Tsuwahasu even commented on. Whereas in English, all that is lost, since we don't have universal mass transit here and there's no way to preserve the original meaning.

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One actually Japanese related thing. I noticed one line in Mushoku Tensei where Aisha says "My big brother is the Rudeus Greyrat, the famous mage". However, in Japanese, she clearly says "imouto", i.e. she's saying that she is the little sister of Rudeus, the famous mage. Of course there are much large changes that happen all the time in the process of translating Japanese, but I found it interesting that they flipped it since they could have kept it the same in English. But perhaps the emphasis would be very slightly less natural that way.



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Also a note from SR about the ever-enigmatic hatashite:

The word 果たして (はたして) can feel a little tricky to get your arms around. When it comes before a question like this, it emphasizes that the speaker thinks that the question is currently unanswerable. There is a sense of groping for an answer that is out of reach.

[golyplot]

I've been making good progress on JPDB lately for once. In fact, for the last eleven days in a row, I completed my daily reviews in under 15 minutes and did my seven new cards a day. I've sometimes been tempted to increase the new cards per day limit, but I know that soon enough, I'll be overwhelmed with reviews again, even as it is.

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Harry Potter

The English version says that Flitwick's feet "were dangling a foot from the ground." I expected it to be translated as "30 senchi" the way the Japanese books usually convert customary units to metrics, but instead they didn't include the distance at all. The Japanese translation went for something completely different, instead saying "se ga chisai node ashi ga shita made todokazu buraburashiteiru."

Another interesting bit is that the statement that Dumbledore "had a number of useful spies" The Japanese version translated this as him "放っていた" a number of useful spies. I guess it makes sense as a metaphor that he's releasing his spies into the world or something, but that is not a word that I would have ever guessed they'd use.

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Anime

Last night, I finished watched Mushoku Tensei, so tonight I decided to start watching A Place Further Than the Universe.

The art style took some getting used to. For some reason, the characters are almost always outlined in white outlines, which makes them look like paper cutouts. At first I thought it might be intended to represent the shine of bright sunlight seen through the edges of people's hair from behind, but if so, they completely missed the mark, because they do the outline thing all the time regardless of the actual lighting or positioning. Even when the characters are indoors or it is dark and raining, there's still that bizarre white outline, and even within a shot they do the outline everywhere, even though those are mutually incompatible directions from a lighting perspective even if you ignore that there's no light in that scene in the first place.



Also, when the girl was crying in the bathroom, it sounded like she kept saying "shakuman" instead of "hyakuman" (for the million yen she lost). Is that a real thing, or just my imagination?

[vonPeterhof]

Also, when the girl was crying in the bathroom, it sounded like she kept saying "shakuman" instead of "hyakuman" (for the million yen she lost). Is that a real thing, or just my imagination?

Considering that the episode is titled 青春しゃくまんえん, it's not your imagination. The merger of the ひ and し phonemes happens in both directions in various dialects, but it's pretty rare in media outside of portrayals of markedly dialectal speech. I think it's most strongly associated with the 下町 accent, basically old-timey working class Tokyo speech. In this case it was probably just meant to represent Shirase slurring her words due to crying.

[golyplot]

I guess my comment about JPDB must have jinxed things. Just a day and a half later on Saturday morning, I failed to get through my daily JPDB reviews and did no new cards, breaking a 12 day streak. I again failed on Sunday, though I just barely made it through this morning. Still, I'm sure that will happen more going forward.

It's a really good thing that I didn't get cocky after a 12 day streak and start bumping up the new card limit like I'd been considering. But I'd been burned enough times in the past on JPDB to know not to do that. For some reason, it seems like there's a big "momentum" effect. You can get away with doing lots of new cards for a week or two, but then it really starts piling up, and will keep piling up even if you stop doing new cards.

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As for Harry Potter, if all goes well, I will likely finally finish PoA volume 1 tonight. But for now, I'll write about a number of interesting words I came across while reading last night, particularly the Christmas presents scene.

The biggest surprise was kuriiro/chestnut. Ron and Harry get a bunch of maroon clothes from Mrs. Weasley, and so "maroon" comes up many times in the scene. I was very surprised to see it translated as "kuriiro" (chestnut) in Japanese.

Since "Chestnut" is used to describe people's hair and horses, and I'd seen kuriiro used for hair in Japanese as well, I always assumed it was just a shade of brown. However, after some Wikipedia investigation, it seems that "chestnut" can mean either "brown" or "dark red". Apparently actual chestnuts are dark red colored, and in fact "maroon" is derived from the French term "marron" for chestnut. I had no idea. It still seems weird to me that the same word would be used for what are effectively multiple different colors though.

Another notable word in that scene was futokoro (breast pocket). That's a word that I'd first encountered on JPDB last week. Despite the fact that I'm studying a top10k deck, and hence any new words I do are going to theoretically be common words, I still didn't think that that was the kind of thing that I would ever actually see in the wild. I assumed that JPDB was just teaching that kanji because it appears in some unrelated common word. And hence, I was surprised to see futokoro actually in fact come up in the wild like this (the context is Scabbers hiding in Ron's pocket while Crookshanks attacks again).

Lastly, another interesting word I noticed was "porori", describing how Ron dropped his socks in shock upon seeing the Firebolt. One of the banes of Japanese learners (or at least me) is how onamotopeioas seem impossible to remember. No matter how much time you spend grinding them in flashcards and no matter how much immersion you do, they never seem to sink in, or if so, only barely. How on earth can anyone remember the difference between sururi/surari/sarari, or odoodo/orooro/ozuozu?

Anyway, I'm hoping that having a mental image to connect it to will help me remember "porori", although based on past experience, I'm sure that I'll forget it anyway soon and end up banging my head against the wall forever like always. Speaking of which, I'm pretty sure I remembered noting "perori" (licking) earlier in the book and then forgot about it. Which incidentally brings up another example of a stupid pair, perori/porori. Why are there so many darn mimetic words that sound almost but not quite the same while having completely different meanings? Why, Japanese people, why?!



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Also, I watched A Place Further Than The Universe ep5 tonight and finally realized that the main character has a little sister. I've mentioned this before, but I am continually amazed how seemingly every anime protagonist is either an only child or else has a little sister. Those are the only kinds of families that can exist in anime. If the protagonist is a high school student, then regardless of whether they are male or female, they'll have a little sister, and nothing else. It really is striking just how pervasive this pattern is.

[golyplot]

This morning, I briefly hit 7000 "known non-redundant vocabulary" on JPDB for the first time. Woohoo!



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Also last night, I couldn't sleep and was up reading Harry Potter for hours. I read an entire chapter (The Patronus) in one night!

The most notable bit is that at one point "... Harry said weakly" got translated to "ozuozu", which surprised me, since I always saw "ozuozu" defined as "timidly" and it seems very different from "weakly".

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

Last night, I was surprised to see "uwasa o sureba" come up in Harry Potter, as I'd only just learned it via a note on Satori Reader earlier yesterday (as the Japanese equivalent of "speak of the devil"). However, it was also surprising because it was inserted by the translator. The original English had no equivalent "speak of the devil". In the original English, McGonagall just says "I shall be speaking to Professor Dumbledore about this, make no mistake! Ah, here he comes now!"


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Satori Reader

A month ago, I subscribed to SR for just one month so I could finish off the stories I'd missed last time when my subscription ended early. However, I was constantly busy and rarely got around to reading much over the last month, so I had an absolutely massive backlog, something like 40 chapters or more to read this weekend. It took a lot of energy these last few days, but I did finally manage it this morning. So now, I'm completely caught up on all current Satori Reader stories for the first (and likely last) time.

Anyway, here are a few of the notes I found particularly interesting:

一向に (いっこうに) works the same way as 全然 (ぜんぜん) and is mostly interchangeable (more on that below). That is to say, it almost always takes a negative ending. That ending can be either grammatically negative, or just negative in meaning.

Above, we said that 一向に is mostly interchangeable with 全然. The thing that is special about 一向に is that it suggests the passage of time: Even though time has gone by and there has been opportunity for the situation to improve, that does not happen at all.

So, in the last sentence about the grades, it's not merely "These grades are no good at all." Rather, it feels as though this has been an ongoing problem. The grades were no good; talks were had; measures were taken; and yet his grades are (still!) completely awful.

In the sentence from the episode, it's a very similar situation. Masaru has implemented new policies and seen the "Health" trees of his subordinates get better over these past weeks and months. But in Akemi's case, despite the new policies, despite sufficient time going by to make a difference, the way her trees are growing doesn't improve at all -- it remains completely bad.

There are a few verbs like 見える and 聞こえる that are, all by themselves, spontaneous in nature, as a part of their root definition. However, in most cases, it's a matter of usage. You simply take an ordinary verb and use it in either its passive or potential form. (The form that you use depends on the particular verb and is simply a matter of convention.)
With the verb 撮る, the spontaneous usage uses its potential form. Here's another example about taking pictures:

いい写真が撮れたよ！
A good picture spontaneously took itself!

The speaker frames the event as something that happened spontaneously, through no special intention of their own. It's similar to the feeling of a sentence like "Hey, this picture turned out great!" The speaker is not bragging about their picture-taking abilities; rather, it is the picture itself that did the work of "turning out" a certain way.
Of course, it's also grammatically possible to take a sentence like this as just meaning "A good picture was take-able" = "I was able to take a good picture." Whether a usage is spontaneous or not sometimes comes down to your judgment call as the listener or reader. But there are certain verbs that tend to be used in the spontaneous a lot, and 撮る is one of them. Another example is 釣る (つる), which means "to catch (a fish)." The moment someone catches one, what you will usually hear is not "I caught one" but rather:

釣れた！
It spontaneously hooked itself!

Just like a voice being audible or a mountain being visible, the fish is just "catchable," and catches itself onto the line without any special work on the part of the fisher.

浮く can mean that time or money appears as a surplus. To visualize this, think of all your money that is already spoken for as being tied down. You have your rent payment, your car payment, your heating and electricity, and so on. If you can trim back somehow and cut something free, it rises to the surface as a surplus. Think of a little stack of cash floating up and breaking through the surface like a buoy.
You can say simply that "money floats up," like this:

レストランに行かないで家で料理することでお金が浮いた。
I saved money ("money floated up to the surface") from not going to restaurants but cooking at home.

Or you can say that a specific expense floats up, meaning that you save on that expense:

暖房を最低限に使うことで電気代が浮いた。
By using heat to the lowest degree possible, I saved on my electricity bill ("my electricity cost floated to the surface").

You might have noticed that Japanese people often use the word "also" in places where we might not normally do so in English. For example, a native English speaker might have expressed the thought here using は instead, like so:

今日のテニスは楽しかったね。
As for today's tennis, it was fun, wasn't it?

And of course, this is 100% correct Japanese too. The only problem is that there is room for this sentence to be taken a different way. That's because one of the things that は does is to suggest contrast between the marked topic and other similar topics.
So it's possible to take the above sentence as meaning: "As for today's tennis (in contrast with other days), it was fun, wasn't it?"
Now, は doesn't always mean this, and Japanese people are good at reading between the lines and understanding when you do and don't mean it that way. Still, you can eliminate any possibility of that interpretation simply by using も instead. If "today's tennis too was fun," then it means that other days have been fun, and today was fun too. It's been solid fun.
今日は is one place where は tends to taken as meaning "today in contrast with other days." For example:

今日は暑いですね。
(Other days may have been different, but) as for today, it's hot, isn't it?

If it's been a string of hot days, you're more likely to hear:

今日も暑いですね。
Today too, it's hot, isn't it?

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A Place Further Than The Universe

I found it interesting to see "tsutomeru" used for "please conserve water", since I always thought it was just "to work for". But apparently when written using this kanji, it instead just means "please try hard", not necessarily work related at all.

[golyplot]

I don't want to jinx it, since I'm only up to episode 11, but so far, I think A Place Further than the Universe is quite possibly the best anime I watched this year. And as recorded in my log, I've watch a lot of anime this year.

Last night, I noticed the word suso (hem), a word I'd recently learned from JPDB, show up not once but twice in Harry Potter. However, in Harry Potter, it was written in hiragana, rather than kanji.

Also, back when I was desperately reading Satori Reader last weekend, I remember one of the stories mentioned the characters eating mikan and watching TV for New Year's. I found it interesting because back in Ace Attorney 3 case 3, I noticed a line where Maya talks about eating mikan and watching TV for New Years, a part that was naturally replaced with something completely unrelated in the English localization.

I guess mikan must be a common New Year's tradition in Japan. Coincidentally, the episode of APFttU that I watched last night was also a New Year's episode, but no mikan showed up there. Instead, they showed a tradition of striking a giant bell with a big wooden log.

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

At the Shrieking Shack, Harry is under his invisibility cloak, but it catches, briefly showing Malfoy and friends his head floating in midair, and he gets grilled by Snape about why his head was seen floating in Hogsmeade. What I found interesting is that the Japanese version translates this as "kubi" rather than "atama" as might be expected. I vaguely recall hearing in the past that "kubi" can be used to mean "neck and the parts up (i.e. head)" rather than just "neck", but it still seems weird to me. Why use it like that when you already have a perfectly good word for head?

Also, when the map says that Snape should "keep his abnormally large nose out of other people's business", the Japanese translated it as something like "meddling to an unusual degree", completely losing the "large nose" insult. I guess that idiom must not have any equivalent in Japanese so they just had to settle for an incomplete approximation.

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Anime

I finished A Place Further Than The Universe on Thursday night, and so Friday night, I resumed watching Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets Wise Wolf.

I noticed that the voice in the opening song sounds different from most (female) singers, with a sort of deeper breathy voice, so I suspected that it was by Ado, who has a very distinctive breathy voice. However, I looked it up and it's actually by Aimer, so I guess it wasn't that distinctive after all.

I had "odeko" (forehead) burned into my memory from watching Stardust Telepath with the constant talk of "odekopashi". And it also shows up frequently in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, where the prosecutors refer to Apollo as "odeko". The last three episodes of Spice and Wolf that I watched are a story arc centered around a Pyrite bubble, and so the word "pyrite" comes up very frequently. I was surprised to notice that it sounded similar, but apparently, it's "outekkou", not quite the same as "odeko".

Also tonight's episode had a really terrible crescent moon. I know I've complained constantly about terrible moon drawings in animation, and it's so common to the point where there's no point in even bothering to complain, but this was an especially bad one. WTF do people do this? It's like they think that crescent moons are a lunar eclipse or something.




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Other

In non-Japanese news, this morning I saw a recommendation and link to a manga called Ultimate Rock-Paper-Scissors (in English). I read it in English so it's not really Japanese related, but I highly recommend it. It's relatively short too - just a single story arc about a rock paper scissors tournament with superpowers and the wild shenanigans and gambits and countergambits that ensue.


I suppose one marginal side benefit is that I was able to recognize the significance of Yotsuba's sisters being named Hitoha, Futaba, and Mitsuba, something that'd likely go over the heads of people who don't know any Japanese (sadly I still had to look up Inazuma though).

Incidentally, I still find it weird that "nin nin" is used as a spoken sound effect. They did the "nin nin" thing in Demon Slayer as well, and it was weird there too.

[golyplot]

Last night, I spent much longer than usual reading Harry Potter (10:29pm-12:04am) because a) it took me a long time to start feeling sleepy and b) it was stupidly hot last night (well, it still is, but it was hot last night too) and the longer I waited to go to bed, the very slightly less hot it would be when I tried to sleep.

In that hour and a half, I read 18 pages (in the Japanese book with its small pages - the English page counts are roughly half as much). That's typical for how long it's taken to read all the books this year, but it is another illustration of just how long it takes to read these things, and that I haven't gotten any faster like I originally hoped last year.

Coincidentally, last night, I also decided to give up on reading Harry Potter once I finish Prisoner of Azkaban (the current book). My original goal was to read the whole series this year, but that assumed I'd magically get much much faster at reading, which never happened. I realized last night that at my current pace, I'd never get much of anywhere. There's no point in even starting the fourth book if it will take a year to finish (as if it weren't bad enough, the fourth book is much much longer than the previous books), and if I gave up on it partway, I'd just feel bad about leaving it unfinished. So I might as well call it quits now while I'm less behind.

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Anyway, as far as Japanese-related stuff I noticed in HP recently:

* At the Quidditch final, Jordan comments that the Slytherin team seems to have been picked "for size, not skill". In Japanese, this was translated as selecting for "dekasa" rather than "ude". I had no idea that 腕 can also mean "skill" in addition to the usual meaning of "arm", and it was jarring to see it there.

* After the Transfiguration final, Hermione complains that the tortoise she was supposed to make looked more like a turtle. Much like mouse/rat, this is another case where Japanese uses the same word for what are two different words in English, so the translation is interesting. In this case, they translated it as rikugame and umigame respectively, so I guess I just learned two new words from that.

Also interesting is that Jisho said that these are "usually written using kana alone", but the book wrote them with not one but two kanji, i.e. 陸亀 and 海亀. In fact, it seems that these spellings are so rare that even my IME refused to type them! The only way I could type them in was by typing "riku", selecting the kanji, and then typing "kame" as a separate word. The IME didn't even provide the option to have "rikugame" turn into kanji!

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In other news, I finally passed 20% known on my Top 10k deck on JPDB this morning! At least I'm making (very slow) progress grinding away at vocab that way, even if I've been doing almost no real Japanese study for months.