Learning Japanese From Zero

[golyplot]

More Justice For All localization changes

The fact that they renamed Ruusaa the monkey to "Money" in the English version rather than say "Keymon" is baffling enough, but this change also caused them to change several lines in the trial as well.

In the Japanese version, Trilo refers to Ruusaa as a monkey, but the judge misunderstands and assumes that Ruusaa is a person and Trilo is insulting him by calling him a monkey. In the English version, they change this to a bizarre and surreal exchange where the judge complains about "slandering innocent fiats". I really don't understand why they made this change.









Next up, we have something that is really interesting because it's a mistake in the Japanese version rather than the English version!

The original Phoenix Wright game was released with only four cases, ending in the famous Turnabout Goodbyes. However, they later released it with a fifth case, Rise from the Ashes, which takes place a few months after Goodbyes and which also features Miles Edgeworth.

The second game came out before the release of RftA (game 1 case 5) and its third case, Turnabout Big Top, is set exactly a year after Turnabout Goodbyes. In it, there's an exchange with Franziska von Karma where they discuss Edgeworth's disappearance.

Since the game was originally written prior to the release of RttA, the dialog says that Edgeworth was "never the same after that case" (referring to Goodbyes) and disappeared immediately after Maya left. However, this is contradicted by the later release of RttA, where Edgeworth appears several months later. Therefore, the English version was changed to say that he was "never the same after that case, and then with the case after that one..." and changed to say that Edgeworth disappeared a few months after Maya left.

So far, all that is pretty understandable. What really shocked me is that the Japanese dialog was never fixed, even in the remakes! Tsuwahasa isn't exactly playing the original GBA game here! He's playing the HD remake compilation of the games, released in 2019, where they redid all the art, changed the penalty mechanics, etc. Why on earth did they not bother to fix the dialog?







Lastly, there's another interesting translation change I noticed. It's a far less significant change than most, but it's still a bit odd that they would change. In the Japanese version, when Acro complains that the ringmaster was too kind to Regina, Maya says that Regina is "cute", "pure" and "angel-like", to which Acro asks whether being "pure" is really a good thing. In the English version, she instead says that she is "truly a princess". I wonder why they changed this.

[golyplot]

Seeing garyb mention interference in his log reminded me of some "interference" of my own. For the last week, I've been watching an episode of Miraculous Ladybug (in French) as well as an episode of Jujutsu Kaisen (in Japanese with English subtitles) each night (except Saturday when I skipped JJK). Recently, I noticed that when trying to fall asleep at night, I'll often get into a state where random French phrases keep popping into my head, but I can't change it to Japanese even if I try. It's especially notable since I otherwise haven't studied French in over four years and have just been focused on Japanese for the last four years.

Speaking of which, I was shocked recently to realize that the Japanese "era" of my life is now longer the original non-Japanese era! Apart from German, which I studied in school, I only got into language learning in January 2016. From Jan 1st, 2016 through Dec 31st, 2019, I studied French, ASL, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian (only a couple months in the case of Italian). On Jan 1st 2020, I started learning Japanese and have been focused exclusively on Japanese ever since. I can't believe that I've now been learning Japanese longer than the entire language learning era before it (four years).

In other news, last night I randomly got curious what the Japanese is for "starfish". Apparently, it is "hitode" but it is written in kanji as "海星". Now that's one of the weirdest kanji readings I've ever seen! It's almost like they only chose kanji for the meanings and got the reading from somewhere else entirely.

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Harry Potter

I've been reading Harry Potter for a while before bed every night for the last week and a half in a largely ineffective attempt to sleep better at night. I feel like it doesn't actually make me any sleepier and the only effect is to delay my bedtime enough that I fall asleep more easily by default. But in any case, it means that I have been making very slow progress through the book (currently partway through chapter 3).

I was surprised to see Arthur refer to his wife Molly as "kaasan", since that normally means "mother". Apparently it can mean "wife" too for some reason.

Anyway, one interesting thing about the books is how idiomatic English phrases sometimes get translated to completely different, seemingly random idiomatic Japanese phrases that I've never heard of before. Some examples:

"You should talk" -> 自分のこと棚に上げて

"YOU COULD DO WITH TAKING A LEAF OUT OF PERCY'S BOOK" -> パーシーの爪のあかでもせんじて飲みなさい！



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Ace Attorney: Justice For All

I read that the second game was much harder than the first and in fact is the most unforgiving game in the entire series, so I guess it's not that surprising that Tsuwahasu lost twice on the second case. He got stuck even more on the second day of the third case, netting a total of seventeen penalties and losing the game four times. (To be fair, he only totaled 3.2x healthbars in penalties and only lost the game the fourth time due to reloading from a save where he was already down to 20%.)

In particular, he got stuck forever when asked to present the murder weapon, getting it wrong eight times and basically just brute forcing it in the end. Ironically, when asked who put the cape on the bust, infamous as quite possibly the most illogical moment in the entire series, he managed to get that question on the first try (though that was probably partly just luck).

As for localization changes, there was one last big one. On the second day of investigation, Moe explains that he named Ratou the tiger and Ruusaa the monkey, whereas the ringmaster named Raion the lion, which is why the former two have backwards names and the latter has a simple boring name. He said he thinks "gyakuten" is fundamental to life and thus called the lion "onrai" and Maya says that "gyakuten" has a nice ring to it.

Obviously, they had to completely change this exchange, since a) they inexplicably renamed all the animals for no apparent reason and b) the "gyakuten" reference only makes sense in Japanese anyway, where it references the title of the games. Therefore, they had to change the conversation quite a bit, and replaced it with unrelated dialog about "keeping names simple and easy to associate".

[golyplot]

Thursday night, I again tried listening to some Touhou songs in hopes of finding a good one and came across the song Sound of the Bell and was surprised to see 音 in the lyrics read as "ne" rather than "oto" even though it was by itself. But Jisho says it can be either one (or "on" as well).

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Harry Potter

I noticed some interesting fun with furigana in Harry Potter recently. For some reason, with the name of Ron's Shooting Star broom, they wrote it in kanji (流れ星) but then wrote "shooting star" in katakana by the side in furigana. It's especially surprising because I hadn't seen them do it at all before, but then they do it three times in one chapter here.

Specifically, in addition to the Shooting Star broom, Floo Powder (煙突飛行粉) and Knockturn Alley (夜の闇横丁) also got kanji names with the English names given on the side as furigana. It's especially weird as they didn't do it for anything else before. For example, Diagon Alley is still just written ダイアゴン横丁, the way it was in the first book as well.

Also, the explanation of O.W.L.s is pretty different in the Japanese edition. In the English version, George just says "Ordinary Wizarding Levels" to explain it without elaboration, assuming the acronym is obvious. However that obviously wouldn't work in Japanese. Therefore they translate the words into Japanese but list the corresponding initial in parenthesis beside it (and amusingly, these letters have the English pronunciation in furigana) and then they add an entire new phrase saying that putting the first letters together gives "O.W.L." (with fukurou in furigana, no less).




Another really interesting thing is the list of required books. Firstly because it's described as an "オンパレード " of Lockhart, an interesting waseieigo. However, the translation of the book titles is also really interesting.

In English, Lockhart's books are all named with alliterations, like Break with a Banshee, Gadding with Ghouls, Holidays with Hags, Travels with Trolls, etc. In the Japanese version, they dutifully translated everything into Japanese, but then added a word to each title in order to make them alliterative again. For example, Year with the Yeti became 雪男とゆっくり一年 (yukiotoko to yukkuri ichinen).

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I came across this song on Youtube this morning. The lyrics are pretty repetitive, but I thought it was worth mentioning, because the subject was so unusual - how many songs are there about kafunshou?



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In other news, I happened to look at some old pages of my log this morning and discovered that the images are all gone! For some reason, Postimages seems to be showing 503 placeholders for everything more than a month or two old now. I really hope this is temporary, but it feels like the kind of thing that won't be temporary. And Postimages was the best image hosting site I'd seen. Now I have no idea what to do for image hosting. Any suggestions?

Edit: Just checked again and the old images seem to be back now. That's a relief!

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Also, I finished season 1 of Jujutsu Kaisen tonight. I know there's a season 2 (the famous Shibuya Incident arc that helped inspire the ban on real life Halloween celebrations in Shibuya last year), but Crunchyroll lists a movie called JJK 0 first, so I guess you're supposed to watch it between the seasons and I'll try tackling it Sunday night. Convenient that it comes up now on the weekend when I have time to watch it.

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

One passage I read last night seems like a perfect illustration of how things sometimes get phrased very differently in the Japanese version in seemingly random fashion.

In the Japanese version, instead of Ron merely gazing longingly at the Chudley Cannon robes, he instead discovers the robes and then stares at them eagerly without moving, a description which is much longer and not entirely similar to what happened in the English version. Likewise, in the original English, the twins are merely "stocking up" on fireworks, whereas the Japanese explains that they are stocking up (kaidame) "because they have few on hand".

Another thing I found interesting is how the original English has a sort of rhythm to it which is completely destroyed in the Japanese translation, since everything tends to be phrased in a much longer manner. I suppose reading English translations of Japanese works might have a similar effect.




Also of note is that Hermione speaks with a "黄色い" voice when they go to Flourish and Blotts. I was confused about how "yellow" could mean "shrill", but apparently it does.

Also, the Japanese version translates Lockhart's autobiography Magical Me as "私はマジックだ", which renders nonsensical some wordplay in the English version. In the English version, when Lockhart announces that he is coming to Hogwarts, he says that the students will be getting "the real magical me". In the Japanese version, they preserve his line about them getting "the real 私はマジックだ", except that since they inexplicably translated the book title as a statement rather than an object phrase, it seemingly makes no sense in the Japanese.

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Jujutsu Kaisen

Monday night, I watched Ladybug and JJK as usual. I was surprised that JJK season 2 seems to be a prequel when Gojo and Geto were students, especially after JJK0 which was itself already a prequel to the first season. It was a bit surprising to see Gojo and Geto espouse the exact opposite of the sentiments they held in the movie - presumably the season will show how they got from there to here. Also, I guess that means that the famous Shibuya Incident arc must be in a later season. It's funny how JJK seems to be moving backwards chronologically rather than forwards.

Edit: I just looked it up and apparently only the first four episodes of s2 cover the Gojo prequel arc, while the rest of s2 is the Shibuya Incident arc after all.

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

Another interesting rephrasing in Harry Potter:

"Lost control of the trolley" -> "カットが言うことを聞かなくて"

Also weird is that "Harry got knocked off his feet" was translated as "ハリーはもんどり打って転がり", even though Jisho says that もんどり打つ means "to turn a somersault" (and more generally, "mondori" means "somersault"). It seems like the Japanese version is implying a much more dramatic motion than the original English. It seems weird when there's already plenty of words for saying that someone fell down or was knocked off their feet.


Justice For All

Some more interesting localization changes. First off, at the end of the first trial day, Adrien Andrews invokes her right to refuse to testify to avoid self-incrimination. In the English version, they used the phrase "plead the fifth", which is idiomatic in the US but of course doesn't exist in Japan.




That one was just a trivial understandable change, but it was still interesting as a cultural difference. However, there's another exchange I noticed where the English version is completely different, since the Japanese version relies on wordplay.

When you examine the TV remote control, Pearl asks what the "kon" in "rimokon", "pasokon", "eakon", etc. means. Phoenix responds that if he tried to explain, it would take until dawn.

Obviously, that can't directly be translated into English, so for the English localization, they didn't bother even trying, and substituted in a completely different dialog. In the English version, Pearl asks whether you can use a remote control in real life.









There are several other localization differences in the same scene.

First off, when you examine the TV, it says that it is playing American movies, and Pearl marvels at how the American actors are so good at Japanese and says she wants to study English when she grows up. In the English localization, they naturally flipped it, so that the TV is playing an old samurai movie and Pearl is amazed at how the Japanese actors speak perfect English and wants to study Japanese when she grows up.

Second, when you examine the bear robot, Pearl asks about its "horsepower" in both the Japanese and English. Apparently, the Japanese version is a reference to the old Astro Boy cartoon, which is lost in translation. Of course I had no idea about the Astro Boy thing either, not having watched it myself, etc. I only knew about this due to reading about it on TvTropes.

Last, there's one really weird and inexplicable change. For some reason, when you examine the rice cooker, the English version changes the dialog so that it is a bread machine of all things. Why on earth did they change that? Did they really think that Americans don't know what a rice cooker is?!?!? Even Weeby immediately thought it was a rice cooker from the art.



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In other news, on Thursday I finished listening to Noriko's podcast for the 26th and possibly final time and started listening to Yuuyuu's podcast for the fifth time.

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Aquariums Don't Dance

Edit: I randomly looked at the Japanese Steam page for Aquariums Don't Dance and looked up a lot of unknown words I saw and thus learned some useful computer vocab in the process:

対応 - compatible (as in 日本語のみの対応となります)
攻略 - walkthrough
ＨＰ - Home Page (i.e. website) - I never would have guessed that one!
分岐 - branching (as in the conditions in the game where the endings diverge)

[golyplot]

Well, that last post went over like a lead balloon, but my log has already fallen off the top page, so I guess it's time to try again.

Harry Potter

More interesting translations:

"glove compartment" was translated as something like "the small compartment under the dashboard". I was surprised there's no regular Japanese word for this concept.

"bent almost double" became "bent like the letter く".

One really weird choice. In the English, it says "She raised her wand the moment she entered; Harry and Ron both flinched, but she merely pointed it at the empty fireplace, where flames suddenly erupted." In the Japanese version, this got changed into two separate sentences with no "but", making it sound like disconnected dispassionate observations and that there's no connection between Harry and Ron flinching when McGonagall raises her wand and the fact that she just lights a fire instead. It comes across as very bizarre.

Lastly, in the English version, there's the exchange

"I- I didn't think-"
"That," said Professor McGonagall, "is obvious."

In the Japanese edition, this exchange got changed significantly, with McCongagall's line being something like "you weren't thinking, huh?", presumably because the English wordplay doesn't translate for whatever reason.

Also two interesting words with new kanji I hadn't seen before - 凱旋 (triumphant return) and 髷 (bun).




Satori Reader

Today I learned that the word ikura (salmon roe) is actually Russian in origin! I'd always assumed it was native, since it sounds a lot like other Japanese words, e.g. iruka (dolphin).

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

I forgot to mention that I learned that steering wheel is " ハンドル ". The word 左ハンドル that I learned a while back from Phoenix Wright makes a lot more sense now.

Also notable is that "McGonagall was not pleased" became "McGonagall はご機嫌斜めだった". I wasn't able to find anything about it on Jisho, but presumably "mood is diagonal" is an idiom to mean "not pleased".


Justice For All

I encountered an interesting word today, "wanchan" (Actually, I think Tsuwahasu used it before as well, but I didn't mention it then, and in any case he used it again today).

"Wanchan" sounds like it just means "dog", but from the context, it was clearly a waseieigo for "one chance", meaning a situation where you lose immediately if you guess wrong.

Anyway, there was one moment near the end of case 4 that I was really looking forward to, as I expected it to be a translation change, but it actually wasn't. At one point, Shelly refers to Adrian Andrews as "he" because he never met her and assumed that she was a man from her name.

I assumed this would be different in Japanese because English and Japanese handle names and gender very differently, but it turns out that that wasn't the case - they were able to keep this clue pretty much unchanged from the original Japanese. (In Japanese, he refers to her as "kare").

However, I did notice three other minor localization changes.


First off, when Will Powers says that the bellboy looked like an assassin and then a thief, Phoenix remarks that "koroshiya" and "dorobo" both share "ro" in common. In English, the line was changed to "Well, I guess a thief and an assassin are both sneaky and silent..."



Second, in both the Japanese and English versions, after Will says that the bellboy looked suspicious because of the line of stitches across his face, Phoenix says "So? A baseball has stitches! Are you saying all baseballs are suspicious because they have stitches!?".

Later on, Will says he was suspicious due to wearing black leather gloves, and in the English version, Phoenix says "So? A football is made of leather! Are you saying all footballs are suspicious because they are made of leather!?" Obviously Japanese people would not be familiar with American footballs. In the original Japanese, he just says that a baseball is made out of leather, etc. This seems like a case where localization was able to improve on the dialog!



Lastly, there's a somewhat larger change to the exchange when Shelly talks about getting requests via "electronic mail". In the Japanese version, the judge just responds "electronic mail" in hiragana, as if he has no idea what the word means, and Shelly apologizes, explaining that he hates shortening words and that he of course means "denshi mail".

The joke here seems to be that the judge has no idea what "electronic" means, which obviously wouldn't work in English, so in English they changed it a bit by adding a second sentence where he asked if they're mailed in an insulated envelope.

de Killer:
On top of which, the times have changed. It is now the age of information and computers, correct? Well I have joined the times, and now take requests via electronic mail.

Judge:
Electronic mail? Do you have to mail that in a special insulated envelope?

de Killer:
Ah, I'm very sorry. I despise the shortening of words. What I meant by electronic mail is what is commonly referred to as "e-mail".

Apart from translation changes, one moment I found really interesting is when Phoenix asks Shelly if he'd seen the video tape and Shelly says something about "saisei". It seemed out of place since it normally means "rebirth", but apparently, it can also mean "playback (of a video)" of all things. According to Jisho, it has lots of other surprising meanings as well, including "recall (memory)" and "recycling".






Miraculous Ladybug


Tuesday night, I watched the last three episodes of Miraculous Ladybug s4 in one night and skipped JJK. The first was the first part of the two part season finale, and it was so exciting that I felt like I had to watch part two and find out what happened next. The second part was a bit of a downer (I wish they'd let Alya keep her miraculous at least), but then I noticed that Netflix had an "episode 27" afterwards and curiosity got the better of me as I wondered why on earth there'd be a random episode after what was clearly the season finale.

"Episode 27" turned out to be a special anti-plastic environmental message and a notable step down from the usual show. I also looked it up later and discovered that it was originally released as a special episode after season five. It's not part of the main chronology, but roughly fits between episodes 21 and 22 of season five, a fact which means I just got spoiled on some aspects of season five, and in particular know that they don't manage to get back the miraculouses before episode 21 at least. Oh well.

[golyplot]

In 2017 and again this year, I didn't bother traveling to see the eclipse, figuring that I could always see one in the future, since they happen somewhere in the world every couple years. However, with all the talk of eclipses in XKCD this week, I decided it was time to stop procrastinating and researched future eclipse a bit yesterday.

It appears that the best bet is to travel to Luxor, Egypt in August 2027. This is a relatively long eclipse (6m22s at peak) and has the advantages that a) it is in an extremely dry desert so there shouldn't be much risk of clouds and b) Luxor is already a major tourist destination in its own right so it should be relatively easy to get flights, hotels, etc. Plus you can look at the ancient Egyptian ruins while you're there. Of course it would be extremely hot in August, and I'm guessing it will also be more expensive than usual since everyone else will have the same idea, but if eclipses are really that magical, it seems worth it anyway.

Anyway, finding this out made me tempted to learn Egyptian Arabic, which is a problem because I'm still learning Japanese and I also wanted to learn Korean next.


Edit: After researching it a bit more, it seems that people use a mix of colloquial Egyptian Arabic and MSA, even in the same sentence, and also that in Upper Egypt, they speak Sa'idi Arabic rather than Egyptian Arabic anyway. It seems like it would be very difficult to learn three separate languages, especially when there probably aren't good resources for the colloquial variants.


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Harry Potter

I couldn't sleep last night and was up really late, so I read a lot more Harry Potter than usual. It's frustrating how often I have trouble sleeping, no matter what I do. Oh well, on to the notable observations from Harry Potter:

* "Seamus Finnegan couldn't control himself. He let out a snort of laughter that even Lockhart couldn't mistake for a scream of terror." -> "シェーマス・フィネガンはこらえきれずにプット吹き出した。さすがのロックハットでさえこれは恐怖の叫びとは聞こえなかった。"

I found the use of "kikoeru" to mean "mistake for" here interesting because while it does make sense, it's very different from the common meanings of the word.

* When describing the damage the pixies wreak on the classroom, the Japanese version ends every subphrase with "wa". I've seen the "wa" particle used in dialog, but I've never seen it used in narration before. What's up with that?


* In the original, Lockhart uses the fake spell "Peskipikisi Pesternomi" to try to stop the pixies, which sounds like a spell but is actually just "pesky pixies pester no me" on closer inspection. What's surprising is the Japanese version. Usually, they'd either just keep it unchanged, or else replace it with an equivalent joke in Japanese, but in this case, they decided to do both. The Japanese version of the spell is "ペスキピクシペステルノミ！ピクシー虫よ去れ！". They kept the original English spell and then added a second spell after it in a mix of English and Japanese!

* When Flint says that the Nimbus 2001 outstrips the 2000 "by a considerable margin", the Japanese version says "soutoumizu wo akeru", which I wasn't able to find in Jisho at all.


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Justice For All/Trials and Tribulations

* In the end credits of JfA, Max and Regina talk about going to America. In the English version, they instead say Zimbabwe. Obviously, references to America have been replaced with other countries before (off the top of my head, France in g1c1, Germany and the UK in g2c2, and Japan in g2c4), but they were always significant countries. It seems really weird that they would randomly pick Zimbabwe of all places.

Max:
It's time to begin our quest of world circus domination sweetie!! And to let the world know we are serious, I plan to make a fabulous flight to Zimbabwe!

Regina:
Hey Max! What do you think Zimbabwe is like? Do you think there are castles made of cake, and bunnies who can talk...?

Max:
I think if there are any talking bunnies, even they won't laugh at Moe's jokes!

* When Mia first meets Pheonix, she calls him "naruhodo" (as everyone else always does in the series) and he says that his name is "Naruhodou" instead. In the English version, they change it a bit:

Mia:
Oh, what's wrong? Do you have a cold or something... Mr. Wry?

Phoenix:
Actually, it's Wright... Like the flying brothers... People screw it up all the time. And yes I have a cold. That's what this mask is for. My doc says this way, I won't give it to anyone else... Be kind to others, he says..

* In TaT case 1, I noticed that Dahlia said "kaminarisama", while everyone else just says "kaminari" like normal. I assumed this was part of her act to seem childish and cutesy in order to win over the judge, and that personifying things like this is childish language. I noticed she also said "ohoshisama" when claiming that she was born under an unlucky star.

Oddly though, the English version inserts a reference to "Thor" rather than translating this as child-speak, so maybe I'm misinterpreting things. I doubt it though.

Dahlia:
The rain was just beginning to let up... But it seemed as though Thor wasn't ready for his fun to come to an end yet. So the sky continued to flash and rumble.

Mia:
Thunder and lightning, huh...

Dahlia:
Yes, I'm afraid of the sound of thunder. So I put my headphones on to block it out...

In addition to all the -samas, Dahlia also uses go- and o- honorific prefixes a lot, something else that I've heard is a common aspect of childish language. For example, at one point she demands "oshoukohin" (evidence), an oddity that even Tsuwahasu commented on. Incidentally, I just realized that shoukohin (evidence) sounds an awful lot like shokuhin (food).

* At one point, Dahlia says "wanpaku", which I assumed to be a waseieigo for "one pack" since nearly every word that starts with "wan" is a waseieigo ("one pattern", "one chance", "one punch", etc.) However, I looked it up and it's an actual Japanese word that means "naughty".

* In case 2, in the basement, there's a large sign saying "バー" with the rest cut off. When examined, Maya suggests that it is the "ba-" in "hamburger" and that the sign is for a hamburger festival, and then suggests that it could also be the "ra-" in "miso ramen" and that they just make a mistake by writing "ba-" instead of "ra-".

In Japanese, Maya's trademark favorite food is miso ramen, which they changed to hamburgers in the English localization, so I was curious to see what they would do here, when she was already referring to her American favorite food in the Japanese version.

It turns out that they changed the sign to say "bur" and keep Maya's initial suggestion of "hamburger" unchanged. Her second line is changed to suggest it was meant to be the "ghe" in "spaghetti".






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Other

While bored this afternoon, I checked Das Erste's schedule and came across a German version of The Parent Trap of all things.



Like most Americans of my generation, I just know of The Parent Trap from the Lindsey Lohan version, but it turns out that the original story was actually German, so it makes sense that they'd be making German adaptations of it.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way to actually watch it. They don't seem to have it on their website like most videos. In the process of looking, I came across a comment with interesting new German words like "White Saviorism" and "Blackfacing". I guess it's a reminder that every language likes to coin new English-based words, not just Japanese.

Ich finde es unfassbar schade, das obwohl der Film grundsätzlich gut sein könnte, alles wieder vom wiederholten Rassismus kaputt gemacht wird. Von häufiger Kolletivierung, dass in Afrika jedes Land gleich sei über Reproduktion von Stereotypen wie, dass des nur Dörfer gäbe oder "wizig" machen von Kultur durch Nachahmungen mit der Maske und White Saviorism (Spendengeld für "Dorfschule") bis hin zu Blackfacing (Kinderfoto von Luise). Und natürlich muss ein Mädchen was die Kindheit über in Afrika war sehr "wild" sein.
Wirklich wirklich traurig und schockierend sowas im öffentlichen-rechtlichen zu sehen.

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I also read about a hidden pun in the old pokemon games of my childhood. Gen 2 introduced the move Curse. When used by a Ghost-type, Curse curses the opponent and causes them to lose health each turn. However, when used by a non-Ghost type, it instead raises attack and defence and lowers speed, which seemed pretty random. It turns out that this is a pun on the Japanese name of the move. In the original Japanese games, it was called "noroi", which can mean both "curse" and "sluggish".

[vonPeterhof]

Edit: After researching it a bit more, it seems that people use a mix of colloquial Egyptian Arabic and MSA, even in the same sentence, and also that in Upper Egypt, they speak Sa'idi Arabic rather than Egyptian Arabic anyway. It seems like it would be very difficult to learn three separate languages, especially when there probably aren't good resources for the colloquial variants.

FWIW as far as colloquial Arabic varieties go Egyptian is likely the most learnable one in terms of the amount of available study materials and media, with perhaps only Levantine coming anywhere close. It has both quality textbooks and courses available from popular brands like Pimsleur, Michel Thomas and Lingq. It does have certain issues that you'd expect from the colloquial register of a highly diglossic language, like certain vocabulary being hard to look up or auto-transcription software messing things up, but certainly to a lesser extent than with many other dialects. I also wouldn't worry too much about MSA if your primary goal is to speak, especially since most textbooks do also introduce the common MSA frases you're likely to hear in an otherwise Egyptian conversation. Sa'idi would definitely be a hard one to find resources for though, at least not strictly academic ones. I haven't yet started preparing for a trip to Upper Egypt, but what I expect to do if I don't find much is to at least learn up on the major differences between Sa'idi and (Lower) Egyptian and hope that most people there have enough passive understanding of the latter for conversations to work (not that I've had a lot of productive conversations in Cairo either; in fact I've had only one that I can somewhat reasonably call productive )

When Flint says that the Nimbus 2001 outstrips the 2000 "by a considerable margin", the Japanese version says "soutoumizu wo akeru", which I wasn't able to find in Jisho at all.

水をあける is the expression, 相当 is just an intensifier.

[Sizen]

* When describing the damage the pixies wreak on the classroom, the Japanese version ends every subphrase with "wa". I've seen the "wa" particle used in dialog, but I've never seen it used in narration before. What's up with that?

It’s basically used to list a bunch of bad stuff happening. I wouldn’t really consider it the same particle as the feminine わ or the Kansai わ that’s becoming popular everywhere, although they could be related.
https://nihongokyoshi-net.com/2020/03/1 ... r-wa-wade/