Learning Japanese From Zero

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

I've barely touched HP since last Monday (the day I read an entire chapter in one evening) and only managed to read a few pages since. But I did see one new kanji:

吃音 - kitsuon (stammer)

Also, I was surprised to see that the famous 3rd floor corridor was translated as "4th floor corridor" instead. I knew that some places count the ground floor separately, and so would call the "3rd floor" what we Americans would call the "4th floor", but I never thought about it in the context of Harry Potter before because the American editions of Harry Potter kept all the British floor numbers intact, despite translating a large amount of other British slang and terminology. It never even occurred to me that the famous 3rd floor corridor would have been on the fourth floor all along, and similarly with the other floor numbers given in the books.

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Phoenix Wright

I watched the rest of Kiyo's Let's Play of Phoenix Wright case 5 yesterday. It's nice that he fell for Gant's trap of presenting the cloth too early so I got to see what happens when you do that and his shock when he loses. The unfortunate part is that that's the end. Kiyo does not appear to have ever played the sequels, so now I'm not sure what to do. I guess I'll see if I can find any other Japanese LPers on Youtube who played the rest of the games too, but that might be difficult.

Edit: I did some searching and found another LP that appears to cover the whole series. One thing that gave me pause is that it was listed as "streaming". With Kiyo, they were just regular videos, and he edited things out when he got stuck for a while, but with a livestream you can't do that. Livestreams tend to be a lot more time-wasting, which is why I avoid them whenever possible. But in this case, I couldn't find any non-livestream LPs that covered more than the first game. The other annoying thing is that this guy has a text overlay in the top corner (and his video on the right) which partially cover up the screen. But I couldn't find any better options, so I guess this is the best I can do.

Here's what the new stream looks like:


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Jujutsu Kaisen

I finished watching Bofuri last week and started watching Jujutsu Kaisen. I figured I should watch it since it's really popular and a cultural phenomenon in Japan and so on. I wish I'd watched it before going to Japan so I could have appreciated the Jujutsu Kaisen show at USJ.

I was surprised when the grandpa dies halfway through the first episode, since he was in the OP, so I figured he'd be a recurring character. But it turns out he's just the Uncle Ben instead.

Speaking of which, he said something that sounded like "kuuki wo yome", but it was subtitled as "Get a clue" (rather than the more common "read the room"), although that does make sense.



In episode 4, they cast a "veil" over the prison which was called "tobari" in Japanese. Ever since I first encountered "tobari" in Spy x Family, I've noticed it pop up from time to time in the wild, so this is just the latest incidence.


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Youtube songs

I tried looking for Japanese songs again on Youtube Thursday night and Saturday night. It's pretty annoying though because a) Youtube doesn't make them especially easy to find (particular while avoiding repeats) and b) a lot of videos don't include the lyrics for some reason, and I've already watched most of the ones I have (or most of the ones that include lyrics that I could find anyway).

For song videos that don't include lyrics onscreen, there will nearly always be someone who posted the lyrics in the comments. However, it's a lot more annoying to read that way because you're just staring at a tiny black-on-white block of kanji instead of actually watching the video, and it's also often hard to find the right place in the lyrics to get in sync.

However, as mentioned I don't really have any choice and so tried watching some lyrics-less videos last night (as well as a few other times last week). I only watched a couple songs last night but still encountered two new kanji in the lyrics. Fortunately when you're just reading them from the comments, it's easy to copy paste them here at least.

贖 - 贖罪 (atonement)
硝 (nitrate) in 硝子 (glass)


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Satori Reader

I finished reading (for now, as it is on hiatus till May) John and Friends in Tokyo and started reading the new story Tree of Happiness yesterday. I'm getting pretty close to finally being done with SR (and obviously would have finished long ago if I hadn't mostly been limiting myself to one chapter a day).

[golyplot]

Justice For All

I didn't expect another Japanese-ism so soon, but there's a big one in the first case of game 2. The accused's name is Suzuki, but she spells it 須々木 rather than the usual 鈴木. This is a major plot point because the real murderer staged the crime scene to make it look like the victim wrote her name as a dying message and thus accusing her of the murder. However, since the real culprit had only heard her name and didn't know the spelling, he wrote it as 鈴木 rather than 須々木.

Interestingly, the streamer even commented on 須々木 being a weird spelling as soon as she was introduced. And when the false name plot point came up, he commented wondering how it was handled in the English localization. As it turns out, in English, they named her "Maggey Byrde" with the culprit misspelling her name as "Maggie" instead.

That part's pretty straightforward, but what got my curiosity is that the Japanese text explicitly refers to kanji and katakana in this part, so I was curious how they translated the exchange into English. It turns out that the sequence is pretty different in English!

























The weird thing is that the Japanese version implies that they can see the text of each other's dialog, since Phoenix somehow knows that Winston was speaking in katakana rather than kanji, even though that's a written thing. I guess this isn't the first time, since there was that weird bit in Rise From The Ashes where Jake Marshall somehow knew that Phoenix responded in exactly 25 characters, even though that should be impossible to know from the spoken language.

The English version downplays that, but is still guilty of it in The Lost Turnabout because Phoenix somehow knows that Winston said "Maggie" instead of "Maggey" even though the entire point is that they sound the same!

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As far as other stuff in the case goes, the victim was named Machio Mamoru. Most of the jokes and puns behind the Japanese names go completely over my head, but I did manage to understand that pun at least.




One Japanese culture-ism that I did not get is that apparently the red feathers on Maggey's outfit are supposed to indicate that she donates to charity. I've never heard of that and only learned it via reading the fan wiki.

Incidentally, this case also features a picture of Maggey in a tshirt that says "Taiho" in roman letters (for Taiho-kun) above a picture of The Blue Badger, which is said to be the original first appearance of The Blue Badger (which is weird, since it also came up in case 4 of the first game when you visit the police office, but maybe that was added to the remake). The English localization dutifully replaces the "Taiho" on her shirt with "The blue badger", although it looks a bit weird since the text has to be smaller.

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Unknown Kanji

I finally read another couple pages of Harry Potter last night and encountered another new kanji, 孵 (hatch), when they see Hagrid's new dragon egg.

Today I came across a song on Youtube that actually had lyrics for once. It included two new kanji, 馳せる (gallop) and 囀る (chirp).

馳 is technically not a new kanji for me because I've seen it in "gochisou" before, but I don't think I've ever seen it used for the actual "run" meaning before. Then again, it's a bit hard to tell because the kanji is so easy to confuse with similar kanji like 駆.

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

I was shocked when I got an email from the library Tuesday morning saying that my hold on the next Harry Potter book had come in, which means I would have to finish the current one by Saturday if I want to drop it off on the same trip. Which is a pretty big problem since I still had more than half the book left to go, and only five days to read it in, and four of those days are weekdays when I'm already busy with other stuff.

But I have been making a pretty big effort, putting off other stuff, so we'll see how things go. As of Tuesday evening, I had 128 pages left, which would take 10-11 hours at my typical pace.

Over Tuesday evening/night, I spent around 60 minutes reading and got through around 14 pages. This morning, I spent another 52 minutes and read 11 more pages. This evening, I tried again, but had often had trouble focusing, and only managed to get through a total of 7 pages in 46 minutes, much, much worse than usual. It's a valiant effort, but I'm still way, way behind, despite putting everything aside to focus solely on reading Harry Potter.

New kanji

I encountered 詫 in owabi (apology) on JPDB yesterday. And since I created all my JPDB decks from stories I've read on Satori Reader, that means that by definition, I've seen everything on JPDB before. However, the kanji was new to me. Presumably, I just didn't recognize it as an unknown kanji on SR before because it looks similar to other kanji I have seen before (e.g. 宅, 討, 諮).

So that's one new kanji. The others are unsurprisingly all from Harry Potter: (well technically, there's also one from AA - 勾)

牽 - pull
稽 in 滑稽 (joke)
晃々 (bright)
臆 in 臆病 (coward)

I also ran into 樫 (evergreen oak) again, but I searched my log and it looks like I already recorded that one when I saw it once previously in HP.


I also came across 誘き -obiki in HP, which is not a new kanji, but is a new reading, and such a weird one that Jisho doesn't even list it. Likewise, 木偶 has a completely bizarre reading.

Justice For All

I forgot to mention that Maggey has the same verbal tic as Gumshoe of ending every sentence in "su". I wonder what that's about.

Anyway, today I watched the first part of case 2. although I failed to understand most of it. One thing that really surprised me was to see "magatama" written in kanji. All this time, I'd assumed it was a fantasy term made up for Ace Attorney, but apparently, it's actually an object common in real-life prehistoric Japan. In kanji, it's written 勾玉, which incidentally uses another kanji (勾 - slope) that I've never seen before, as mentioned above.

As for Japanese-isms, it's hard to tell which parts might even be interesting to look up, since this is the part where the scenery and character designs are so obviously Japanese themed that the localizers pretty much had to give up and just accept that there's a traditional Japanese village in California for some reason (to be fair, there were a lot of Japanese immigrants to California historically, but still). For example, Morgana Fey's clothes are literally covered in kanji, something they didn't bother trying to change in the localization.

However, there were a few parts worth comparing. First off, when you meet Lotta Hart, you have the option to call her a joke name instead. In the English version, the joke option is "Lotta Hair". In the Japanese version, it's apparently just "Janet" instead. I think the English version actually improved on the Japanese here.





More significantly, there's a lot of Japanese name suffix subtleties here and I was curious how they translated them. Specifically, Phoenix calls Maya "Mayoi-chan" like normal, but Pearl always refers to her as "Mayoi-sama" (as does Morgan, IIRC). However, Pearl calls Phoenix "Naruhodo-kun", presumably because that's how Maya referred to him when talking to Pearl. At one point, Pearl even says that she gets mad when people refer to Maya with "-chan" instead of "-sama".

In the English version, they just had Pearl and Morgan refer to Maya as "Mystic Maya" instead of -sama and had Pearl call Phoenix "Mr. Nick" to reflect the -kun. And instead of complaining about chan vs sama, Pearl says she gets mad when people don't call Maya by her "title" (Mystic Maya). It's a bit awkward, but I guess that's the best they could do since this is really something that doesn't naturally translate to English.




放棄宣言

For the last six months or so, I've been carefully recording every new kanji I encounter in the wild in this log. However, I plan to just give up on that going forward. Part of it is that I realized that to have any hope with Harry Potter, I need to go a lot faster, which necessarily means to stop writing much about it.

The other reason is that it feels like barely anyone is even here in the logs forum studying Japanese nowadays anyway. For a while in early February, there seemed to be a bunch of people, but then they all disappeared again. So if noone's reading, there's less incentive, and my guess is that the new kanji list is not something that anyone ever really cared about anyway, so that's an easy part to drop to save time.

I'm planning to keep posting about interesting translation differences in Ace Attorney as I come across them, even though it takes a lot of time, since they are pretty interesting. But I'll probably cut back a little, like how I only posted screenshots of one of Pearl's lines above and didn't mention Morgan's "nihongo jyouzu" line to Lotta at all.

Jujutsu Kaisen

I heard that Jujutsu Kaisen had a story arc centered around Halloween in Shibuya, because that was one of the reasons given for banning all Halloween festivities when I was there last year (even beside the Korean crowd crush and general desire to prevent crowding and drunken revelry). However, I always assumed that was a later story arc, both because the series itself obviously started a while ago. And thus I was very surprised to see the Halloween incident foreshadowed as early as the end of episode 7. Presumably they're just setting up a plot hook and it won't actually appear until much later, but it was still weird and surprising.

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

Well it took a heroic effort and most of my free time for the week, but I did manage to finish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone vol2 today.

Previously, I would try to read the story in Japanese, and then read the English version afterwards in order to understand what happened. However, starting a day or two ago, I tried a new strategy. I read the story in English first, two pages or so at a time, and then read the corresponding part in Japanese. One advantage is that since I already know exactly what happens, it's a lot easier to recognize the words and sentences in Japanese, since I'm just matching them to prior knowledge instead of trying to understand them out of the blue.

However, the other reason it's significant is that I often have trouble focusing when reading Harry Potter in Japanese and just zone out and think about other things without consciously absorbing anything I'm reading. (To be fair, I sometimes get distracted when reading things in English as well, but that happens less frequently). If I read the story in English first, then I already know what happens, so there's no incentive to try to go back and reread the parts where I was zoned out, whereas if I were reading in Japanese first, I would sometimes try to reread them, which takes more time. Additionally, I'm a lot less likely to understand things in Japanese in the first place if I haven't read the story in English first, which also makes it easier to lose focus.

This did enable me to go faster, although the improvement was much less than I'd hoped. Over the last two days, I typically averaged around four minutes per page, while I was often taking over five minutes per page before yesterday. However, that's still really slow.

While I did manage to finally finish the first book through heroic effort, it has become clear that my original goal is not remotely feasible. I'm already 2.5 months into the year out of 12. Finishing one book in 2.5 months when your goal is to read six books in a year might not seem bad at first glance, but that's ignoring the fact that a) I read half the first book already last year and b) the first book is much shorter than the latter books. Many of the latter books are several times as long in fact. When you take that into account, my progress is more like 1/20th of the goal, and even that required massive effort at points (i.e this week).

Therefore, I'm forced to give up on my goal of reading all six books this year. I'm planning to keep reading them, but will probably end up nowhere close. I knew my original goal was wildly ambitious even when I started. I made it on the assumption that I'd get much faster at reading over time, but so far there's been no sign of that.

As far as the actual story goes, it was interesting to see how things occasionally differed in the Japanese translation. For example, when Jordan and the twins are tickling the giant squid's tentacles after the exams, "tentacle" was translated as simply "足". I would have assumed that tentacle would be a different word, but Jisho says ashi means "foot; paw; arm (of an octopus, squid, etc.)​". Likewise, I was surprised to see that the bowl of peas that Hagrid is shelling when they come to him after the exams was translated as "豆", since I always thought that just meant "bean", but apparently it can mean "pea" as well.

The word 金縛り (kanashibari) showed up no less than three times in the story, first when Harry meets the hooded figure by the unicorn corpse and then twice describing the Body Bind Curse. I learned that word years ago on WK but I just learned it as "sleep paralysis" on WK, which didn't seem like the kind of word that is likely to come up, so it was interesting to see it come up here and in contexts that meant something other than "sleep paralysis". (It's also one of those weird e->a substitution words.)

Justice For All

I'd always assumed that the Ace Attorney games were designed to be really easy, with enough hints and the penalty gauge generous enough that anyone can beat them on the first try without too much sweat. In all the LPs I've watched, I've never seen anyone actually lose the game as far as I can recall, apart from when Kiyo fell for Gant's trap, which is a special scripted choice rather than a normal failure. I can't recall even seeing someone ever get more than two strikes out of the allowed five - it's really generous.

And thus I was really surprised when Tsuwahasu (the new streamer I'm watching) got stuck for ages at one point in the first trial day of case 2. In fact, he had so many wrong guesses that he actually lost the game, something I'd never seen before. And even after that, he was only one strike away from losing a second time, and in fact did lose a second time later on. He also got stuck for a long time on several points where there was no penalty for failure. I guess the games must be harder than I thought.

Also notable is that case 2 has a major Japanese-ism in Ami's urn.

The fan wiki summary mentioned that the Sacred Urn holding Mystic Ami's ashes had "AMI" written on the side, but after Pearl accidentally broke and reassembled it, she accidentally reassembled it incorrectly so that it said "I AM" instead. I was really curious how this was handled in the original Japanese. It turns out that the puzzle was a lot harder and more plausible in the original.

In Japanese, the reassembled urn says "子供" on the side and is said to hold the ashes of "キョウコ". It took even me a moment to realize the trick even though I already knew it would be backwards, since the name is only given in katakana rather than kanji and it uses a different reading than the false word.

In fact, the Japanese version of the puzzle was tricky enough that it took Tsuwahasu himself, an actual Japanese person, several minutes to figure out. It's also a lot more plausible that Pearl would have reassmbled it incorrectly since it's kanji and she's just a kid and wouldn't know the kanji spelling of Kyouko's name. Meanwhile, the best they could do in the English localization is "AMI/IAM", which is immediately obvious to any player and also makes Pearl look like a huge idiot, since in English, even an eight year old kid should have been able to figure out that one.








In other news, there's another notable localization change that I didn't see because Tsuwahasu didn't happen to choose the option to trigger it. I only found out about it by reading the fan wiki:

In the Japanese version, presenting Pearl Fey's profile to "Hotti" will have him urge Phoenix to bring her to see him if she hurts herself, to which Wright inwardly refuses. Believing this line would not be suitable in the Western release, the localization crew experimented with an alternative scenario where "Hotti" compared Pearl to a doll, before removing the line altogether. In the final Western release, "Hotti" compares Pearl to a young girl who is currently at the hospital, although he is unsure what her ailment is.

https://news.capcomusa.com/zeroobjectio ... e-attorney

Incidentally, this post from the same person is also an interesting look at the thought that goes into localization.

[bolaobo]

The other reason is that it feels like barely anyone is even here in the logs forum studying Japanese nowadays anyway. For a while in early February, there seemed to be a bunch of people, but then they all disappeared again. So if noone's reading, there's less incentive, and my guess is that the new kanji list is not something that anyone ever really cared about anyway, so that's an easy part to drop to save time.

For what it's worth, I try to read your posts, but it's hard to keep up with studying, my own log, responding to others' logs, and life in general at the same time! We sure chose a time consuming hobby.

Glad to see your studies are still going well and your motivation seems high as ever. If the translation is anything like the original, Harry Potter gets progressively harder as the series advances, so don't feel bad about not being able to finish 6 books in a year, which was, as you said, quite the lofty goal.

[golyplot]

Harry Potter

One interesting thing I didn't mention about the end of the first book is that Voldemort uses "oresama" to refer to himself. I can't recall ever seeing anyone, even in fiction, using -sama to refer to themselves before. It's especially interesting since the original language is English, where he just says "I" like anyone else, which means that the translators decided to insert that out of nowhere. Quirrel, meanwhile uses "watashi", which actually is normal, but made me think it was meant as a sign of how subservient and weak he was.

Anyway, as mentioned, I returned book 1 vol2 and checked out book 2 vol 1 on Saturday. I didn't get around to actually cracking it open until last night though, and even that was only because I was up sleepless and had nothing better to do to pass the time until I could hopefully fall asleep. I spent a long time reading, though as usual, I made little progress (just got up to the plans for the dinner party in ch1).

However, I did see one thing that was very strange. One of Vernon's early lines ends uses the "wa" ending (the one where he says they know what will happen if they let Hedwig out of her cage). It was really weird because "wa" is very feminine and none of Vernon's other lines use it, instead having other endings that I assume are meant to convey masculine aggressiveness. It's so bizarre and out of place that it really makes me wonder if the translators simply misread the story and thought that that line was said by Petunia instead for some reason.



Incidentally, it's interesting how they always refer to Hedwig as "fukurome" here. It took me a little while to remember that "me" can mean female and that it was probably a suffix used to indicate a female owl. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to be a word that Jisho knows, but that wouldn't be too surprising if it was an uncommon use of an otherwise productive construction.

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Justice For All

I went back to the first day of case 2 and discovered that the Sacred Urn appears cracked in the background when you first see it, even though a major plot point is that Pearl breaks it after that point. I guess they were just too lazy to alter the background art to match the story, even though they do that for other stuff, like the cloth being stuck in the incinerator (note: this isn't a localization complaint - this is a problem with the original Japanese version too).

However, there actually was an interesting Japanese-ism in the last part of the case, where the localization screwed up.

In the original Japanese, Ini claims to have exited from the left side of the car after the crash, which is supported by the cinematic which shows the entire right side of the car covered in giant flames, while the left door is unobstructed. The problem for her is that the car was imported from the US and thus has the driver's seat on the left hand side (左ハンドル), which proves that she was the driver, not the passenger.

Obviously, that had to be changed in the English localization, which takes place in the US, and thus they naturally changed it so that in the English version, she claims to have gotten out of the car on the right side, but the car was imported from the UK and thus has the driver's seat on the right side, etc. The problem is that they didn't change any of the art.

In the English version, the cinematic still shows the right side of the car on fire, meaning she could have only possibly exited from the left side! This contradicts her testimony, but in the opposite way from what the game intended, leading to much confusion among people playing the English localization and the other translations derived from it. It's a really weird oversight too, since even if it would be too expensive to redo the art, they could have just mirrored the scene in order to fix the plothole at near-zero cost with no art alterations required. Oh well.



Incidentally, I learned a new word from the game in the process, 左ハンドル, a car with the driver's seat on the left side. I guess that's another waseieigo, although it's only half English.

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Miraculous Ladybug

Tonight I spent most of the evening reading about brazen police corruption and politics and so on, and was too upset to focus on anything, so I opened up Netflix to look for some distraction. As luck would have it, Netflix's home page banner was advertising that they now finally have "season 6" of Miraculous Ladybug. It's also a strange coincidence that I would happen to check the exact night they release it since I've only visited Netflix a couple of times at all in the months since I subscribed to Crunchyroll.

It's a bit funny though, because Netflix has a bit of a split-brain thing going on. The show actually only has five seasons and Netflix is actually only up to season four, but Netflix split seasons 2 and 3 into two parts each for release on Netflix. And for some reason, whenever they split up releases like this, they tend to label each new release as "season nine billion" or whatever. But the split-brain thing comes in because the actual episode picker still shows the correct season numbers! Here's a screenshot showing both "season 6" and "season 4" at the same time. This isn't exactly the first time I've seen this happen on Netflix, but it's still pretty funny.



Anyway, season four aired two years ago but Netflix is only finally getting it now. For a long time, the only way to watch season four of the show was on Disney+, even though Netflix still had the first three seasons. I actually did watch part of s4 years ago on my parent's Disney+ subscription back when they still had that, but only got maybe eight episodes in.

I couldn't remember where I'd left off, and so decided to watch ep8 tonight (in French without subtitles, like usual). As it turns out, I'm pretty sure I already watched ep8, but it's been so long that it doesn't really matter, because I'd forgotten everything anyway. I'd forgotten that Chloe even had a sister, or that Hawkmoth was now using the peacock miraculous.

Anyway, language-wise, there was one notable moment when Chloe storms out and calls Adrien "Adri-rien". I was curious and checked the English dub, and it turns out that she just lamely calls him "Adri-nothing" in the English version.

It was surprising to see a French-only pun like this, because I'd heard that despite the show being produced in France, the animation was lip synced to the English script, and so English could be considered the "original" language of the show, and you wouldn't expect to see French-only wordplay like this. It seems like perhaps French is the "original" language of the show after all, in spite of the lip synching.

[lichtrausch]

However, I did see one thing that was very strange. One of Vernon's early lines ends uses the "wa" ending (the one where he says they know what will happen if they let Hedwig out of her cage). It was really weird because "wa" is very feminine and none of Vernon's other lines use it, instead having other endings that I assume are meant to convey masculine aggressiveness. It's so bizarre and out of place that it really makes me wonder if the translators simply misread the story and thought that that line was said by Petunia instead for some reason.

Looks like Kansai dialect to me. In standard Japanese it would be "yo". Other hints of the dialect are his use of "washi" and "oru".

Incidentally, it's interesting how they always refer to Hedwig as "fukurome" here. It took me a little while to remember that "me" can mean female and that it was probably a suffix used to indicate a female owl. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to be a word that Jisho knows, but that wouldn't be too surprising if it was an uncommon use of an otherwise productive construction.

The "me" here (奴) is actually a derogatory suffix.

[vonPeterhof]

However, I did see one thing that was very strange. One of Vernon's early lines ends uses the "wa" ending (the one where he says they know what will happen if they let Hedwig out of her cage). It was really weird because "wa" is very feminine and none of Vernon's other lines use it, instead having other endings that I assume are meant to convey masculine aggressiveness. It's so bizarre and out of place that it really makes me wonder if the translators simply misread the story and thought that that line was said by Petunia instead for some reason.

Looks like Kansai dialect to me. In standard Japanese it would be "yo". Other hints of the dialect are his use of "washi" and "oru".

It’s probably just the standard fictional “old guy” form of speech, which is apparently based on an older form of the Kansai dialect (the way it was explained to me, it was supposedly codified in Edo-era fiction, when it was common for Yamanote families to have older folks who had moved in from Kyoto or elsewhere in western Japan). fwiw from what I hear this "masculine"/emphatic "wa" has become pretty mainstream in colloquial Japanese even beyond Kansai, whereas the "feminine"/softening "wa" has actually receded.

[golyplot]

The "me" here (奴) is actually a derogatory suffix.

Thanks. That would also explain the Dobby thing I was going to ask about.

Harry Potter

As it turns out, I was up sleepless again last night, and even worse than the night before, so I read a bit more of Harry Potter, reading the rest of chapter 1 and the first six pages of chapter 2.

One thing I found odd is that Dobby always refers to himself as "ドビーめ". Presumably this is the same humble/derogatory suffix that Lichtrausch mentioned.

The other interesting part is that the Japanese term for "house elf" is "屋敷しもべ妖精". Coincidentally, I'd first encountered the word "shimobe" at the end of the first book when Quirrell is talking about how he serves Voldemort. However, that usage had a weird kanji spelling whereas this is in hiragana for some reason. It was surprising to see a one-off new word again so quickly like this.

Also interesting is that when Harry says nonsense words while pretending to burn the hedge, the Japanese version translates them to different nonsense words. Normally, they'd just leave stuff like this unchanged.

P.S. One thing I didn't really think about much until the scene with Dobby is how of course it is Ron who always objects when Harry says "Voldemort" and asks him not to say the name. Because Hermione was raised by muggles just like Harry, and thus doesn't have the cultural upbringing that makes most Wizards refuse to say the name.

P.P.S. In case two of Justice For All, Morgan Fey ends nearly every sentence in "gozaimasu" and the streamer tended to read out the constant "gozaimasu"s with a lowered intonation that reminded me of an American Southern accent, and now with Dobby also saying "gozaimasu" constantly, I tend to hear it the same way in my mind!

[golyplot]

Justice For All

One thing I forgot to mention is that I found it interesting that Manfred and Franzika van Karma both have one-syllable first names in the Japanese version (Gou and Mei respectively). Those sounded more like Chinese names than Japanese names to me. However, there's no hint of them actually being Chinese in the games, so I wonder if that's just coincidence or not. If so, it's a weird coincidence, since I can't recall any other characters having single-syllable names like that at all.

Anyway, on to the infamous Turnabout Big Top, the first case that I'd never seen in any Let's Plays before and also widely considered to be the worst case in the series.

The first interesting point is that when Maximillion Galactica reveals his real name, Maya is disappointed that he is Japanese. Presumably, she assumed he was a foreigner because he had a western stage name. I was curious how they handled this in the localization. It turns out that in the English version, she's disappointed that he's a "country bumpkin" instead. He's from the countryside in the Japanese version too, but Mayoi-chan doesn't care about that.




The next point of note is that the Circus has a tiger named "Ratoo" and a monkey named "Ruusaa", both reversed versions of the corresponding Japanese words. The obvious way to translate this would be to name them Gerti and Keymon, but for some reason they didn't do that (and Gerti even sounds like a real name, no less!). Instead, they were changed to Regent and Money.

It's especially weird because they did preserve the name of the lion. In Japanese, the lion was named "Reon" (for "raion"), which was translated as Léon. Sure it happens to be a cognate, but still.



Also of note is the name of the circus owner, 立見 七百人. What's interesting is that the first time he sees the name (in the court record, before the official pronunciation was given), Tsuwahasu reads it as "nanahyakunin" rather than the correct "naoto". I guess it's a reminder that even Japanese people can't always guess weird name readings. But even stranger is that when the clown mentions the name again, and it is shown with the official reading, Tsuwahasu still says "hyaku"!



Lastly, there's an interesting Japanese-ism with the poster in the cafeteria. In the Japanese version, the poster reads "食堂内は清潔に!" Phoenix comments that the place is dirty anyway, and Maya seemingly suggests that they should have written "seiketsu" in hiragana (presumably to make it easier to read).



I was curious how the English localization handled it, and Maya instead suggests making it easier to understand by writing "Clean it or die!".

Incidentally, I had to check five or six different English videos of the game before I finally managed to find one that actually examined the poster so I could see what the dialog was in the English version. It was especially annoying since several of the Let's Plays examined everything in the room except the poster! Oh well. At least I did eventually manage to find one.



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Miraculous Ladybug

Last night, I watched s4e9. Unfortunately, this is where not watching the show for years really hurts, because the plot centered around a character named Felix and his ring, and I had no idea what they were or their significance. Apparently it follows from the s3 episode Felix, and of course I would have watched s3 even longer ago, so it's not surprising I forgot.

I looked it up on the fan wiki afterwards to try to understand what was going on and read the summary of Felix and a couple other past episodes, but unfortunately I encountered major, major spoilers in the process. Felix and Adrien are actually sentimonsters. Also, Felix gets the peacock miraculous and becomes a major antagonist. Oh well.

As for tonight's s4e10, I was surprised to notice that Mylene is wearing a magatama! I guess it's not just a Phoenix Wright thing anymore.