Friday night, I read about the shinkansen on Wikipedia. I'd always imagined flying in to Tokyo and then going to Kyoto for a while and back, not only to visit two places, but so I could experience riding the bullet train. I was disappointed to learn that the fastest line is Tokyo-Shin Aomori, which reaches 200mph, while the Tokyo-Kyoto route tops out at 177mph. Obviously, that is still really fast, but I feel like I'll always be disappointed knowing at the back of my mind that it isn't the fastest one.
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This morning, I checked Youtube to see if there was anything that looked interesting in the recommendations, and while as usual I didn't find anything to watch, I did notice that one video title contained the word 恥辱, a word I'd unlocked on WK a little under three months ago. It's cool to see high level WK vocabulary show up in the wild like that.
The title also contained the word 告る, which I guessed was read "tsuru". However, it is apparently actually "kokuru". Interestingly, when I pasted it into Jisho, Jisho listed it as "noru", even though
Japanese Wikipedia confirms that "kokuru" is correct.
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Furareta:Last night, I "read" ch4, but as before, it felt like I was just forcing my way through didn't actually absorb anything from it. This morning, I reach ch5, which fortunately went a bit better.
喪失感とは別の、少し強い感情が私の中にあったことに、ようやく気付く。
その正体は……嫉妬?
I'd learned 正体 as "true character", a translation that didn't quite seem to fit here. I guess she's talking about her true feelings or true motivations or something.
「光くんは彼女いるんだよね?」
私は確認する意味で聞いてみた。
「んー。いたけどちょっと前に別れて今はいないよ」
As I've mentioned before, I put every paragraph or two into Google Translate after reading to try to find out what the parts I didn't understand were saying, but even when I do think I understand it well like here, I still translate it to see if there was anything I missed or misinterpreted. Of course, Google Translate doesn't always help. Here's a case where I saw it make a major mistake, translating this as simply
“Hikaru-kun has a girlfriend, right?”
"I asked to confirm."
“Hmm.
It
completely failed to translate the last line at all. I know DeepL would often just ignore the output and fail to translate things, but Google Translate seems to do that less often. However, as this example shows, it does still break sometimes. I'm a bit disappointed and frustrated that Google won't roll out a proper LLM based translator. Based on how much people have been talking up GPT lately, it sure seems like machine translation should be way more advanced than this, so presumably they're still using old, obsolete methods for some reason.
So, uh, WTF is up with this furigana?! The main character is named 細川光, and all this time, I had assumed it was "Hosokawa Hikaru". However, ch5 inexplicably furiganas
the entire name as "hikaru", which makes absolutely no sense. The only thing I can conclude is that it was just a mistake and the name actually is supposed to be Hosokawa Hikaru anyway.
It's also weird that the furigana randomly appears in ch5. Normally in stories, they put furigana over a character's name the first time they appear, and in fact, this story did furigana the names of three
other characters in ch1 the first time they are named, so why did it take so long for the main character to be named? I guess maybe ch5 is the first time his full name has appeared and he was always previously referred to as 細川 or 光君 in the story, but still, it seems like it would make more sense to put furigana over each individual name the first time it appears if the author worried that the reader wouldn't know, rather than making the reader randomly wait until ch5 to find out, and then using the wrong furigana anyway!
光君はとても辛かったろうに……悲しかったろうに。
I was confused by the ろうs here. I assumed it was some variant of だろう but wondered why the だs were missing. I asked on Reddit and someone said that this is an older form of だろう.
光君には……もっと素敵な女性がふさわしいのかもしれない。
こんな愚劣な感情を抱く私よりも、きっと良い人がいる。
"Maybe Hikaru-kun... might be better suited for a nicer woman."
"I'm sure there's someone better than me who harbors such stupid feelings."
Here's another case where I found Google Translate's offer amusingly broken. This time, it at least translated the entire input and is mostly correct. However, the English sentence is very misleadingly worded. An English speaker reading it would assume that "who harbors such stupid feelings" refers to "someone better than me" rather than "me", and thus the meaning of the sentence is flipped from the intended meaning. This is actually pretty good by the low standards of machine translation, but it would still completely confuse anyone actually relying on it to understand the text. I guess it's a good thing that my Japanese skills are good enough that I can sometimes understand things better than Google can.
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Having finished Hi Score Girl, I took a break Friday night and watched Secrets of Summer ep3. I was disappointed at how much of the Spanish I couldn't understand at all. Tonight I started watching my next anime, Aggretsuko. I already watched Aggretusko in the past, but left off on s4e3, so I resumed with s4e4. Unfortunately, I barely remembered what happened before due to it being so long.
In any case, it was interesting to see Director Ton get de-facto fired by being "promoted" to a made-up job with an "office" that is just a storage shed on the roof. I'd heard that Japanese companies would traditionally get rid of unwanted workers by reassigning them to made up jobs with no duties rather than actually firing them, and I guess that's an example of this in action.