I’m now on the start of chapter three. The narrator changes from the vampire to the female protagonist, Filia Noma (フィリア・ノマ).
I decided to take a break from the beginner series and listened to an intermediate episode. The dialogue was considerably long and I got some new words. First is 図々しい (zuuzuushii) which in the dialogue is used to express “what a shameless thing for you to say that”. Then there is あばよ (abayo) which means “good bye”. Last is 碌でなし (roku de nashi) which is used to say that someone is “good for nothing”, “moronic”, etc. I’ve heard ろくでなし lots of times in the song Honto no Jibun but never bothered to check it out.
For the grammar, I misunderstood 「うっかり忘れるところだった」. I thought it was “That’s one point I forgot”, where ところ is translated as “point”. But it actually means “it was just about to slip my mind”, where ところ here means “a point in time”. Other example: 「行くところだ」 - “I’m about to go”.
あばよ！
First of all, I found this game tamagocchin (from tamagochi + gocchin). At the starting screen, the page asks for AA. What is AA? No, it’s not something related to batteries…
I’m now back at my home, so Mnemosyne studies and others should proceed full scale soon.
The story on this episode is about someone trying out clothes in a store. One point of interest is that the Japanese language differentiates between wearing stuffs for the upper part of your body and the lower ones. You use 着る (kiru) to wear shirts etc. but use 履く (haku) for pants etc.
彼女は白いTシャツを着ていた
Whe was wearing a white T-shirt.
彼は黒いズボンを履いていた
He was wearing a black trousers.
Also, Natsuko notes that パンツ can mean either underwear or trousers, depending on the intonation. If you go up, it means trousers, but if you go down, it means underwear. Be sure to hear her pronunciation!
I’m still out of town and sadly had no time to do Mnemosyne. However I managed to do quite a substantial reading.
If you’re learning Japanese, you surely know the board game go right? Japanese people call it igo (囲碁). Anyway, if don’t know it already, please try Hiroki Mori’s interactive go tutorial.
Go boards can be very expensive. The best ones are made of kaya tree, which can reach up to $20,000. What I did today was to read the Japanese Wikipedia article on カヤ for a plant dump about kaya at Midoria.
Believe me, there are lots of things to be found reading botanical articles. Here are new kanji in this articles and the words in which they appear:
Of course, there are also lots of other words made up from kanji I know already…
Still on chapter one. The most interesting thing is this snippet:
とある人間の女性
A human girl
This is the first time I’ve met とある, which according to the dictionary is the same as 或る (a certain something).
On this jpod101 episode they played じゃんけん! I always thought it was じゃんけんぴょん, but here they used ぽん instead. Also, they used the counter 個 for 鳥の唐揚げ (fried chicken!).
そろそろ眠らなくちゃ。。。
The lights went off today so I spent most of my Japanese study on reading Routledge’s grammar book (I’ll elaborate about this book some time). I read about なら, and the most interesting finding is the 同じ…なら. which means “If … anyway, then …”.
It’s essentially どうせ. I’ve never encountered it in real life.
Does Japan, and other countries for that matter, have shaky electricity infrastructure also?
I did jpod101 before the lights went off :). Coincidentally, it’s about たら and なら! No new stuffs, except that it’s always interesting that Japanese people use メール for the thing we call SMS in Indonesia.
As you can see above, the effects of blackout is pronounced on my study!
眠い～
I’m starting to read chapter one. The protagonist is telling how he is different from vampires most people think of, because he holds the idea to coexist peacefully with human.
そう、わたしは人間を愛していた。彼らにまぎれて過ごす時間が好きだった。
Yes, I love human. I love the time I spend blending with them.
It’s about Italian food! They mentioned Napolitan which I knew already from Buono’s song “Café Buono!“. However they brought up ボンゴレ (vongolle) and its ingredient 浅蜊 (asari, a clam) which I didn’t know. Also, they mentioned that the person’s name 田淵 (tabuchi) contains difficult kanji. Indeed difficult, but one I know :).
There are some interesting points of the episode I listened to today. First of all is the usage of さん for shops ending in 屋, such as ケーキ屋さん (keekiya-san, cake shop) and 薬屋さん (kusuriya-san, pharmacy). Natsuko-sensei said that this usage is more of a female speech. No wonder I first found it on Morning Musume’s single, Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari.