Can’t read your own shirt, huh?
One really popular pastime for native English speakers, when visiting Japan, is to gawk at and make fun of all the t-shirts with bizarre, fractured, or profane English prominently featured.
This, then, would be turnabout.
My wife has gotten rather hooked on the TV program “Bones”, which features a weekly dose of blood, gore, and oozing dead people. It is, however, a network program, so it’s very careful with the language the characters use; it tends to stay firmly in the PG realm.
Anyway, we don’t actually WATCH weekly programming, as a rule, but we’ve bought the first two seasons on DVD and we’ve been watching them.
The other night, we’re watching this program, and after a family-friendly 40 minutes of the main characters trying to track down the killers of a guy who was found mostly dissolved in a bathtub full of …I want to say acid, but I think it was actually a strong base. Lye’s a base, right? “Acid” sounds cooler… anyway, after the main story is resolved, Angel Booth and Temperence are talking in her office, and I notice that Angel Booth’s shirt is written in Japanese, and then I have to pause the episode and go back to make sure that it says what I thought it said.
”ファック ザ 世界”
“Fuck the world”
I’m going to guess that nobody on-crew could read the shirt they put on him, and just figured “Hey, Japanese looks cool, we’ll go with this one.”
6 days until the JLPT…
So, I took last year’s 3kyuu test tonight, after finishing up the exercises in my Grammar test book.
Score:
Kanji & Vocab : 41/55
Listening: 15/23
Grammar & Reading: 37/50
These are not great scores. They ARE passing scores, but not by much. I don’t know how much I can do on the listening portion, but I can certainly work on the other two over the next week.
I try to be smart, and am not.
So, I’m reading Tae Kim’s excellent guide to Japanese grammar, and it slaps me with an unfamiliar kanji. (誰)
I look it up. It’s the kanji for “who” (だれ)
I think to myself… I’ve never seen “だれ” written in kanji… why on earth is this guide using a kanji for something I’ve always seen in hiragana?
As an unscientific experiment, I google “だれ” and it comes back with one million, nine hundred thousand hits. Hah, I think to myself, obviously the hiragana is the right way to write this word and the guide is just being picky with using the kanji which obviously nobody in the real world ever uses.
I google “誰”
Two hundred million hits.
I’m flipping through a volume of “Honey and Clover” today, and I see “誰”, “誰”, “誰”, over and again.
So, yeah, I’m not as smart as I thought.
OK, I get the cake thing now
After about a zillion sightings of “the cake is a lie hah hah hah I’m so funny and referential”, I broke down and rented Portal yesterday. Well, I rented “The Orange Box”, strictly speaking, but really… Portal. And it was a good thing to rent. I’m not about to drop 60 bucks on the 360 version right now, and the PC version, while cheaper, comes with the spectre of “Hey, we can turn your software off, remotely, if we feel like it. See? ” that is Steam.
I know it puts me squarely in the tinfoil-hat-crowd to avoid Valve products because they require Steam to work, but I’m OK with that. Saves me money.
Anyway. Portal. Damn fun game. I get the cake jokes now, AND the obsession people have with Weighted Companion Cube, and the ending credits / song are all kinds of awesome.
Video game rentals are mighty pricey these days - playing Portal set me back 8 bucks for about 4 hours of portal-hopping puzzle fun. I suspect that will go up to six or so before I take it back, as I suspect I’m going to have to replay through the second half, the half that my wife couldn’t stay awake long enough to see, at least one more time. 
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: Episode 40/52. Episode 39 featured “Yan goes out, gets drunk, and gets in a fight.” I do love this program. I kind of wish they’d kept Mary Althaus as the host for the second season, but I’ve slowly gotten used to the new instructor.
Yuno, I’m troubled.
I ought to be heading to bed soon, but I’ll probably be up for an hour or so.
In the meantime I am faced with a conundrum.
On the one hand, I should take this opportunity to study for the JLPT.
On the other hand, after finishing Exit, I decided to give Brave Story a spin in the PSP.
Inside the first half hour of Brave Story, you meet your first companion.
mmm nekomimi
So I’d like to play Brave Story for a half hour or so.
On the other hand, if I study Japanese, then I will be better able to understand future nekomimi-inside games, even if they don’t get translated.
So really I’m faced with the concept of catgirls-in-actus vs catgirls-in-potentia.
I DID have to look up what the opposite of “in potentia” was. I’m freely admitting that I’m not that big of a geek without reference materials.
I have to give the character designer credit for realizing - leather armor: not cute. Leather armor WITH A BOWTIE and a pink skirt: cute.
Maybe I’ll crack the JLPT book open and do ONE chapter.
Also, since I haven’t been tracking this every day: “Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 36/52.
Edit: One hour later: TWO chapters read and a self-test administered. Brave Story played: Zero. The things I do for education.
Katakana is a untrustworthy friend.
Normally, I like seeing words in katakana, because normally they’re nice friendly English words.
Then, I hit a word spelled in katakana, like, oh, I dunno, “ホーム”, and this of course makes perfect sense. Ho-mu. Home.
And then I hit a sentence in my JLPT study manual like “ホームにならんでいます” which means “Standing in line at… home(?)”
I’m standing in line at home? What does that mean?
And after trying to figure out if there’s a different meaning for ならんで that would possibly make this make sense, I find out that the Japanese use ホーム for the English word “home”, yes, as in “home plate” or “home base” but they ALSO use it for “train platform”
Standing in line at the train platform. That makes sense.
“ホーム” instead of “乗り場”, that doesn’t bloody make sense. I just have to remember it and it will all be good in the end. Right?
Endings, quite satisfactory.
Finally managed to catch up to see the end of Lucky Star this last week. With shows that don’t really have an overall story arc, it’s hard to say when a good “end point” really is, but I really liked where they closed it out. I fully expect that, if I hopped onto niconico RIGHT NOW, I would find a half-dozen versions of the Big Dance Number recreated by assorted fan groups, with another dozen or two in the works.
Having the ending credits song be… admittedly, a horribly sung version of… the ED from Beautiful Dreamer, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, was a nice touch. I was a little annoyed, though, when I put in the US-released Beautiful Dreamer DVD and found that the ending credits were actually cut a little bit - you hear the ending song, but you don’t hear the Tomobiki high school bell ringing. As a result, if someone hadn’t ever seen the movie on VHS or laserdisc, they wouldn’t understand why the heck Minoru is making bell sounds at the very end of the Lucky Star ending credits.
OK, so, minor quibble that doesn’t have anything to do with Lucky Star so much as it has to do with a very early domestic anime DVD with a bit of a sloppy release. I understand they even re-released the DVD, maybe the newer version has the full ED. I don’t think it’s worth buying it to find out, though.
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 32/52.
Back on the horse.
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 29/52
I started the second season back in August and watched 27 & 28… then got off track. Posting here to keep myself in-line. It’s not directly tied to the material covered on the JLPT, but I think it will still help me.
It’s a little bit odd to be watching footage shot in Japan, see a pan shot over the river that includes a 水上バス (the ferries that run along the river in Tokyo), and have it evoke a “hey, that’s familiar” feeling instead of a “that’s foreign” feeling.
JLPT Madness 2007
Well, I’m critically behind on my studying, and honestly I was thinking about wimping out this year, but - damn it - I’m going to do my best here.
Signed up for the JLPT Level 3. It’s held December 2. That gives me a little over two months to get ready while at the same time hopefully pulling down good grades in my Literature, Statistics, and Economics courses.
I can do this.
Gameworld Nostalgia
I don’t have the bandwidth these days for any MMO, and it amazes me how much I’ve been able to get done since I’ve admitted I don’t have time for any MMO, but I’ve given EQ2 a few hours this week since Sony was nice enough to give me a free copy and all.
My primary reason for checking it out is, well, I spent way too much time playing EQ and since they announced EQ2 takes place 500 years in the future, I’ve been somewhat curious to see what the world looks like 500 years in the future. Never curious enough to actually buy the game, mind you.
So, I’ve rolled a Shadowknight, and gotten to look around Neriak some, and that was a great nostalgia kick, and then I managed to run over to Freeport, which is less of a nostalgia kick but I really haven’t explored much, and now I’ve started a Qeynos-area rogue to poke around that side of the world.
If I had the free time for it, I could see myself getting quite sucked in to this one.
Unfortunately, it’s going to lose out to the combined forces of school, work, and Japanese study - and if those weren’t enough to keep me off MMOs, there’s the little matter of having gotten really used, this year, to starting and finishing games. MMOs don’t have a “finish” to look forward to.
Let’s Learn Japanese Progress: 24/52. Nearly all of the first year done. Really can’t speak highly enough of this series.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
