Let's read in ๆฅๆฌ่ช๏ผ @dokushoclub - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
Let's read in ๆฅๆฌ่ช๏ผ
@dokushoclub
I collect reading resources in Japanese and write book reviews by JLPT level. Japanese langblr but only for reading books - Bookblr for but only for learning Japanese. Share your books with me o(*^๏ผ ^*)o
Reading novels in Japanese can be a real challenge if your reading flow comes to a stop every time you encounter a kanji you canโt read, so getting a book with 100% furigana can help cutting back on that frustration.
There are several Japanese publishers with a younger target audience, whose books all have furigana on every kanji while still presenting complex and interesting stories about 150 โ 300 pages long.
They are my top recommendation for all intermediate readers, who already have experience with graded readers, easy childrens stories or manga, but have yet to read a longer novel aimed at native speakers.
่ฌ่ซ็คพ้ใ้ณฅๆๅบซ โ Kลdansha Aoi Tori Bunko
You will recognize them easily by their colorful frames around the covers and they include popular anime movies like ๅใฎๅใฏใnovelisations of anime series or disney movies, light novels and even the Harry Potter books.
I go into more detail about my recommendations for each publisher on my blog.
Reading novels in Japanese can be a real challenge if your reading flow comes to a stop every time you encounter a kanji you canโt read. The
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Today, 7 July, is Tanabata, a Japanese festival centered around stars, the milky way, romance, as well as hopes and aspirations for the future.โญโจ
If you want to find out more about the customs and history of Tanabata in simple Japanese, take a look at the texts and articles below. Most of these texts have a reading level fitting for JLPT N5 and N4 readers and all texts are freely available online!
Hirogaru ๏ผใฒใใใ๏ผ
The article on the website hirogaru introduces the star festival with large pictures and few sentences. You can toggle furigana for this text in theory but it might not work depending on your device. However, all text also has a read out loud function. There is also a small reading comprehension quiz at the end.
On Kazue Ono's blog, she writes about the Tanabata festival in three levels: for starters, beginners and intermediate readers. The blog post has audio options for all three levels, can be downloaded as a PDF and also features a reading comprehension quiz here.
Although the free web magazine Watanoc hasn't had new articles for a while now, their article about Tanabata still holds up and gives a great overview about the festival. You can hover over words and phrases to get the reading as well as a translation into English. After each paragraph you can also click to translate the entire sentence into English as well.
https://watanoc.com/post-1607-tanabata
Matcha Magazine
If you are interested in reading about the street festivals and parades taking place, Matcha Magazine recommends some great Tanabata festivals in the Kanto region to check out. Their article has full furigana and added spaces between words.
https://matcha-jp.com/easy/367
Hukumusume ๏ผ็ฆๅจ็ฉ่ช๏ผ
There is a legend behind Tanabata and you can read it in a simpler Japanese version on hukumusume, which is a place for free online children's stories. Although this text is not written with learners in mind, it features both furigana and cute colorful illustrations that guide readers along.
Please scroll past the videos at the beginning of the page. The full text is just below.
For learners approaching intermediate abilities (N4-N3), I can recommend this short story by Tadoku no Hiroba. It is both longer than the articles above and features more complicated grammar points and speech registers, but still features 100% furigana on all kanji.
[Image description: A photo of a newspaper ad for Kinchoโs anti-mosquito products. At the top, the text translates to โ(connect the flying mosquitoes in the numbered order)โ. The person who took the photo has connected the dots and shown that the result spells out โBored?โ.]
or, โHow the transition to horizontal writing went both ways on the sides of carsโ
In Japan, some company cars and trucks write the companyโs name from the front of the car to the back: left to right on the left side, but from right to left on the right side.
Itโs not well documented why people did that, but my personal pet theory is that this started when Japanese was still in the transition from vertical writing (columns right to left) and had to decide between which way to write Japanese horizontally.
Top to bottom, right to left
According to Wikipediaโs article on โhorizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scriptsโ, before WWII, Japanese was written horizontally only in one row when constrained for space, and since columns went from right to left, the one row went from right to left.
Here is an old print ad for Calpico (ใซใซใใน) where the logo, being horizontal, reads from right to left, and the ad copy underneath goes from top to bottom, right to left:
This is a lot like writing words top to bottom with upright Latin letters. Here are two signs in Dutch for a liquor store (slฤณterฤณ), one vertical and the other horizontal.
But especially after WWII when Japan rushed to Westernize, Japan adopted left-to-right horizontal writing to match the Latin alphabet. This follows the footsteps of the January 1915 issue of the Chinese magazine Science, which wrote Chinese horizontally to make various scientific formulae easier to read.
This magazine is printed sideways from the top left, and marked with Western punctuation. This is to make more convenient the insertion of mathematical, physical and chemical formulae, and not for novelty's sake. We ask for our readers' understanding.
Coincidentally, this solution was mostly equivalent to rotating vertically written Japanese 90ยฐ to the left, then rotating every letter 90ยฐ to the right.
Why not both?
The thing is that there was a pretty long time in Japan where left-to-right and right-to-left writing coexisted. So when writing text on vehicles, people wrote the name from the front to the back, so that a stationary observer can read it better when the vehicle is in motion. But itโs weird now that left-to-right won out by a huge margin.
Here are two advertisement plaques for CalpicoโI donโt know when the specific dates areโthat have motly the same design, but the older one (using the kyลซjitai ๆ) goes from right to left, and the newer one (using the shinjitai ๆ) goes from left to right. (I donโt know why the character in the ad looks so blackface-y, but itโs what it is...)
This post was prompted by this Quora question, which listed some times when this practice went sideways (pun definitely intended). Translation follows.
Q: Why are company names, like on the side of a truck, written from right to left?
Answer by Kลji Hirano โข president of idealShip, Inc. (2006โnow) โข 1215 answers written, seen 130.87 million times
There are various hypotheses, but the prevailing one is that itโs in imitation of ships writing letters from the front to the back to make it clearer which side itโs facing. Though, I donโt think a truck needs to imitate that, being obvious which end is the front end of one...
Also, Iโve directly heard before that many companies do it as a good luck charm to keep the company moving forward. They seem to associate going against the direction of movement with things going badly, and want to avoid that.
I often hear the hypothesis that itโs easier for a moving car to read it when the text goes from the front to the back, but I donโt trust that...
You see thisโ brand often! Itโs Sujahta. [Note: written โในใธใฃใผใฟโ, a dairy product company, and the #1 brand of coffee creamer and chilled soup in Japanย as of 2009]
Writing backwards causes these kinds of... mishaps...
Not ้่ผธโใใคใฌ : [portTrans โ Toilet]... but ใฌใคใใผ่ผธ้ [Reitล Transport]
Not ใใใใใฎ่ [That Young Meat]... but ่ใฎใใใใ [Aikawa Meats].
Not ๆๆฅญใจใญๅฑฑ [Actions Lewd Mountain]... but ๅฑฑๅฃๅทฅๆฅญๆ [Yamaguchi Industrial Works]
Not ใฏใใตใข [EW, IT REEKS!]... but ใขใตใใฏ [Asack]
Iโm personally against this practice of writing right to left...
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Ok if you have any japanese learners in your life, my pro tip if you want to make them happy is to ask them nonchalantly if theyre taking N1 this july
3 people have casually asked me this in the last week for some reason, and wheeeeeewwww boy i would fail the N1 so fast, but wowzers it's been a high to be asked this
Realizing that work doesnโt feel like itโs helping my Japanese improve because itโs teaching me things that are NOT what I want to learn.
At this point Iโm upper intermediate, so I know most of the essential skills that carry over between different settings. Basic grammar, function words, listening fundamentals.
Now, itโs most filling in the vocab, and unfortunately Iโm spending 40 hours a week learning things like INVOICE and LOGISTICS and TAX WITHHELD and surprise surprise these things donโt help me read my fantasy mystery romance manga any more smoothly
seriously though, this is what ive been talking about. Like they lure you in with "100 words cover 50% of the language!" or whatever bs factoid, and then it's like 15 years later and you have learned 250,4346,43222.642 words and somehow it is not enough
Realizing that work doesnโt feel like itโs helping my Japanese improve because itโs teaching me things that are NOT what I want to learn.
At this point Iโm upper intermediate, so I know most of the essential skills that carry over between different settings. Basic grammar, function words, listening fundamentals.
Now, itโs most filling in the vocab, and unfortunately Iโm spending 40 hours a week learning things like INVOICE and LOGISTICS and TAX WITHHELD and surprise surprise these things donโt help me read my fantasy mystery romance manga any more smoothly
seriously though, this is what ive been talking about. Like they lure you in with "100 words cover 50% of the language!" or whatever bs factoid, and then it's like 15 years later and you have learned 250,4346,43222.642 words and somehow it is not enough
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
โ Live Streamingโ Interactive Chatโ Private Showsโ HD Qualityโ Free Actions
Free to watch โข No registration required โข HD streaming
haha, i totally dropped off the map for a while, huh? well, i decided to apply for grad school last fall and so every time i thought about opening my laptop to update this blog, i was instead reminded of upcoming due dates and resumes and essays and emails...and i just left the laptop closed. BUT! the application period has long since passed. more importantly, I GOT IN!!! the program starts in august and i'm very excited to be entering a new chapter of life. sometimes i feel like i'm behind since i didn't pursue a master's straight after undergrad...then again, everyone lives life at their own pace. i don't know if i truly believe in fate or destiny or anything like that, but i do take some comfort in the belief that i'm exactly where i'm meant to be in life at any given time. whatever happens will happen. my job is to deal with things as they come.
anyway, why don't we get down to business? i've got a few panels to compare from chapter 70 today. the first one is of tengen with the butterfly mansion girls.
this one took me completely off guard because tengen 100% does not call kanao a pig or stuck-up in japanese. all he says is "[You're a] quiet one," albeit in a disrespectful tone. being quiet or reserved is, after all, one of the worst things you could be in tengen's eyes. something like "You meek little mouse!" would be closer to the original japanese and a more in-character insult for tengen, in my opinion. seriously, i've never ever, not once in all my years of studying japanese, thought of pig as a suitable translation of ๅฅด. what the hell were they thinking...?
next is a panel of tanjirou yelling at tengen about aoi.
english:
People have different needs and abilities! You can't just use them as you like with no regard for them at all! Let Aoi go!!
this panel comes after tengen has just said that aoi doesn't look like she'll be useful, but since she's basically a corps member he's still going to take her on a mission anyway. both the reader and tanjirou know aoi feels insecure about her position in the corps, and in classic tanjirou fashion, he indignantly yells at his superior for the transgression.
tanjirou doesn't quite say anything about different needs and abilities or using people as one pleases, though. more literally, his line is "People have their own circumstances, so I'd like to ask you not to callously poke at this and that!" basically he's telling tengen to think before he speaks. i guess the "you can't use people" part is a reference to tengen's plan to use aoi for his mission? having read the japanese version still makes it a confusing choice in my opinion, to say the least.
i'd also like to point out tanjirou's somewhat polite ๏ฝใใใ ใใใ and the ่ฟใโผ that comes right after. very funny juxtaposition to me, teehee.
the final panel for today features tengen and tanjirou & co.
firstly, i think "He's huge!" instead of "He's tall!" would've been a better choice for zenitsu's ใใงใใใ, but that's just me. the main thing about this panel that got me, though, was inosuke calling tengen ใชใใใ. it's been omitted in the official english version, which i can understand. there's not many good english translations of it that would fit inosuke's character. i've seen it translated as mister, but inosuke wouldn't say that. i've also seen it as pops or bloke, but inosuke wouldn't say that either. if demon slayer were being translated now, they might have gone with unc, which honestly is probably the best option available. unfortunately inosuke is not a black u.s. american and does not live in the late 20th or early 21st centuries, so he still wouldn't say that.
they could've gone with old man and that would've been fine, but whatever. mostly i just wanted to show more people that inosuke calls tengen ใชใใใ. it's so fucking funny to me. "where are we going, OLD MAN?" and the old man in question isn't even 25.
that brings us to the end of this panel comparison. i'll try to get back into reading demon slayer more often, but no promises. thanks for reading, and please look forward to the next posts! ่ชญใใงใใใฆใใใใจใ๏ผๆฌกใฎๆ็จฟใๆฅฝใใฟใซใใฆใใ ใใ๏ผ
My short essay on what I read today and what I think about food waste:
ไปๆฅใ้ฃๅใญในใซใคใใฆ่ชญใฟใพใใใ
้ฃใน็ฉใฏใใฃใใใชใใใใ็ก้งใซใในใใงใฏใชใใจๆใใพใใ
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Free to watch โข No registration required โข HD streaming
*I had to localize this for Japanese funeral processions (โcremate the dead with their smartphone in the casketโ) and Japanese cultural beliefs (the dead crossing โthe River Sanzuโ instead of the River Styx)
today it dawned on me that i might read more in japanese if i had an actual book app on my phone. ๐คทโโ๏ธ i downloaded Kobo and immediately read two manga volumes. I guess i can get anything done as long as it involves being on my phone
