The original article can be found here.
This translation is done purely for enjoyment and educational purposes. It is not intended to replace a professional translation, nor will it necessarily be a perfect translation.
That said, I hope you enjoy it!
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If I have learned anything about babies this past 5 months, that one is pissed they aren't getting any milk.
No, that’s not Yuko Oshima’s baby. That’s just her holding someone else’s baby up to her partially exposed breast. Are people going to masturbate to that? I hope not.
Anyway.
Now you can pay ¥1480 ($18.93 at time of writing) per month to have AKB48 themed internet, an AKB48 tagged email address and access to concert tickets and other goodies.
Oh. And the writing on that image? “Want to make a baby with me? (On the internet.)”
I picked up 漢字検定 DS the other day. I had it years ago when it first came out but now it’s much easier to go through. It’s not so much that I get more right, but that in general I have a better grasp on Japanese in general, so I am able to make better deductions and I am able to better learn Japanese in Japanese than I used to be able to.
But then I found 漢字検定 DS 3 exists.
Now I feel like I wasted my cash. I checked a bunch of stores, only saw the first 漢字検定 DS software, and while I knew a 2 existed, I had read it wasn’t that much of a jump over the first one. Having looked at some videos of 3, however, I see that it has fixed some of my qualms with the first software, which I so recently bought for the second time.
I could put up with the flaws, but that just seems silly. Sure, I could sell this one at a loss and get the new one. I cannot return this one because I already lost the receipt like a fool. I usually do research, but this just escaped me.
Oh well.
I think I’ll put up with the 漢字検定 DS1 for a while and if I do get into it and start cranking out good study with it, then I’ll plunge for the newer and better one. If I don’t really get into it, I can count this as testing the waters.
Eriko had an x-ray today.
It seems wrong. Pregnant woman + radiation = Bad for baby. But looking at a variety of documents it seems like it really is safe. And I should probably trust the doctors. I mean, I pay to trust them, right? Is that how it works these days?
The x-rays were in concern about my son being able to work his way out of my wife’s body. The x-rays were only taken today. The examination of them comes on Wednesday.
We’ll see if my genes are too big for my little wife.
Last week I started writing in Japanese on Lang-8.
The site houses a pretty basic concept. You write in the language you are studying and fix writings that are in your native language. I had heard about it a while back, but I never thought I would enjoy doing it. Usually people get annoyed when you fix their mistakes, but here people want you to do it.
Who ever knew grading writing assignments could be so much fun?
Although I am a language teacher, I don’t mark assignments like many of my middle and high school teaching friends. Perhaps that’s why it’s currently a novelty to me instead of an annoyance.
But people fixing my Japanese for me is so good. So, so good.
It’s not surprising that my biggest problem is with particles. はがにでを and forgetting to use を‚’ because you drop it so much in spoken Japanese. Putting the fixed sentences into Anki in order to remember not to make these mistakes will hopefully get my writing up to snuff within a while. I’m not expecting anything miraculous within a month, but if by next year I was writing like a slightly intelligent high-school student, I wouldn’t be complaining.
Of course, I still need to read more Japanese.
Anyone remember Trio? I probably shouldn’t have reminded you. Sorry about that.
For some reason that I can’t exactly remember, the conversation last night at dinner turned to dialects in Japan. Namely how my mother-in-law tends to pronounce some words a bit differently than standard Japanese. It’s a country side thing, apparently. Basically, a lot of z sounds get turned into d sounds. The word for dust cloth, zoukin [雑巾（ぞうきん）], she pronounces more like doukin. She says there’s a bit of a difference than if she were to say a true ‘だ’ sound (i.e. だぢづでど) but I can’t manage to tell the difference.
This language structure has trickled down into my wife, and has caused me some problems when I’m trying to look up words. There’s a dish called zousui [雑炊（ぞうすい）] which is made by basically taking leftover soup and putting rice and maybe an egg into it. Well, I had a hell of a time trying to look up どすい which is what I heard my wife saying1. This isn’t a new thing, though, as apparently my wife’s summer vacation diary in the first grade was filled with corrections for the many times where she wrote ど©[do] instead of ぞž[zo].
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. (Which, in Japanese is 蛙の子は蛙 The children of frogs are frogs.)
Later on in the evening we were (not so seriously) discussing the possibilities of my son being so handsome he can become a baby model. My father-in-law said that as long as he is born with all the right parts we should be happy. This is Japanese, as he said was gotaimandoku. I had trouble looking it up in my dictionary to get the kanji for the word.
Of course it was actually gotaimanZoku (ごたいまんぞく).
I see my students walking home from school every day and I feel a bit envious. That’s a daily bit of life that I never really got to experience. Sure, we had the busses and they had their own culture and charm about them. However it was so structured with so little variation that now thinking back on it it seems to have a bit of that suffocating freedom-less rigor that Japanese schools themselves are often accused of having. I mean, we had assigned seating on our busses. Not very fun.
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I make no claims about the accuracy of this translation. It is done purely for educational purposes and put up in order to receive comments and the like. The original article is found at [http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20110111_419676.html].
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Square-Enix Opens Song Voting For “Final Fantasy IV Complete Collection Ultimate Pack”
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Yesterday we went to the local shrine (not temple, that’s a different thing!) for our first visit of the year. Incidentally, this will likely be our only visit of the year, but hey, I’m not one to indiscriminately knock traditions. Continue reading »
This is the second year I spent with my wife and her family for the New Year. While the company is good, the food last year left me a little hungry. I’m not accustomed to eating a lot of fish, and I don’t really find it filling in the slightest. I don’t dislike it, per say, but I’m usually not excited to put it down my foodhole.
This year there was a lot more meat available at the dinner table.
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