Japanese Archives - Page 12 of 18

Ponyo on the Cliff

I had a bit of time on my hands over the weeked, so I finally got round to watching that cam of Ponyo on the Cliff I uh, obtained a while ago. As expected, someone in the cinema got up and walked across the screen halfway through the show (I think it’s obligatory, really), but apart from that it was an excellent-quality cam.

The movie itself was okay. Very childish, but I’m obviously not the intended audience. My adult brain wouldn’t stop screaming at me that while it was very pretty to see a whale swimming across a road, a tsunami huge enough to turn a cliff into an island would be extremely disastrous and would result in an extremely large amount of extremely dead people. Not to mention all the stranded, dead and rotten fish in people’s houses once the waters finally receded. And just think about all the destroyed goods and boats and personal effects and books and money and clothes. They’d better have been insured or they’re in for a world of financial hurt.

Still, even if I was the intended audience, I don’t think this is one movie I would watch more than once. Growing up, the favorite movies in my house were those with lots of tension and nail-biting moments in them. Disney’s Aladdin was one of those. And Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which we watched until the tape tore, then patched together with sellotape and kept on watching. Ponyo on the Cliff has very lovely animation and stirring music (Wagner called, he wants his royalties), but there’s never any doubt that everything was going to come right in the end. You can tell by the way the characters take the time to chow down on ramen and ham then snuggle down on the couch while the world goes to hell around them.

Did it help my Japanese ability any? Not really. The script was written for 5-year-old kids = very easy to understand. And the art and actions are expressive enough that they needed even have bothered with any dialogue at all. It was fun though, definitely worth at least one watch. Next on my to-watch list is Laputa: Castle in the Sky. And that’s all for today.

Quit playing Fire Emblem DS

Day and night time, rain and sunshine
I seek my dream everywhere
Day and night time, rain and sunshine
I seek my dream everywhere

I can’t get enough of that Chage & Aska 🙂

What I can and have gotten enough of is that stupid Fire Emblem DS. Okay, it’s not stupid. But it’s annoying. I’m on chapter 15, just a few steps left between me and the boss, and I’ve been stuck there for the past 2 weeks. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Somebody ALWAYS dies. Usually due to my carelessness, but we’ll gloss over that for now. Bartz has died, Gordon has died, Alan has died… it’s like they’re taking turns!

So finally I said, screw it all. No matter who dies next we’re moving on. Then I moved Oguma up to put the finishing touches on the boss –remind me again why I shouldn’t take a swordsman up against a general wielding a killer lance — and, as expected, CRITICAL. Instant death. And the criticals in the game are ugly and boring anyway, so I didn’t even get any pleasure out of watching that. And I was so angry I even forgot to swear in Japanese. GOSHDANGIT, YOU STUPID LITTLE PIECE OF —-ahem!

Anyway, there’s no way I could let Oguma stay dead. I mean, he’s Ogu-freaking-ma! So, reset #15. I’ll try again later tonight, when I’ve gotten over being pissed off at myself and at the game. And that’s all for today.

Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger review

I thought I’d try watching something different yesterday, so I downloaded the first episode of a sentai show called Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger (subbed, unfortunately). Actually I’ve had the mp3s for both the opening and ending themes from the show for a while, and I listen to them almost every day. Watching the show itself though, quite an…experience, shall we say?

After the Last Friends debacle, I lambasted the cast for being uniformly terrible actors. Little did I know how truly bad Japanese acting could get. Yes, I know it’s a sentai show. And I know that on some level the actors were acting badly on purpose. But oh, it was so bad! The dialogue (“Fight with your DinoGuts gushing out!! Warriors filled with DinoGuts can never lose!) The actions! The expressions. So, so, so bad. I don’t even know how to describe it without insulting the characters, their mothers, their families and their entire sexual histories since they were two years old.

Abaranger was so bad, in fact, that I watched every single last second with rabid interest and longed for more. So this is the famous “so bad it’s good” syndrome. Usually when I watch a show, I tend to stop every few minutes or so to check something on the net, eat some snacks, type up a couple of e-mails,etc. Only a very gripping show can keep me from switching at least once, and Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger was one of these. I just had to see how much worse it could get, and it didn’t disappoint me…in a bad way.

If only I could get this show raw I think I could become quite the fan. :-p

On the other hand, I tried to watch Code Geass all over again yesterday and failed miserably. Some shows just aren’t meant to be watched twice, you know? The first time everything is new and moving at a blistering pace, so you don’t have time stop and think too deeply about the story and the meanings of what they’re saying, and of course you don’t know what’s going to happen next so you can take everything seriously. One watch is definitely enough for me. Let’s keep the magic alive, shall we?

I’m going to spend the rest of the day listening to Chage & Aska’s Very Best Roll Over 20th Album on endless repeat.

Giant indecipherable walls of text

You know that feeling when someone spots you from far off and waves to you, but you don’t know who it is so you’re like errrrr… and then the person gets closer and it turns out to be someone you know really well and really like, but haven’t seen in ages so you’re like “OMG, it’s YOU!! :DDDD”? I saw it happen just yesterday on my way home, actually. This lady, standing at the bus stop, dressed up to the nines. A car pulled up just a bit away and the gentleman in the car beckoned to her to come closer. You could tell by the look on her face, she’s like “WTF do YOU want, fool?” as she stalked over to where he was parked (note to sensible ladies out there: don’t approach parked cars at night). Then her face did a total 360 when she saw who it was. It was the most amazing transformation ever, like, WHOA, night into day. She was all like “Heeeeeeeey! It’s been aaaages! Oh I’ve missed you! Tee hee hee hee” and stuff like that. And then my bus pulled away so I couldn’t see the rest of the reunion, but you get the picture, right?

It’s been like that with me and Japanese lately. I won’t kid you: Japanese Wikipedia used to intimidate the hell out of me. I’d open up a page and bam, all these curly lines and huge blocks of densely-packed text. Not a picture or a graph in place to lighten the mood a bit. >__< Sometimes I’d just close the page right away, like “I didn’t really want to know this stuff that badly anyway,” and lately I still get that reaction, but as soon as I look a little closer, I see tons and tons of old friends, all lining up to say hello. 😀 It’s amazing how much more I understand now, ever since I started making a focused effort to read all the pages in Japanese. Even those scary-looking strings of 5, 6, 7, 8 kanji in a row like 最多候補数 and 主演女優賞受賞 that look like they just escaped from a Chinese newspaper, once you look at them closely you see they’re made up of simple 2 and 3 kanji compounds that are a cinch to read. Y’aaaay~!

I’ve still got a long way to go, of course. I come across at least 10 words and compounds I don’t understand in even the shorter wiki articles, and I still get a little turned off by some of the longer pages, but I’m getting there. I’m definitely getting there. And that’s all for today.

Another source for Japanese magazines

After the whole fs2you/raysource nonsense, I continued the hunt for Japanese fashion magazines online. I can’t remember where I found this link, or I’d give them the credit, but I found another site where you could read fashion magazines. It’s a Chinese site, btw. Who’d have thought the Chinese youth would be that much into Japanese culture? It just goes to show.

But I guess JPseek is still better if you want to actually download the pages as one big rar file instead of reading page by page. And of course JPseek has its other uses as well.

More good ood news: I cleared my backlog of SRS reps and entered 30 sentences so far today. Online Japanese reviews are such a great way of getting sentences. Too bad I keep getting distracted by the Beijing Olympics. I find myself watching even things I don’t care about like the discus throw and triple jump and stuff. But hey, it only comes once in 4 years and it’s almost over anyway. Might as well enjoy!