• 8 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Yes, we should have expected a price rise when we’ve had some of the worst inflation in modern history this decade, but there’s also the declining yen. One dollar was worth 114 yen the week the Switch launched. It is currently worth around 145 yen. The British pound also increased from 140 yen to 184 yen, and the Euro from around 122 yen to around 160 yen. That’s around a 30% increase for all three currencies, which for the UK at least is almost enough to offset inflation.

    Obviously the yen could possibly quickly recover in the next few years, but I don’t think inflation is the only thing you should consider if you’re going to talk about how fair the price is in western markets.



  • 上下左右 (じょうげさゆう). Means “top, bottom, left, and right”. It isn’t used very often, but it’s useful for talking about web design, which is how I first encountered it.

    拘り (こだわり) when used for food. It’s easier to translate it as a verb (拘る), which means to be particular about something. 玉子に拘っている can very simply be translated as “We’re particular about eggs”, but 拘りの玉子サンド is much more difficult to translate. In this usage, it means that lots of care, thought, time, and/or work has been put into getting it right. There are a few translations you could use, but I don’t think any one of them had quite the same nuance. Jim Breen dictionaries translate them as “speciality”, but I don’t think it captures the original meaning at all. You could translate it as “artisanal” or “finest”, but that gives it more of a high-end or luxury sounding nuance. “Meticulously crafted” is also close, but that sounds like something very complex or elaborate, whereas the original can be used for simple things.











  • 代々墓 (だいだいばか): An ancestral grave

    One of my Japanese teachers pointed out that it’s often used in sentences like OO家族代々墓, which makes it sound like " the OO family are massive idiots.

    I also thought 五十五 sounded funny when I first learned it, because I thought it was supposed to be pronounced like “go Jew go”.

    It probably doesn’t make any sense noq considering how quickly internet language changes, but I learned the word for ambulance (救急車 きゅうきゅうしゃ) around 15 years ago, and at the time QQ meant crying, and was used to call people emotional crybabies. It reminded of the term “wahmbulance” which people would use when someone is being whiny.






  • The most tragic thing about this is that she isn’t even using the word breedable correctly. The traditional meaning of the word, which she is trying to gatekeep, means to produce offspring. Humans breed by procreating with another human to create human children. Vaginas do not breed with other vaginas to create vagina children, so vaginas are not breedable.

    Even if you think the slang form of the word breedable this guy used is invalid, he’s still breedable as long as he’s capable of impregnating someone, even if he has no desire to do so.




  • 手紙 is the direct object. 家 is the place it was sent to, so I suppose that counts as an indirect object. Sentence order for Japanese is very flexible (although the verb must always come last), so I wouldn’t worry too much about memorizing any particular order beyond Subject-Object-Verb.

    Edit: I took a look at the source you gave, and I think you should probably disregard this sentence pattern. It’s clear from the purpose of the lesson that they were purposefully trying to shoehorn から, へ, and に into single sentence. I don’t think it sounds particularly natural.