I like coming up with stupid punny wordplay things so that's what's happening with the name of this blog:
I'm aware that the player/protagonist's default name (in the game) is 雨宮 蓮 amamiya ren, which characters mean
雨 rain 宮 shrine/palace* 蓮 lotus
(*I suppose "palace" would be the more fun interpretation here for reasons ;)
(Fun trivia: if you've played this once in english/I assume any of the other languages and change the language to japanese, this name will also show up in your save files (on steam at least) as you're only given if I remember correctly 3 character spaces per first name/last name)
So, I wanted to play around with the idea of "lotus in the rain". If you know anything about japanese, you'll know that there is often more than 1 way to pronounce anything, and ren is the on-yomi or 'chinese' pronunciation of the word, and hasu is the 'japanese' pronunciation or kun-yomi of lotus.
Further poking around in the dictionary led to the delightful discovery that there is a compound word for "in the rain", 雨中, and it is pronounced uchuu, which also happens to be the pronunciation for 宇宙, or "space", and that sealed the deal.
So, "lotus in space in the rain".
Avatar image taken from this merch on mercari, at least while the page still exists, aka the "Picaresque Mouse" series, it's an added bit of meta for me that I like to think that this mouse is floating in space ;)
The purpose of this blog is for me to self-indulgently yap about and sometimes expound on the linguistics of things and just to be a bit silly sometimes, and I will be breaking things down so that it's accessible to everyone, so it doesn't matter if you have any japanese or not, feel free to come along for the ride! :)
Thoughts on whether this is a good medium to expand on one's japanese language abilities: short answer is that I think you'd need to be upper intermediate in daily life japanese to get by in the first place.
Ryuji's speech is very slurred and the words are written as pronounced, running into each other, and the others have lesser variations of this sort, but nevertheless they do use them. Which means you do need to have some idea of what the original phrasing is if you want to look things up. I've not run any of this through google translate so I don't know how well machine translation parses these, I've mostly been looking up individual words at need, but I imagine that some of it will undoubtably come out as garbage in machine translation. I suppose having the voice language in english might help, but again, a lot of it isn't voiced, and I do feel like knowing the underlying nuance behind the phrases is going to affect what options you'd choose too. So yeah, I do think upper intermediate, and preferably being more fluent in the japanese that people actually use rather than classroom phrases before one gets a benefit rather than a headache from it.
Backstory is that I was talked into playing this, which I decided would be worth having a go if I did it in japanese. I am not a gamer, I can't even qualify for noob status, I enjoy games as a spectator sport and so I have to say that this is in fact a very gentle game for someone who sometimes can't even get through the doorways properly and get stuck behind them. I'm watching Persona 4 (golden?) being played and I'm thinking, ha. hahaha.... haha, ha.
(I've also seen chunks of Persona 3)
The current plan is to work on a bunch of posts and then put them on queue so that I can forget all about it have them nicely spaced out. I don't know how frequently I'll be doing this yet, particularly since my gameplay is rather slow, but let's have a go and see! :D
Thank you for reading all this and here we go! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
