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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2671 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Spice & Wolf in the original. It's pretty difficult because the wolf goddess speaks in such an antiquated manner and because the setting is Medieval Fantasy Europe and therefore very far from slice-of-life Japan. I never read it in English so I'm following along as best I can.

And here I never even finished reading the translated version. Did you think about reading the TL in parallel to help with the difficult bits? (To the extent it's a faithful translation anyway...)

Update: I tried it. It's good as a lookup for when I totally lose track of what's going on, e.g. for a discussion about currency manipulation, or when there's a sentence I just don't get. Reading in parallel doesn't work though, it's annoying and the book doesn't read well in English IMO. The translation is too faithful, it makes the prose beige and the sentence structure kind of choppy.

Thanks for the suggestion, it's good to try new methods.

Back when I started studying Japanese, I made a rule for myself: if it's in Japanese, you do it in Japanese or you don't do it. I can probably relax that a bit now, 8 years after I started, but I'm wary that if I let myself take the easy way I'll never get back to doing things the hard way. I'll give it a try and let you know.

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