サイドリーダー ： "Spirited Away" Plot Outline

This is the first in what I hope to be a continuing series of Japanese "Side Readers". This one was taken from the Spirited Away entry at Japanese Wikipedia, with translation and vocabulary list added by me. I've also written a very quick and easy guide to importing the vocab list into an Anki deck, if you're interested!

『千と千尋の神隠し』のあらすじ
“The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro” plot summary

10歳の少女、荻野千尋（おぎのちひろ）はごく普通の女の子。
10-year-old Chihiro Ogino is a very ordinary girl.

夏のある日、両親と千尋は引越し先の町に向かう途中で森の中に迷い込み、そこで奇妙なトンネルを見つける。
One summer day, Chihiro and her parents move house, and on the way towards their destination town they become lost in a forest, finding a strange tunnel there.

嫌な予感がした千尋は両親に「帰ろう」と縋るが、両親は好奇心からトンネルの中へと足を進めてしまう。
Chihiro gets a bad feeling and clings to her parents, saying “let's go home”, but they continue on foot into the tunnel, curious.

仕方なく後を追いかける千尋。
Having no other option, Chihiro follows behind.

How to Use .txt Files to Add Cards to Anki Decks

You can convert .txt files very easily into cards for your Anki deck, and I'm going to try to format any vocab lists in this blog so as to make the conversion as quick and pain-free as possible. The Anki program recognizes two different “dividers”: either tabs or semicolons. Since tabs are kinda lost on web pages, and semicolons look fugly, I've separated each of my three “fields” (Kanji, reading, and meaning) with a triple-hyphen.

All you have to do is copy and paste the vocab into Notepad or an equivalent, go to Edit-->Replace (or hit ctrl + H), and put “---” in the Find box, and “;” in the Replace one. Hit “Replace All”, save your file in UTF-8 format someplace easy to remember, and voila, the list is now ready for transfer to Anki! The Import feature is in Anki's File menu. If you have a deck open it adds the cards to that, but if you don't it'll prompt you to create a new one.

簡単でしょうね！

Japanese Accent Patterns and Associated Numerals

Yes, Japanese has a pitch accent pattern, not unlike Chinese. The word for it is 高低アクセント （こうていアクセント）. You can get by very easily without ever knowing about this stuff, but if you want to sound as natural as possible, then it's something to keep an eye out (or an ear out) for. The best way is just to listen to as much audio as you can get your hands on.... but if you don't have access to that, then many online Kokugo dictionaries use either marks or numerals to indicate which pattern to use. Well, it used to be many. Goo Jisho and Yahoo Jisho did indicate accent in the past, but I think they use the same basic source for their dictionaries, because they both stopped using the numerals at around the same time. If a word has more than one numeral, then that either indicates that both accents are fine, or that it is spoken differently in another region in Japan. The first one listed is (from what I hear) usually the Tokyo standard.

To make it a little less daunting, all i-adjectives are pitched the same as each other (the fall in tone occurs before the ending "い"), and all verbs are too.

はく 【拍】
beat (music); mora (rythmic unit)
A mora is basically a syllable or a unit of sound, the definition of which differs from language to language. Japanese syllables are ideally all given an equal length, and it is the pitch that gives any needed accents.

へいばんしき 【平板式】
"flat" accent pattern
With Japanese in general, unless a word has the accent on the first mora (ie, a “head” accent), then the first mora is always given a lower pitch than all the morae after it. Words that have a “flat” accent pattern are low on the first mora, higher on the second, and from then on stay high and gradually fade back down to a lower pitch. This includes any particles attached to the end of the word. In online Kokugo dictionaries, these words will be marked with a “0”. This particular pattern isn't technically an accent at all, so often these words will be said to have no accent. (And hence the "0"!)

あたまだかがた 【頭高型】
"head" accent pattern
Words with a “head” accent pattern have a high pitch on the first mora, then drop down to a noticeably lower pitch for the second, and stay low from then on. These words may be marked with a “1” at the end, or with a reversed “「” between the first mora and the second mora. (The first dictionary I ever bought uses this second method, but it's entirely in roomaji so I don't know how many other dictionaries do the same.)

Sorting Out Japanese Adverbs

One of the most confusing word types for me to learn in Japanese is adverbs; probably because it often just a matter of a few degrees between meanings. Just as with English, for example: quite cold, fairly cold, a little cold, sort of cold, pretty cold, and so on. They all mean approximately the same thing, and differ only slightly. In one of my old textbooks (which has been permanently borrowed) there were a few basic linear diagrams of the degree of some Japanese adverbs, and I’ve searched for something similar on the internet, but the best example that I could find with them being “ranked” was a medical survey of patients talking about how well a certain medication worked for them, or something like that ^__^ Anyway, I spent a little while trying to compile some sorted lists, some of them may be interchangeable between the groups, and I know there’s a lot more adverbs out there, so feel free to suggest additions or corrections!

PROBABILITY/CERTAINTY　見込み/ 確信
絶対に---ぜったいに---absolutely, unconditionally
確かに/確実に---たしかに/かくじつに---definitely, certainly, reliably
きっと---きっと---surely, almost certainly
恐らく---おそらく---probably
多分---たぶん---perhaps, maybe
多分~ない---たぶん～ない---unlikely, maybe not
恐らく~ない---おそらく～ない---improbably
絶対に~ない---ぜったいに～ない---never

FREQUENCY　頻度
いつも---いつも---always
大抵---たいてい---usually, almost always
しばしば---しばしば---frequently
よく---よく---often, well
時々/ 時に---ときどき/ときに---sometimes, now and again
まれに---まれに---infrequently
滅多に~ない---めったにない---rarely, seldom
全然~ない---ぜんぜん～ない---never