Greetings from the San Diego Comic-Con! J-List’s booth is well stocked with anime figures, plush toys, hentai grab bags, plus the awesome limited FAKKU x J-LIST Hentai Boxes and awesome con exclueisives you get for visiting our booth. Can’t make it to the show? Then enjoy our new contest, and a 5% sitewide sale!
I’m busy here at the convention, but not too busy to keep up with new anime series. One show I’ve been enjoying is Kakegurui Compulsive Gambler, about an elite high school named Hyakkaou Private Academy where the main curriculum isn’t math or science or geography, but gambling. At this school, the powerful students who win hold all the power, and the losing students become their slaves, treated like chattel. When Jabami Yumeko enrolls in the school, she pretends to be a newbie at gambling, but it’s all an act, and she soon starts winning big bets and disrupting the hierarchy of the school. The show is fun because of the way each episode’s game is set up and executed, and it’s all very dramatic and fun to watch. The series features top voice actors, too, and very high production values. So, will you watch Kakegurui Compulsive Gambler?
When you start to learn a language as different from English as Japanese is, you naturally expect some things to be different. Japanese has a different word order, uses Chinese kanji characters in a way that’s similar to how English is augmented by Latin and Greek loan words, and is “agglutinating,’ which just means information like past tense, passive voice etc. is often encoded into a verb conjugation. One thing I was surprised by was Japan’s creative use of “sound words” to add flavor to language. All languages have onomatopoeia, words which mimic sounds, like bang, slam, bark and tick-tock, but Japan gets extremely descriptive with theirs. Like ざあざあ zaa zaa, the sound of rain pouring down, or para para, rain that’s just drizzling, or しんしん shiin shiin, what frosty snow sounds like falling outside your window. But they take it up a notch, assigning sounds to abstract things like ニコニコ niko niko, the “sound” of smiling; paku paku, eating very quickly, the origin of Pac-man’s name; and pera pera, the sound of someone speaking a foreign language fluently. Can you guess what these Japanese sound words mean? Highlight to see the results!
pika pika — the sound of electricity zapping
kira kira — shiny and sparkly
doki doki — heart is racing with excitement
jiii~ — staring intently, pronounced “gee…”
shiiin~ — the “sound” of silence, often heard after one of my jokes, pronounced sheen
peko peko — stomach is growling with hunger
suu suu — a drafty feeling, like when girls have no panties
How many did you guess right?
In addition to all the awesome anime figures, Plush toys, English visual novels and other products we will have for you in San Diego, were also doing a FAKKU x J-LIST Hentai Box. Only 50 will be available each day of the con, so visit booth 4929 early each day! We’ve also got free items to fans who stop by our booth, a 5% instant savings sale using code SDCC2017 on the site through Sunday, plus a contest here!
