Ohhhhhh, I see what’s going on. Took me a while to get it :P I was thinking too much like the first one. The middle square is actually supposed to be the radical, right? So you get 知, 足 and so on.

Hm, yeah, listening to it again, it might be 服を着ろ. Sounds to me kinda like fuku-uh kiro! – I think it’s just the を not being enunciated well that made me mess up.

Ahhhhhhh, that makes sense. There’s no way I would have got that though because I don’t know any of those words :S I was thinking it had something to do with the radicals. You don’t have any others, do you?

I’ve got to assume they don’t actually watch the clip they’re dubbing beforehand because the voices don’t sound like they’re even *trying* to sound similar to the person. The female and child voices are the worst.

Normal voices :D I really wish I could find the English counterpart to this one to compare.

Also, no need to post the exact translation for that sentence – I just assumed what you’d typed was word-for-word what was in the book, amazed that I’d typed the same thing :P

出発前&到着後

When 後 is a suffix, it’s pronounced 「ご」, right? So 到着後 is 「とうちゃくご」. How do you say 出発前? I don’t think I’ve ever learned what 前 is as a suffix, for whatever reason.

That tiny extract is from the blog of Risa Stegmayer, co-presenter of NHK World’s “Cool Japan”. Just discovered it today, and while it’s not the *most* entertaining blog, it’s making great reading practice. I’m a bit worried though – I’m understanding far too much of it, and I don’t know if that’s me getting better or if she’s just using not-so-complex Japanese. I know she’s half-Japanese but she wasn’t born there; she does live and work there now though and hosts the show in Japanese, so I have to assume she’s near enough “fluent” or “native-level” or whatever you wanna call it.

Hm, that makes a bit more sense, but how does こなきゃあ work there, I’m wondering? Can it be used as a conditional on its own? I know it usually implies the ならない part but to me that doesn’t seem to fit here.

As for the 犬に生まれて part, comparing with some examples on jisho.org it seems to mean something like “born to a dog” (implying she was born a dog as opposed to a tortoise, say). So adding that to your idea, it might be something like “Had she not been (born) a dog/born to a dog, she mightn’t've died this soon.”. (Can’t say I’ve ever used “mightn’t've” in a written sentence before but it sounded right to my ears :P)

Edit: Hold on, I made a mistake with that first part: なきゃ is a contraction of 「なければ」 and なくちゃ is a contraction of 「なくては」. So it’s 来なければ, not 来なくては as I said before >.<

http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/%E3%81%AF-particle-and-verbs/ – Joel’s post is quite interesting here, might be worth a look.

Also, are you a fan of Boxxy by any chance? Or are you maybe *the* Admiral Awesome, I wonder…