[PKJ] A Japanese Pokémon Adventure, Part II

Coming back to this several days later, I can feel a lot more of my ability to parse hiragana and katakana cement itself, even if the words are still meaningless. I have a lot of ground to catch up on, and first up is a much needed badge...

Good lord, 5 hours just to get to the 2nd gym is...actually reasonably slow given about half this time is split into study and writing this. But, the amount of time it takes をり to steamroll through a water gym ?

Maybe 5 minutes. But, heading up past the bridge forced me to confront an issue...

...Team composition.

I decided to sit down and think out a full team setup, with the bonus idea of no HM slaves whatsoever, all 7 moves will be spread out across a team of 6. This will be an even slower burn, as I work towards having a coherent enough team that can destroy whatever, but I'm in this for the long haul. As my 2 choices tore their way through the horde of trainers on the way to Bill's house, my memory strained to think what some good choices would be...

Whoops I got distracted by trying to memorize the weird, voiced kana. 68/71 feels pretty incredible though, but I feel the desire to get a little notebook to scribble notes in (foreshadowing !)

Oh, hello. Want to join me on my strange adventure ?

Eager, I like it. So, names names names...you know what ? Tetris 99 has a ton of Japanese usernames, I'll let fate decide this one

ひさ...I shall seek out the meaning of this later, as Jisho seems to enjoy returning a server error to me. I also had to force myself to learn that はい was yes, or to confirm that I wanted to give it a nickname.

I will burn this boat to the bottom of the ocean, and leave a wake of sunken dreams to all that stand in my way. Allow me to pass, lest you face the wrath of my incomplete team, and even more incomplete vocabulary, person of the sea.

Mid-rampage on-boat, I noticed a peculiar "10" appear in the dialogue box, which was on a move をり was going to learn. I recognized it's stats, that was unmistakably thunderbolt, but why the 10 ?

Well, as it turns out, it's called something completely different in Japanese. "１０まんボルト" roughly translates to 100,000 Volts, according to Bulbapedia. This wasn't even something I had considered as a factor when it comes to translations, but seems so obvious when realized. Japanese text for a move I only know the English meaning of could not be used as a reliable translation.

None were spared in my ravenous hunger for knowledge, for both my pokemon to grow, and for my Japanese abilities to improve. None would be spared from our combined power...except the woman who was nice enough to heal my pokemon during all that, she uh, escaped on a space ship back to her home planet.

Good pace, unbalanced team, we'll fix this next time. I will not be stopped...

(As an aside, I did *not* expect this series to get any popularity. I write these with a buffer. If say, part 2 is out, that means part 3 is already written and finished, simply not published yet. If you're reading part 3, then part 4 is finished, etc...thank you for reading and following along regardless, I'll do my best to keep this entertaining 💛)