Japanese now has better voice acting

I just recently noticed a major update to the voicing of the Japanese course. In the past, the various words or even parts of words were used as building blocks and sounded the same regardless of context, which sounded really weird as the actual spoken lines fell apart into sounds that did not really fit together when you picked them one at a time.

Now, it seems that each spoken line has its own set of words in the database, and they are pronounced the same when you pick them from a list as they are in the corresponding sentence. If you can pick the words at the right speed, you can pretty much reconstruct the original sentence, cadence and all. This has only little influence on the learning, I think, but it is definitely more pleasant.

Speaking of which, I found myself clicking the [お兄さん] (oniisan) button repeatedly to hear the female voice pronounce it. I am not really that kind of pervert myself, but it is such a commonly recurring trope in anime that I just found it utterly hilarious. Supposedly there are boys who take an inordinate amount of pleasure in being called “oniisan” (big brother), either by their actual [妹] imouto (younger sister) or by another younger girl. I assume this is just a TV trope for comedic effect. Because of the low fertility in Japan, many young people have no siblings at all, let alone of the opposite sex, so probably don’t know much about daily life in a family like that.

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