Spotify, One Piece and learning languages
I’ve been rewatching One Piece recently. I’d been hearing a lot of hype about it being in the last few arcs so I decided to catch up. So far, there's about 1200 episodes its a marathon to watch it, but I grew up on One Piece so its also nostalgic to watch it. Towards the end of episode 1028, there’s an absolute banger of a song, it’s very anthemic with an epic trumpet solo. And I love trumpet solos.
So naturally I did what anyone who finds music in random places does, I go to youtube and start searching for random words hoping to find the song. I looked up “Luffy v Kaido song”, “Luffy punch song”, “Epic Trumpet song One Piece”, and none of them got me what I wanted. I then went to spotify and looked up the entire One Piece OST and started listening to the songs one-by-one until I finally found the song I was looking for - ルフィ ~覚醒~
I’m not a huge fan of spotify, the UX is too cluttered, they mess up the back button so I randomly end up exiting the page, the phone app is okay but I can’t find any songs I want. But the absolute worst, most crappy and evil thing I came across is that Spotify doesn’t let you copy song titles! All I wanted was to find out the name of this song I loved, I figured I’ll copy it, go to google translate, and live happily ever after. Maybe even write a blog post talking about how amazing the song was. BUT I COULDN’T COPY THE NAME OF THE SONG!
So naturally, I did what anyone in this situation would do - look up “how to learn japanese in 10 days” and 10 days later, I’ll finally know the name of the song.
Japanese isn’t that difficult to read. They have 3 scripts, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is the cutesy style of japanese, its the characters any non-japanese person would think looks like japanese. Then you have katakana that looks sharper. But its the same-ish set of phonetic sounds as Hiragana. All in all, there’s about 214 characters to learn and you can learn to read them in an afternoon! Here’s the site I used if anyone else is interested.
And then there’s Kanji, that’s the part that’s really difficult and you just have to memorize a couple 2000 commonly used ones. The nice thing is that a lot of places I see kanji, they write its hiragana/katakana above or below. So its not impossible to read it once you know the base 214 characters.
Its been exactly 12 days since I started learning Japanese and though I haven’t learned it entirely, here’s what I know.
ル -> stands for “ru”
フ -> “fu”
ィ -> “i”
覚 -> “remember/wake up”
醒 -> No clue what this means, I didn’t get this far.
But this was enough for me! So the song is called “ruffy kakusei” or “rufui remember” or “rufui wake up” and that’s enough for me to figure out the name of the song, “ruffy’s awakening theme”!
And if anyone wants to listen to the song, here - Luffy's Awakening
(Turns out there’s a roundabout way to copy the name of the song in Spotify. Click “All Credits” on the right, highlight the name of the song, and press cmd+C because right-click and copy doesn’t work…)