Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 34 Dummy questions and fun stuff

Coming the the end of the retrospective series, we want to conclude with some tiny details that are dumb… and fun, I guess. (And, yeah, we finally got back our intro paragraph again. Yay!)

Dummy questions

As mentioned in episode 0, this game has included a range of dummies randomly spreaded across a range of integers and dictionary words. A lot of them was put as dummy questions as they don’t quite fit into the format of Tìngäzìk, and others are just some interesting (?) ideas for fun. One of such questions was discovered by the first challengers’ team. In this article, I’ll be going through the backgrounds of each dummy questions used in the game.

(Questions are introduced in the order of creation.)

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This is some short pre-ads riddles taken from an episode of Tōdaiō. The filename squeezed in between the boxes is a partially hidden version of 【东大王】20200226_日字-av91955836.mp4, where the second half is the video ID of an upload of this episode on Bilibili((Which is a good place to find Japanese variety shows, shh!!)), and the first half being the title of the video.

Questions in these slides are in a format where the white text are the questions, and the colored texts are choices for the answer.

To solve the first question, you convert the number into Katakana English, and then take the first letter of each number. So, 4-9 becomes フォー-ナイン, then ふな (Carassius), and 3-6 would be スリー-ナイン, then すな (sand).

For the second question, all words to the left has a music note in it:

• ド(do)ライヤー = dryer
• 冷蔵庫 = れ(re)いぞうこ = fridge
• ミ(mi)シン = sewing machine
• ？
• 掃除機 = そ(so)うじき = vacuum cleaner
• ラ(ra)ジオ = radio
• C(si)Dプレーヤー = CD player

Among the choices, only ファンヒーター = fan heater has the letter “fa”.

The third question is asking plainly for “which peninsula is located in Japan”. A simple factual question. The answer is 向津具(むかつく)半島.

The last question, 🍤🦢 is tempura and swan. “Tempura swan” sounds like “ten plus one” in Japanese, so the answer is 10 + 1 = 11.

This did not become a main stage because the answer would be too easy to guess.

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A verse from ボーカロイドの歌 by ピノキオピー with some Hànzì swapped for their Simplified Chinese version (and labeled in HTML). If you have set different default typefaces for Japanese and Simplified Chinese in your browser, you might be able to see some difference on the highlight when you select the lyrics.