The Apothecary Diaries - Vol. 8 Ch. 41 - Book

[CheeseDio]

Isn't ji inshi an Enoch

 

[Raiden3]

@TwinAero Males are not allowed inside the palace, to prevent enticing between the maids and males. Same way I would guess to the books, it is too lewd that it might make the girls be too heated.

 

[KhalE]

Sold for food

 

[alacaelum]

The emperor didnt seem to need censorship.

Shao Ran is such a good girl.

 

[niteman555]

We Honzuki now

 

[Diamond-hime]

@CheeseDio
That you need to deduce it yourself 😊
Jinshi is quiet the mysterious character thqt you need to notice everyone if his action , there are already a lot of hint about his identity in the manga , if you want you can reread the manga with chapter with him to gather all his suspicious behavior 😉

Spoiler

his identity will be revealed at the end of this new arc

 

[beThereShortly]

Shao Ran is a cute.

 

[beThereShortly]

A quick reminder to any french reader that the offical translation has hit the shelf and that it's translation is quite good.
And a many thanks to the translation team for helping me discover this great manga.

 

[Blabladodo]

Poor Emperor...
He bought his own stash of porn only for it to be censored.

 

[danich182]

The origin of H Doujins lol

 

[Elilla]

@goldfish178 You need to pay more attention to the story.

Spoiler

He's not a eunuch.

 

[NutritionalValue]

Can't believe Mao Mao encourages light novel piracy.

 

[sukaley]

Shao Ran's name seems to be 小蘭 (xiǎo lán), meaning small orchid. It suits her!

@Wyrm
imo it wouldn't be too hard for them to decipher the hanzi since they already know how to speak the language, they just need to put visuals to the words. For example, Maomao wrote 冬虫夏草 for cordyceps—literally meaning winter bug summer grass (referring to the life cycle of cordyceps). If Shao Ran knows the meaning of cordyceps, then she also knows that it's comprised of those 4 characters, meaning she now knows how to write 5 terms, not to mention other words that she can make in the future by combining those characters with others. Similar characters also tend to have similar pronunciations, e.g. 粗 (cū) and 组 (zǔ), or similar meanings, e.g. words with the 艹 radical probably have something to do with plants. Learn enough basic characters/radicals, and soon she'll be able to fill in the gaps through context. Of course, if she doesn't know what cordyceps is at all, then that's another issue lol

 

[Nunally]

Already has the printing machine that Johannes Gutenberg invented, so maybe this series happen between 14-15 AD.

 

[Wyrm]

@sukaley
That only works if taught properly.
If you are just shown a few random characters and told what the final word is, that won't help you. Particularly when the final word is not even be pronounced as the aggregate of its components. A japanese example I remember is tree + tree = forest. (Ki and Mori) so if I show you the kanji for forest, tell you it's pronounced "mori" and leave it at that, it will tell you nothing about the word for "tree".
If you're smart enough, you might realize how it's made of duplicates of a simpler character, and you can have a guess that it means "tree". But more complex characters are not so obvious. The one you took from the story is definitely not a simple one.
When the component characters are different, even if you can guess what the component words are, how do you then match then to the characters?
You can learn that all by yourself if you dedicate a lot of time and/or know enough of the basics. But starting from very specialized characters and skipping the basics won't help a maid who has work to do and little time to piece a language together.

This... game of sorts works better the other way around. You learn the basic characters, then you can try to guess what composite words are. Even then, some feel like charades designed by a madman. Like your very example. (Do you seriously think this composition is that obvious?)

I can only expect Mao Mao to switch to better instructions, or this poor maid will have trouble learning much in the little time she has.

 

[Phan_Minh_Khoi]

Shao Ran is cute

Spoiler

Would be bad if anything happens to her

 

[Cycycyizitreal]

cute

 

[sukaley]

@Wyrm
I do understand what you mean! I definitely agree that Maomao needs to start with more common terms, especially if Shao Ran doesn't even know anything about medicine. I guess I was mostly refuting your point that logographic languages aren't useful in deciphering more common words like alphabetic languages are when, imo, it would be the opposite. Unless the word is a compound word, alphabetic words do not contain other words within them, but any logographic word with more than one character does. Of course, it's harder to learn logographic languages from scratch because you have to assign pronunciation and characters to meanings, but Shao Ran already has the first one down so the process should be a lot more intuitive.

Spoiler

I'm not sure if it works the same way in Japanese, but given that this story is set in ancient China, I'm basing my knowledge on how I learned to write Chinese as a kid (basically just rote memory of common characters). More complex words like cordyceps are comprised of smaller words—in this case, 4 characters meaning winter, bug, summer, and grass. I wouldn't call them specialized; they'd be characters kids learn in kindergarten or first grade nowadays. So, whether or not Shao Ran recognizes that these characters comprise the word is contingent on whether or not she knows what a cordyceps is in the first place (and thus knows why it's called winterbugsummergrass). Giving an example in English, we know the compound word "sunshine" is made up of "sun" and "shine" because it's what happens when the sun shines down on Earth, but someone might spell it as "sonshine" if they don't know what it means.

Of course, the characters aren't the most basic, but it's not like Maomao's teaching Shao Ran starting from radicals and the composition of characters; she's also just teaching with rote memory. Although the words that she wrote may have been too obscure, the individual characters themselves aren't difficult to parse (characters like grass and tea don't have common nominal homophones anyways, so once Maomao says it out loud, Shao Ran would be able to assign meaning to that character even if she doesn't know what the full word means).

^Sorry about the tangent on linguistics 😅 hopefully it wasn't too incoherent

 

[RoundRobin]

Shao Ran’s so cute!

 

[goldfish178]

@Elillia

Spoiler

I know which is why I said misunderstanding that he’s a eunuch who is interested in sex is funny