Due to a general lack of page numbers, it can be difficult to know which page you’re asking a question on. You can use the thumbnails below to see at a glance which page number each is.
Thumbnails with page numbers for this week's reading. (Spoiler warning!)
Anyways, a few questions as always. Any help would be appreciated
Page 49, Panel 2, is さっちゃん saying that they are in a tight spot, (therefore) today will be a practice day
Page 50, Panel 2, is だって used to link the two sentences that さっちゃん said? Yup!Look Because if we play hide and seek, we are practicing hiding and searching, are we not?
Page 51, Panel 3, さっちゃん is saying that The democracy of the univeristy of Tokyo is with this thing???
Page 52, is ことは saying If there is a person who has the same game (as me) and I happen to pass by him/her, it would become advantageous?
Page 53, first panel, what is the furigana for 立入禁止 and does it mean People are not allowed (to come here)
I also like how although Saitou wants to mess with them, he would also help them (from what I observed in this chapter, feel free to disagree)
Thanks @OuchWaterwars for telling me, I’ve just changed it
Me coming from an English native language background, I always enjoy breaking a sentence down into its topic-comment pair.
Here, we have the topic 「ヒーロー」. The comment will be something about the topic of heroes.
Side comment: Why do I say “heroes” (plural) rather than “hero” (singular)? It comes down to context. It may seem strange for us learners that Japanese doesn’t specify singular or plural, but it’s actually not as weird as it may at first seem. When it comes to English, all plural tells us is that it’s more than one. But “heroes” (plural) doesn’t tell us if it’s referring to two heroes, or three heroes, or a hundred heroes. And just as “heroes” doesn’t distinguish between how many heroes it as (aside from being more than one), 「ヒーロー」 similarly does not distinguish between how many.
Back to Sacchan’s line, her comment about heroes is:
「ピンチの時だけ働くのではない」
We have の which turns the clause before it into a noun, so let’s look at that portion on its own first:
「ピンチの時だけ働く」
The core of this clause is 「働く」, which as a sentence on its own would mean “They (do) work”. The subject is often unspecified, as it’s known by context, so I went ahead and used the pronoun “they” which similarly doesn’t specify who the known-by-context subject is. (Since the topic is about heroes, we can infer in this scene that heroes are the subject who are working.)
The particle だけ specifies a limit. It’s saying what it’s attached to (ピンチの時) is a limit. Here, the limit is essential “when in a crisis” (“pinch time”).
If when you do work is limited to when you are in a crisis, then you get 「ヒーローはピンチの時だけ働く」, “Heroes only work when in a crisis.” You’ll find that this だけ limit is often translated as “only”. The words 「だけ」 and “only” have different meanings/uses, but they overlap. You can’t always use “only” as a translation, but you often can.
Now, that’s not the end of the sentence. We’re taking 「ピンチの時だけ働く」 as a noun (thanks to the の) after it, giving us “working only when in a crisis” as our noun.
Attached to that clause-as-a-noun is ではない. I’m not good at explaining this one, because I never formally learned the grammar behind it. My understanding is that the normal noun ending (copula) だ is short for ではある, and the negative (じゃない) would then be ではない. In other words, “isn’t”.
Because the clause is turned into a noun, that means this is a noun sentence: “(Subject) is (noun).”
Putting this all together, and sticking a bit to the Japanese structure, “As for heroes, it isn’t that they are working only when in a crisis.”
And since heroes don’t work only when in a crisis, these little heroes are having a training day today.
This use of って is used to make a topic out of 「かくれんぼだ」, similar to the function of は. Since って is used for quoting, it’s sort of like saying “speaking of …” or “talking about …”. Essentially, “Speaking of hide-and-seek, doesn’t it make for good hiding and seeking training?”
In the sense that she’s establishing a topic that she then makes a comment on, you can definitely say that this って linked the two sentences together.
「東大デモクラシー」 is a difficult one, as Sacchan is bungling an expression: 「灯台下暗し」, “it is darkest under the lamp post”.
She’s saying since this she and Kotoha are hiding on the other side of the tree where Yui is counting.
And yes, lines like this are a nightmare for us learners of Japanese as a second language. I credit this posting for helping me out on this one. (Warning: Contains spoilers.)
Essentially, yes.
Her Nintendo 3DS system has a function where if she passes by someone else who has a 3DS and the same game as her, they’ll exchange game data, which can give her an item or some other advantage. Following that, Kotoha in panel three laments that this doesn’t happen often in the park.
立入禁止, meaning “entering forbidden” (“off-limits”).
By the way, 入 vs 人 was my very first ever misread kanji back when I was starting out learning Japanese. This was back when computers in the home were still rare, so all my exposure to the two was written, and 人 looked more like a backward 入.
As for the sign, anyone out there with a physical copy who can read the small print on it? I see it starts with 上野, but I can’t make out the rest.
I don’t have a physical copy but I think it starts with 上野公園… not sure about the remaining 3 kanji, but my guess is it’s something along the lines of Ueno Park Administration…
Oops. I’m using the extension to auto-add furigana to my kanji on here, and it sometimes misses furigana on longer kanji. I failed to check for that one, as I got distracted by the tiny kanji that’s illegible on the digital version of the page. I’ve corrected it now; thanks!
The core of Sacchan’s line here is 「場合か」, “Is it a situation?”
What kind of situation is she asking if it is? To know that, we need to apply the modifier that’s in front of it: 言ってる (“to be saying”). It’s a “situation to be saying (what she had just said prior)”.
Altogether, she’s asking, “Is it a situation to be saying (what I just said)?”
If we stray from the Japanese grammar and into common English ways of saying things, we can go with, “This isn’t the time to be saying that,” which is closer to DeepL’s take on the line.
In my earlier days, it was a nightmare trying to piece everything together and conjure something half resembling almost a meaning out of what I was reading.
Important takeaways:
Removing all modifiers helps to see the core sentence. It also helps improve your ability to recognize what’s modifying what.
Short sentences can be very difficult because there’s so much that needs to be inferred from context. This creates a situation where the lines that seem like they should be easier are actually harder.
場合 is one of those words that can be tricky to get a handle on. Well, it was for me. Your milage may vary.
There’s something strangely satisfying when you type a word into the vocab sheet and the little stars in the frequency column appear! And also disappointing when you thought you were typing in a relatively common word and no stars appear…
What is Yui doing on page 48?
Summary
Page 50 - The sound effect says ミーンミンミーン - I think this is the sound of cicadas in the background:
It definitely shows the importance of having a frequency list appropriate to the kind of material one is reading.
Dowsing for water, perhaps? (At least, I know it’s something I did as a kid. But all I had to use was a Y-shaped stick. And I never found water with it.)
Yup. Commonly seen in manga on a summer day =D
(And yet, browsing a few random manga, I can’t find any examples to show how common it is…)
Page 52, panel 2: このゲームはちゃんと血が出る, is this This game is very violent (because a lot of blood is coming out)?
Page 53, panel 3: でも公園より外には出ないよね. This one is confusing me in part because I only know より as “less than” from Genki’s lesson for より and のほうが. I guessed But I don’t think to leave the park but DeepL gave me But you don’t go much further out than the park
As always, thanks for the help in getting through this!
I prefer to think of より as roughly “compared to, in relation to”. Looking it up on Jisho or any other dictionary you’ll find it can be used in lots more ways than just with のほうが. This phrase would be “But in relation to the park we don’t go outside” , or more simply, “But we don’t go out of the park.”
There’s some debate because Gravatar says it was public data. I opened my account there like decades ago so I don’t remember what settings I used but I’m pretty sure I’d have never agreed to having my email made public. So I just nuked my Gravatar account for good.
Oh no! Sorry to hear that. That sounds really stressful.
I also read this as meaning the game was violent/gory. That fits with what we know about Kotoha already!
血の出るよう can be a metaphor for great physical and mental effort, as if soaked in blood. (reference) But I don’t think this meaning fits with the context, or with the structure of the sentence.
my Gravatar account for good.