それでも歩は寄せてくる ・ When will Ayumu Make his Move? - Volume 2 Thread

Pg. 57

It’s actually:

後半はわりと会ってましたけど

As opposed to 行き

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p.57

haha yeah I actually realised this also throughout the day… :see_no_evil:
It really was a typo! :sweat_smile:

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Page 52

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I was dumbfounded for a bit thinking the が in 悪いが was the subject marker and thought everything I had ever learned was a lie. I quickly realized it was the contrasting が and my existential crisis was averted :upside_down_face:.

No other hiccups this time, the chapters were pretty fun.

She does have those frog eyes, I ain’t gonna lie, but I think she’s a nice addition to the cast, cheering Urushi on on her romantic endeavors haha

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For anyone uncertain how to tell the difference, only a noun (or noun phrase) can be the subject.

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Yeah, that was what confused me, I was like “can adjectives also be subjects? oh god, what does this mean??” and then just realized my mistake and felt dumb haha

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Low-key went through the exact same thought process and still didn’t fully get it until now, soooo :grimacing:

Thank you again for saving lives, noble Fritz

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With 内側, this manga continues to present me with words on the same day or a day after Wanikani presented them to me. Overall, not awful. Chapter 20 was packed with words I don’t know (love the vocab list as always, thanks, but I was even going beyond it quite often this time), but 21 wasn’t so bad. The only thing tripping me up is maybe the top left of 58, those couple panels. I think I’ve got it more or less; in this particular case it’s hard to even phrase how I’d want to ask about it so I think I’m just gonna leave it.

Spoilers

With that ending, we have an official ruling finding Urushi 可愛らしい . Certainly the right call. I feel like that bit is so saccharine I should be aggravated, but I liked it, haha.

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This is the true power of reading while using WaniKani.

(Except for those 20’s levels where half the kanji never showed up in anything I was reading.)

Top left of 58

There’s a lot going on here.

Let’s break it down.

First, we have the top-left panel, which has two dialogue balloons, but it’s two halves of one sentence.

0058a

The first dialogue balloon is the topic.

The second dialogue balloon is a comment about that topic.

The topic of the sentence, the noun that is the topic, is:

「いつも将棋(しょうぎ)勝負(しょうぶ)してる田中(たなか)(ちから)()わせるっていうの」

That’s a bit of a mouthful, as opposed to a simple noun like “school” or “bunny” or “water”.

Going “from left to right” in this sentence, we have:

いつも: Adverb meaning “always”. There’s going to be a verb here that’s always done.

将棋(しょうぎ)で: Shogi and で tells us this is the “what with”.

勝負(しょうぶ)してる: The noun for a “match” or “game” followed by する (meaning to have/play a match or game) into the て form plus いる (meaning “heaving/playing a match or game”) with the dropped い of course.

“Always playing shogi.”

This “sentence” comes before a noun, so we know it’s modifying that noun.

田中(たなか): Tanaka.

But not just “Tanaka”. This is a modified Tanaka.

“Tanaka, who is always playing shogi.”

(Note that it’s clear from context that he’s always playing shogi with her.)

と: with, as in “(something) with Tanaka who is always playing shogi (with me)”.

(ちから)()わせる: “to join forces” or “to cooperate”; yes, this is a set expression (like “join forces” is in English!)

We have another verb, which makes this a good time to put to all together so far:

“To join forces with Tanaka who is always playing shogi (with me).”

っていうのは: This is used when you’re going to define or explain something about the portion before the “って”.

This is easy to understand if the item before って is a concrete noun. When it’s a noun phrase (as is the case here), I’m still trying to understand the nuance.

“Speaking of joining forces with Tanaka who is always playing shogi (with me)…”

The second word balloon is the comment she’s making on this topic.

なかなか: quite, considerably

(たの)しかった: fun, past tense (“was fun”)

っていうか: As an expression, has a meaning along the lines of “how should I put it” or “I mean”. This is the kind of thing to kind of keep an eye on and figure on what the individual parts are contributing when you see it.

“…it was quite fun, you could say.”

Altogether, and made more English-friendly: “Teaming up with you after we always play shogi together… I suppose you could say, it was kind of fun.”

0058b

「って足引っはってる私が言うなって話だけど」

って: basically wraps the prior panel’s lines in quotes, as she’s going to comment on what she’s just said.

足引っはってる: “to hold back others from achieving success; to stand in the way of”. Technically there should be a を in there, but casual Japanese doesn’t care about us learners. It’s fine. I’m sure English as a second language is even worse.

Since we hit a verb, and there’s a noun next, we know this will be a modifier.

(わたし)が: The subject, “I”. When modified (and ignoring that って for now) gives us:

“I, who held us back from winning”

Now let’s see what the subject is doing.

()う: to say

な: After the plain form verb, saying one shouldn’t do it.

“I, who held us back from winning, shouldn’t say (that line from the prior panel).”

And because Urushi is trying to use up her って quota for the whole volume all on one page:

って: Captures this panel’s line thus far into a quote.

(はなし): speech, conversation. I see/hear (なに)(はなし) used when someone’s asking the equivalent of “What are you talking about?”.

だ: This lets us know that the overall sentence is a “Noun(1) is noun(2)” sentence.

けど: although

This one is tough for me to put all together, and I’m not certain I have all the right nuance understood. Trying to keep that all in, I might go with:

“Although you can say someone like me who who held us back from winning shouldn’t say that.”

 

Spoilers

Allowable correction? Or no?

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Thanks a lot for taking the time to do all that! I’m glad to say I did understand big chunks of it, like the first part making a noun phrase, but you helped a lot with the bits I couldn’t put together.

That bit was my first stumbling block, new to me as a phrase I think and tripped me up a bit when trying to just put it together from its pieces.

Is this a bit of an idiom? を or not, I don’t see it in jisho for example. Either way, part of what I got wrong was the result of thinking “leg/foot, ok, and 引っぱってる is pull/draw/etc… seems slightly off but this must be about their legs being tied together.”

And that would be the last thing I messed up. I’ve seen the form plenty; it’s used constantly in Yotsubato and on a good day I’m fine with it, but in this particular instance it wasn’t clicking that that was what happened. My brain really wanted to default to なって or something, which already seemed incomprehensible and, looking at it now, is obviously impossible for a bunch of reasons.

The spoiler

You know, it’s clear that she has a problem with being called 物 in the story (and it was even mentioned earlier in the thread) but I was honestly a little shaky about proper usage because I know there are instances where もの CAN mean person, usually with other stuff attached. It’s only now, looking at it to say something, that I realized there’s a different kanji used. 者 Language learning is hard!

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(Oops, I have a typo in there, don’t I? But aside from that:)

I almost included a part where I said “without the を you won’t find this in a dictionary”, but then I checked in Jisho and there it was! So I removed that part.

Try typing it into an IME and you get 足引っ張ってる. That gets you a Jisho result, whereas the kana version doesn’t.

For what it’s worth, I kept seeing it as なって as well. And that’s knowing that なる can’t follow the plain form of a verb!

Yup, that’s it exactly. Even if she didn’t see the paper, it’s clear to her from usage which meaning was associated with the もの. It’s a concept that I don’t think can really exist in English.

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I would add here that I interpret her as contrasting the competition between them in Shogi (しょうぶ) with the cooperation in the three-legged race (力を合わせる). Like, it’s kind of fun to be working together instead of competing for a change.

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That’s a good point. I don’t know the nuance to the various wording used, but contextually what you say does feel “right” to me.

Completely unrelated to our manga here, but yesterday afternoon I had my Anki card for 交代(こうたい) auto-suspend as a leech. Then the manga I read in the evening…had the word 交代(こうたい) in it. Then the anime I watched an episode of at night…had the word 交代(こうたい) in it.

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This week, plan on spending less time on chapter 22 (less dialogue) and more time on chapter 23 (more dialogue).

For those enjoying the ebb and flow happening around the shogi matches, chapter 22 does not disappoint.

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I lightly read through chapter 22 and 23 today and I agree with the statement, that there is more time needed for chapter 23.
I understood what was happening, but I probably only really understood 50% of the words/content. (Meaning I will probably have to read through chapter 23 again and look up stuff. :sweat: )

Also I’m probably late to this info, but I finally realised there was a shougi stone which is apparently called 歩.
So far I did not search any shougi related stuff yet, does anyone think it’s good/necessary to know more about the game? I’m pretty much interested the series now and I guess it seems like a good idea… :thinking:

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It's been mentioned before, but like with unknown Japanese words in general, it's easy to miss it when you don't know it yet.

There are some other pieces that are worth knowing later in the series, but there’s no real need to learn them in advance (unless you want to). My “minimum effort” recommendation would be take note when a piece name is mentioned, and learn it at that time.

Also, it can be worth looking at the board shown at the end of some chapters.

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I did a bit of clean-up to the formatting of the vocabulary list while adding words today.

Details for anyone interested in that sort of thing.

Wider Columns

The English and Notes comments were originally made longer by merging a cell across three columns.

This does produce a wider cell. However, when inserting a row, the new row’s cells are complete unmerged.

To improve this, I unmerged all the cells, removed the unnecessary columns, and resized the English and Notes columns to be wider.

(This is the main one that got me to do a change, and I figured I may as well do a few other things while at it.)

Lengthy Text

Typically, we want to use text that is short enough to fit within the visible space within a cell.

Sometimes, this simply isn’t possible.

The English and Notes cells were originally set to cut off anything that overflows out of the visible space in the cell. (This is the default behavior.)

I changed these two columns to “wrap” behavior. This means if the content for an English or Note cell is too long to fit in the visible space, it will wrap around to a new line, and the row will auto-size to fit the contents.

Vertical Alignment

If a long English or Notes value’s contents wrap across more than one line, all the other cells are bottom-aligned, which looks odd. (This is the default behavior, and one I’ve never understood in spreadsheets.)

To rectify this, I set all the columns to top-align.

Unnecessary Columns

By default, a Google Sheet has way more columns than we need. I went ahead and remove the extras.

Unnecessary Rows

For desktop/laptop users, the more rows there are, the smaller the vertical scrollbar is. For a series with short chapters, it’s unlikely we’ll even hit 50 words in one chapter added to the sheet. But just to be on the safe side (since not everyone will know how to add rows if necessary), I reduced the row count to 100 rows per sheet.

(Although, anyone on a desktop computer probably has a wheel on their mouse, which may be an easier way to scroll than dragging a scrollbar.)

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I really love kanji. I know there are plenty that are unintuitive, but on the very first page, I’m pretty sure 新入部員 and 正式 were both used in the past. Back then I had no clue, ran straight to the vocab sheet. Now, with more kanji knowledge, I could just read these new (I mean, I didn’t memorize them back then) words straight away. Nice read overall, despite the bigger text density in chapter 23, I was pretty ok. Some statements took some time to pull apart, usually just a piece or two was throwing me off for a bit, but overall this is right about at the perfect level for me now.

I also very much appreciate the warning that 歩 is a piece name; I probably would’ve forgotten. This is getting an English release, isn’t it? I don’t envy the translators dealing with kanji name references. I’m already getting some nice value out of being able to read the original here!

More of a curious nuance question than understanding

Just wondering, if anyone happens to know, is 自分勝手 particularly different from your usual 勝手? Looking over the jisho entries (feels like a case for Japanese dictionaries but I’m not quite to that point), it narrows the meaning, I suppose. Wondering if it’s only for being more specific or if adding 自分 might intensify it or something, given the fact that that is “oneself” onto a word already about doing things selfishly. Not a very important question, just the kind of thing I wonder about after seeing 勝手 all the time but just now seeing this form.

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Well, let’s check a (children’s) Japanese dictionary!

勝手(かって):「自分(じぶん)のしたいようにするようす。わがまま。」

自分勝手(じぶんかって):「自分(じぶん)都合(つごう)のいいようにすること。身勝手(みがって)。わがまま。」

These definitions are basically the same! It’s practically just swapping out の for に, and したい for 都合(つごう)のいい. (Maybe that ようす add something to the first, though.)

And the second one throws in a 身勝手(みがって) just to make us wonder what the nuance of that one is.

身勝手(みがって):「自分勝手(じぶんかって)。わがまま。」

0026x

Looking over it more, I think 勝手(かって)'s translates more like “State of doing as one wants” and 自分勝手(じぶんかって) is more like “Doing for one’s convenience.”

The latter feels to me more like you’re getting some benefit from it. But this is the first time I’ve knowingly seen 自分勝手(じぶんかって) versus the common 勝手(かって)+に.

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As always, much appreciated. Love that they start pointing back to each other, heh. Also literally learned わがまま earlier today, so good timing.

Is the children’s dictionary you used easily accessible online?

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Afraid not. And with as teeny the text is, I wish there was a PDF version I could have bought instead. (I looked before buying physical.)

For the curious, I have the 三省堂 例解小学国語・漢字辞典セット. It includes both a children’s dictionary and a kanji dictionary.

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