If you need any general info about the book, please check the Nomination post for more details (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) Also, note that this is an offshoot club’s thread, meaning that we have already finished reading the first volume, that you can find at それでも歩は寄せてくる ・ When will Ayumu Make his Move? - Volume 1 thread (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Reading Schedule
||||||
| — | — | — | — | — | — | Week|Start date|Chapter|Page Numbers|Page count*|
Week 1 | November 27th|第29局|03-10|7|
Week 2 | December 4th |第30-31局|11-29|16|
Week 3 | December 11th |第32-33局|31-49|16|
Week 4 | December 18th |第34-35局|51-69|16|
Week 5 | December 25th |第36-37局|71-87|16|
Week 6 | January 1st |第38-39局|89-107|16|
Week 7 | January 8th |第40-41局 + おまけ|109-127|14|
*in the page count, white/unwritten pages aren’t considered.
Vocabulary List
Please read the guidelines on the first page of the sheet before adding any words.
Members
Mark your participation status by voting in this poll:
Finally it’s time for ayumu again!
I guess I have reading this so deeply integrated in my schedule now, that I felt like something was missing last week.
Sadly it seems like there are no page numbers in volume 3 anymore. At least I didn’t see any in chapter 29 and even searched in chapter 30, but found nothing. I wonder if they stopped using them.
p.5
I don’t understand this, can anyone please help?
将棋の寄せ合いとかけましてインフレと解きます。
将棋の寄せ合い - ?? the pressing against each other in shougi ??
と - probably: if/when
かけまして - there are many meanings for this, since there is inflation next, maybe spend time/money or to bet?
インフレ - inflation (really?)
と - with inflation (?)
解きます - again multiple meanings, maybe to solve?
Just guessing here:
When it’s time for the pressing together in shougi, spend some time/money and solve the inflation. (?)
Honestly Urushi please stop talking in riddles.
p.7
でもそれでなぞかけは・・・なんか違いますね。
なぞかけ - I don’t understand what this is suddenly about telling a riddle?
I’ve fallen a bit behind schedule yet to finish the second volume, but I gotta ask you a question.
With this manga in particular when I’m staring at some kanji, I get that feeling that they are so vaguely familiar yet I don’t recognize them exactly. And after I occasionally look one of them up on wanikani, lo and behold it’s one-two levels above where I’m at. The most annoying part, the level doesn’t matter, even after leveling up, there are always new such kanji with that feeling. Does anyone have that too? It’s driving me mad. Am I delusional?
I can totally relate!
In addition to wanikani I try to learn some words + kanji that are either not on WK or in later levels, so I always have to decide, if I want to add it to my list or not. For example if it’s a kanji/word from level 40+ I always add it, but if it’s from the 20’s range, I usually don’t add it.
I spot kanjis that are in the 20-30 level range a lot. But I think it might relate to the fact that WK teaches the “most common” kanji at the beginning (at least I think so?), so I suspect once you are past level 30 this might not occur as often.
But I still have a long way until I make it past 30, so I can’t say for sure either.
I couldn’t figure out the word-for-word meaning of the riddle, either. But based on the overall conversation, I think she’s essentially asking “How is shogi like inflation?” (Perhaps you worked out that much already, though.)
Page 7
On page three, Urushi sees Ayumu smiling with his friends. Maki shows up and teases Urushi a bit. The manga scene fades out on page four before reaching the end of their conversation, but page seven reveals that Maki suggested using a riddle to make Ayumu smile.
On page six, Urushi comments that Ayumu’s response to the riddle wasn’t what she was going for. Ayumu inquires, and she reveals that she was trying to get him to smile like when he was chatting with his friends earlier.
Page seven, Ayumu says about Urushi trying to make him smile with a riddle:
「でもそれで」 But, for that (referring to him smiling)…
「なぞかけは」 …telling a riddle is…
「・・・なんか違いますね」 …somehow different.
In other words, smiling from a riddle and smiling with one’s friends aren’t the same thing.
This happens to me all the time. It’s especially bad when I’m stuck on a level due to too many leeches. (I’ve been on my currently level for almost 60 days, and my overall leeches have slightly gone up in the past month.) I keep encountering kanji one to three levels away, and I know I won’t reach them in WaniKani for a few to several more months yet.
One thing you can do, if you’re not super-slow like me at learning and remembering kanji, is you can look up the kanji (and its radicals) on WaniKani after seeing an upcoming kanji when reading. You don’t need to commit it to memory. Just read all the meaning and mnemonic material WaniKani has. Then, when you reach those radicals and kanji by going through WaniKani lessons, you may recall it just enough that it’s easier for you to learn them.
Even with it occurring less often, you’ll be surprised how much it still happens. But you get a good mix between “Ah, this one’s coming up in a few levels” and “Wow, WaniKani doesn’t teach this one?”
Apparently the sentence I did not understand was indeed a riddle and not just for me. And I guess the answer to the riddle was the following panel about the gold.
Now I can also make the connection with the laugh conversation, I just thought the topic had changed and they were suddenly talking about something else.
Also I like the idea of looking up the mnemonics for kanji you find and are in higher levels. I think I’ll start doing that!
And if you’re not certain on the answer to the riddle:
In shogi, I think she’s saying when you have 将棋の寄せ合い, that is, the pieces are huddled together, you feel relieved if you have a Gold Knight piece which can move in almost any direction.
In inflation, as the value of money goes down, you feel relieved if you have gold because it’s retaining its value.
Good luck to whoever gets to do an official translation of this series.
One would think, but no, not really, unfortunately. It’s actually organized by kanji complexity. They teach the ones with lower amount of strokes, or the ones that that are easier to break down first, as opposed to ones that are most common. Thankfully, a lot of the most common kanji are simple, so it sorta balances out, but the focus on simplicity over commonality means that there are also a BUNCH of kanji that are in the later levels that you’ll have seen a lot before ever reaching them in WaniKani.
This. Even at level 54, I run into some I haven’t seen yet, and will soon. One thing that has become more common though, is I’ll learn a word on WaniKani, and then run into that word in one of the manga I am reading, in the next day or so. The most recent example, and perhaps somewhat surprising, would be 虐殺
I learned it yesterday morning, and then we saw it in Mitsuboshi Colors. I didn’t really expect to see that word in the wild so soon.
For an earlier example, I actually learned 将棋 right around when this manga started!
I struggled a little bit with the joke/riddle when I read the first part, but the second part is what at least made it make sense. I think this is a joke that would have fallen flat even without the uphill climb of having to be analyzed (the quickest way to kill a joke is always to explain it), to be honest… It was clever, at least, but not particularly funny.
Maki’s no fool. She knows to always end advice with, “I dunno, though,” because that obviously means that you forfeit all liability for the end results.
Well, much like the joke, that didn’t work out as planned. He didn’t even hesitate.
Ohhh, sad Urushi is sad. ;w; At least he cheers her up/embarrasses her very quickly.
Side-note, how would one read aloud the piece positions on the Shogi board, does anyone know? On the layout at the end of the chapters, I notice that the vertical side uses kanji for the numbers, and the horizontal side uses Arabic numerals, but I’m not sure how that would be read aloud. For example, in chess, you might say, “Queen to G4,” since we use a number-alphabet combo to break up the board in English, so I’ve just been mildly curious about that might be expressed in Japanese.
Let’s consider the board on page ten. It has the following as the first move:
☗７六歩
Since this is the side that goes first, the reading begins 「先手」. (For the second player, it’s 後手).
Next, you read off the destination: なな、ろく
After is the piece: 歩
All together, ☗７六歩 is 「先手７六歩」
Movement can be added after that, to help resolve ambiguity (if there are two possible pieces that could have made the move). You’ll see 打 for a piece dropped (placed onto the board), and 上 when a piece moved upward.
Promotion information may be added to the end as well.
I thought Urushi being sad was going to turn out to be an act to guilt him into laughing. In the end, I never knew one way or the other because Ayumu pulled his usual trump card and embarrassed her
I’ve been puzzling over this for a bit, and my guess about part of it is that 寄せ can mean “endgame/last moves” in Shogi, so I’m guessing you split the phrase and the 合い is the suffix form, maybe “condition/state”? The only way I can figure out to make the と grammatical at all is to think of it like the quoting version? Maybe that’s ok, marking each side of the riddle, who knows, but most other uses make no sense. Where I arrive is something like “[It] secures Shogi’s endgame and solves inflation.” Or substitute “secure” for your preferred かける.
I’m about 0% confident here, but if I didn’t drag myself through feeling like I made SOMETHING sensible at this it was gonna gnaw at me for too long. It’s possible that’s not quite how 合い actually works as a suffix, or any other issues, heh. I’ve also resisted learning much of anything about Shogi so that’s working against me also, haha.
I’m less than confident in my interpretation, also, but I read the と in both parts of the phrase as “When,” and had a similar take-away from the 寄せ合い as you did.
My breakdown:
将棋の寄せ合いと = When shogi’s endgame state (exists)
かけまして = to secure, and (because I think the て is conjunctive)
インフレと = When (there is) economic inflation
解きます = to solve
So, adjusting for prettier English a bit, “When shogi’s in the endgame state, (it) secures it, and when there’s economic inflation, it solves it.”
I don’t see anything in the sentence that would lend them to being a quotation particle, since there’s no real verb for them to be working with as a quotation particle (no 言う、思う、書く, etc), but I fully accept that I could be wrong.
Honestly, I think you’re probably right… there’s a LOT of unstated, dropped stuff happening that I think made と as “when” feel wrong to me, but that actually probably works out just fine. I was kind of cheating anyway and just thinking of it as closer to a subject marker rather than a real “quote” of any sort. In the end, yeah, other than the “when,” we worked it out similarly.
My brain has also become a little too trained to consider verbs that work with quotation particles as totally optional from reading prose stuff where it gets constantly dropped because there are actual brackets around words… I recognize that’s a whole other topic, but some habits accidentally spill over when switching mediums.
I was a little leery of labelling it as the conditional as well, since it wasn’t noun+だと, which would usually be the case, but だ getting dropped in casual Japanese happens so often, I just hoped it cross-applies here as well, and it seemed to fit the best out of the potential uses. When I saw that you labelled it as quotation, I immediately doubted myself all the more, though.
I have more of a general question, I’ve been struggling with the meaning of として for a while now but I think I got the meaning now with this page
I’m thinking here it is something like “assuming my role as…” like “even if I assume my role as her senpai like this, there is no gravity” or I guess in english something like " He doesn’t take me seriously even when I act as his senpai" or something like that.
To add some more context to this struggle, I had seen として before and added it as としても to my anki, in the last volume actually (which I now think may have not been wise as it ended up being a leech that I didn’t understand well)
However, here the としても is marking a verb instead of a noun, so I am guessing maybe the nominalizing の was just omitted?
Here I can see it being “the act of…” so with も it would be something like “Even if the act of getting the clubroom happens…”
However after all this rambling I’m still not sure I get the meaning completely, and could use some insight as to whether my thoughts are somewhat close to the meaning, it has me a bit stumped
For the first line, the core of the sentence is 「威厳ないのか…？」
Here, 威厳 is being modified by another noun, 「センパイとしての」. (Normally として modifies the verb, but when it’s turned into a noun with の, it modifies another noun.)
として represents one’s qualifications or position, and is similar to “as” in English. 「センパイとして」 would be “(position) as senpai” or “as (the one who is in the position of) senpai”.
Since this is modifiying 威厳 (dignity), you get “dignity as senpai”. Or, rather, it’s 威厳ない, so that would be “without dignity as senpai”.
If you added は (nounとしてはclause), you get the meaning of “As a (noun), it is (clause).” This is making a statement about the subject that may not apply to others. “As a mathematician, I can add numbers without using a calculator.”
Or you can instead add も to say that a comment applies to this topic (as well as applying to some other topic). “As someone who graduated from the sixth grade, I also can add numbers without a calculator.”
The main example above is for としての (modifying a noun), but when it’s として modifying the verb, it as a meaning like “I’m saying this as your friend” or “I’m reading this manga as a learner of Japanese.”
Your second image is broken, so I can’t comment on that one.
We are already at chapter 30! As a person who has not read many things in japanese yet, to me this feels rather amazing.
I didn’t take a closer look at the grammar yet, but overall this week’s chapters seemed fairly easy. I might come back with some questions though if no one is faster than me.
Chapter 29
I thought this chapter was really hilarious.
I laugh every time I see this face!!!
It’s also kinda ironic how Urushi wanted Ayumu to smile last chapter, but now that he is doing it on his own, she is creeped out. (Well… I think anyone would be … right?!)
Oh I loved that face too! I don’t think he gets enough practice smiling, a bit too much of the stoic type. That face is some combination of smug, condescending, maybe mildly pained… anything but happy haha.
)
