Thanks for the advice! I’ve nearly finished Genki 1 by this point – read through lesson 11 today. So I am definitely familiar with those particles and those usages. Though, to be fair, I probably got a bit caught up in the cognitive overload of dealing with the other parts and I feel like my brain might have gone “yep that’s the particle” for the purposes of parsing word separation, and not focused in enough on what each one was conveying because the words themselves were throwing me off. Something to keep in mind and hone in on more, and I’ll do that when I give it a second look.
I’m in the same boat as you, as I just started. I don’t have much grammar knowledge yet. The basic particles @ChristopherFritz mentioned are known to me but it is a different thing to see them in actual dialogue instead of the example ones.
I also struggled with the exact same phrase but got the gist of it and decided to just try and get the general meaning for now instead of every nuance.
So far the vocabulary list has helped a ton.
https://shogishack.net/pages/internet-resources/how-to-read-kifu.html
I found an article that explains the game card at the end of the chapter
For sure, seeing this stuff in the wild is trickier, but hopefully more helpful too, over time!
I thought I’d save this for tomorrow but my head will get fixated on figuring stuff like this out, so I gave it a second go already. Much better now! I’m definitely leaning on the vocab list heavily – some of those are simple words that I know, but there’s a lot I haven’t come across. And some is still hard to recognize without leaning on the list when it’s taking forms I don’t know. Caught a few things that I haven’t learned that were tripping me up – causitive forms like something ending たせる, conditional たら, also し as a sentence ender was just something I was totally unfamiliar with. It’s just, when you don’t know what you don’t know, sometimes it’s hard to parse what it even is… you know? Not pushing myself to learn them at this moment, just nice to notice what some of the stuff I don’t know seems to be. I think on my first read through I was a little too eager to pick the grammar apart, figure out how sentences ticked, but a lot of it is a little above what I’ve learned. Going along for general meaning (and yeah, with heavy use of the word list, you all are saving me <3) and more frequently shrugging when a bunch of unfamiliar endings and other bits showed up worked a lot better, and I think I more or less followed almost all of it. Think I also just mentally wore myself out earlier and was declining until I rested a bit. It’s been a long day!
On the positive side, I caught a たい ending or two, and that was in the Genki lesson I just read earlier, so it’s nice to be already noticing that and hopefully I’ll remember it better as a result.
Cute story. The blunt “…せんぱい” reaction was pretty amusing now when my brain wasn’t yelling at me.
Oh, I missed that this started last night (for me), but have just got through reading the first chapter. Was nice in that now I got a lot of the vocab without having to look it up (through a mix of WK stuff and bits I’ve picked up from reading in general), and I think that anything I would’ve asked about has already been answered
To the newer people - don’t worry if it takes you a while to get through the chapters, and don’t be afraid to ask anything no matter how simple it might seem. You will end up picking up a bunch of grammar knowledge in the course of reading and asking about it/looking up unknown bits (which is hard at first, but does get easier as you get more of a sense of what is grammar and what isn’t)
Page 5
Maybe whats confusing you is the 私, as that is not the subject of the sentence.
I think this does make sense with 私 as the subject though? Someone can correct me if this is wrong
The 入ってる is a continuous and it’s what is saying she was enrolled in the shogi club - since it’s continuous I think it makes more sense to see it as applying to her
What she’d be saying here is “I was the only one enrolled in the shogi club!” which is implying the reason he joined rather than explicitly stating it (the implication being he joined because he liked her). There isn’t really a need for Ayumu to be included in this statement
pg 5
hmm… but then, how do you explain the しかいない? Since it is directly attached to the 私, I am pretty sure it is a part of 私しかいない将棋部.
So if the 入る was referring to her… what exactly is she saying?
“because I enrolled in the shogi club with only me in it!” ?
If Ayumu is the subject, I still think 入ってる being continuous makes sense, since he has already joined the club.
Not sure on this, but wouldn’t "私しかいない将棋部だった!” be more fitting for that translation?
As in “It was a shougi club with only me in it!”
Maybe someone can confirm/correct me? 
Page 5
Well しか can be seen as an “only” kind of thing, so you can say that 私しかいない is saying “only me” or “none other than me”, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be modifying 将棋部 because it seems like pretty much all the subject and (indirect) object markers are dropped here
私しかいない = only me
将棋部 = shogi club
入ってる = being enrolled in
Here the “only me” is who’s enrolled, and “shogi club” is where they’re enrolled/what they’re enrolled in
Also perhaps a better translation would be “I’m the only other one in the shogi club!”
私しかいない将棋部だった to me would read as “it is the shogi club with only me in it”
This was adorable! First time trying this out and I’m surprised about how much of this I got out of the gate,
After going through the vocab list on second read through I was able to get a decent understanding and at the end was like “awwww!”
more pg 5
Hrmm… now I am not so sure anymore 
I still think the いない is modifying a noun, in this case 将棋部.
私しか (noun + particle) いない (Verb in plain-form) 将棋部 (modified noun)
I think for it to be “only I entered” It would have to be 私だけ入ってる将棋部” or something similar… but eh, at this point I am only guessing 
I think my biggest problem is that we have two verbs, that don’t both appear in you translation.
Like, this would have to mean “only I am” rather than “only me” right?
Anyway, I will just hope that someone smarter than me can figure this out ^^
As a side note, how would you interpret the next Speechbubble by Urushi? Since I took both Speechbubbles to have Ayumu as an omitted subject. Do you think that that is referring to Urushi as well?
Her dialogue before that has Ayumu as a subject too, so having Ayumu be the subject later felt natural to me.
Page 5
Not to say that it’s the be-all end-all here, but DeepL would seem to interpret the line as “Because I’m the only one who’s in the chess club.” though granted, it wouldn’t know the unstated subject so it should definitely be taken with a pinch of salt
Her next speech bubble definitely has Ayumu as the subject, though I just saw that as stemming from his response being “I wanted to play shogi” (again this is an unstated subject, but it makes sense as a response to her implication that he joined because she was in the club) - it’s a snappy response to the statement in which he makes himself the subject
The exchange as I see it (spilling over into a little of page 6):
Urushi: You like me, don’t you?
Ayumu: What are you saying?
Urushi: After all, I’m the only other one in the shogi club!
Ayumu: I wanted to play shogi.
Urushi: You knew nothing about shogi!
Ayumu: But I wanted to play it.
Urushi: You said I was cute!
Ayumu: You are cute.
Urushi is evidencing her statement that Ayumu likes her (by implying he joined because she was in the club - it couldn’t have been for anyone else, since she’s the only one there) - she also lists him calling her cute to evidence it (using し to mark evidencing) with multiple reasons
Both possibilities give the same broad meaning though, so I guess it’s down to others to try and help determine what’s the closer interpretation here
Jep! Sounds like a good plan.
Our seperate versions:
Urushi: After all, You joined the shogi club only I was in!
I also love how there is so much to discuss, while the meaning in either version is pretty much identical
Thus is the pain of close reading I suppose haha - at least in our native languages it’s less of an important skill since we kind of just inherently understand these kinds of things, but you can say a lot about why exact words are used and what their precise meaning or impact is while not really changing the overall meaning of something
Page 5
So I’m pretty confident that 私 is not the subject of 入ってる, and my main reason is that it’s already the subject of いない and can’t really be the subject of both. 私しかいない is a clause modifying 将棋部 rather than a clause acting like a noun. It can’t be acting like a noun without a modifier like こと at the end since いない is a verb. (There are fancier words for some of the stuff I’m saying, like the word for something that makes a verb a noun, but I’m typing this from my phone in bed and too lazy to look them up)
By and large I’m following what’s happening - it was cute, and I’ve definitely read enough manga now to get the gist. If I was reading on my own, I would definitely be finishing this chapter and thinking ‘yeah, I get the idea, keep going’. Since I have all of you lovely folks to bounce ideas off of…
Quick question on p9 - I come across しまった/しまう endings fairly often and recognize them/get a general sense of their meaning but am still often a bit unsure whether the meaning is ‘did accidentally’ or ‘finished completely’…sometimes neither seems right for the context and I’m just left feeling a bit confused. In this case:
恥ずかしい思いをさせてしまった - the しまった indicates that he accidentally embarrassed her (and feels a bit bad about it), yes?
Page 9
One way I think about しまう at the moment is the phrase “end up”
So here it would be along the lines of “I ended up making her experience embarrassment”. Though I feel like it’s just something you kind of have to get a feel for through repeated exposure. There definitely seems to be a sense of Ayumu feeling a little bad for doing so
That’s really helpful! I’ve definitely been finding that I’m getting more of a feel for what it means in different cases, but I still sometimes don’t trust that feeling, you know?
cure dolly has a pretty intuitive explanation for it, atleast if you kinda get what “done did it” means, just skip the first 2 min where she rants about textbooks again and turn on captions if the voice is annoying.
Interesting - we don’t usually use ‘done did it’ in my area of Canada as a common expression, but I’m generally familiar with the meaning - not strongly intuitive for me, but definitely adds another way to look at it. Thanks!
As I read through the thread, this was what I planned to respond with. I’m glad to see it came up!
I think it’s worth mentioning again, because it’s something important to keep in mind.
Particles attach to nouns.
There are situations where a particle gets dropped (unspoken), and it can make figuring out a sentence a nightmare for us learners. But often a particle gets dropped because it can be dropped without introducing ambiguity.
In this case, the uncertainty was, “Is the first word missing a particle, or is it modifying the second word?” If the first word is a noun, it cannot be modifying. If the first word is not a noun, then it must be modifying (because it cannot take a particle).
Note that there may be exceptions that I’m not thinking of offhand, but this should be a good rule of thumb to begin with.
Did you know it’s possible to argue that this is or is not a verb?
The opposing argument is that it is an adjective. In this case, the adjective represents the state of not doing the action of the verb. Rather than saying someone is doing the action, you are stating they have the attribute of (being) not doing the action.
Viewed this way makes is easier to remember that changing a word like いない into past tense (or as well as other forms) works exactly the same as it does for adjectives.
The first thing that started to help me on these two meanings is to consider that when something was “done accidentally”, generally it’s been completed. For example, if you forgot to bring your umbrella when it’s expected to rain, you’re not constantly in the state of forgetting it. You’ve done[1] forgotten it. The forgetting has finished completely.
[1] You can see CureDolly’s influence on me here.
So, the question isn’t whether it’s “did accidentally” or “finished completely”. The question is, “Did they intend to do it or not?”
This can still be ambiguous, pending understanding the full context. Either way, the action has been done completely. Here, the only question you need to ask is, “Did he intend to do the action?”