ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん 🌳 Week 1 (The Wolf of the Small Forest Book Club)

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Page 7

する and くる are often referred to as “irregular” verbs because their readings change so much in different uses.

For example, 来(く)る becomes 来(き)た for a completed action (past tense), and it becomes 来(こ)ない for the negative.

Don’t worry about memorizing all of that (unless you want to). As you continue reading and encountering them, you will naturally become familiar with all the readings for this verb. It’s a very common verb!

Think of it as slightly extending the vowel sound. You’ll see it come up a lot, in various different series.

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Thank you. Just one more thing on the small あ. I get that it extends the sound, but is it formally part of the sentence こないな? Or is it an informal vowel extension meant to give it more of a wondering/questioning feeling? I’d like to know because if it’s the latter then I’ll avoid unnecessarily looking up words when I see it used like that in other contexts.

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This. You’ll meet a lot of situations, where when writing down informal speech, they use tricks like this. Tricks such as using the katakana ー character with hiragana sounds (Nagatoro enjoys doing this a lot), or when extending a sounds, you could use the 〜 mark, or the small katakana equivalent (rarer, but happens, especially with エ). Some words might even be replaced with their katakana writings, even if it doesn’t involve emphasis or foreign words or anything of the sort.

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Page 8

みあっていうの
I understand the translation thanks to the other discussions here.
However, I don’t quite understand how you can have a double-consonant sound at the beginning of a word? It works here because Mia’s name ends in a vowel sound so you can hit the double-consonant coming from the あ. But what if your name is something like レオン? I’m not sure how you could say レオンっていうの.
If I had to guess, when speaking you would just hear "レオンていうの because the ン prevents you from enunciating the って?

Sorry if this is a little beyond the scope of what the book club is for but I’m curious about all the differences I’m finding between spoken and written Japanese now that I’m reading it like this for the first time.

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p8

You are somewhat misunderstanding how っ works. Only special consonants can be actually extended like what you are saying, stuff like z, r, s, the rest relies on a vowel to be pronounceable (try saying t without at least a placeholder vowel attached). Instead it functions more like a glottal stop. You stop the movement of air for a split second then continue on. A common example in English is oh-oh. You first say oh stop for a second, then you say oh again. In Japanese, you can very well write this is おっおっ, the small tsu is understood to work like that even without a consonant following it. You can often see this with stuff like あっ

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Rather than a double consonant sound, think of it as a very brief pause before the consonant sound.

For your example, 「レオンって」 would be pronounced「レオン (very brief pause)て」.

(Same with a word/name ending in a vowel sound.)

It’s not a perfect explanation of what’s happening, but conceptually should be a little easier to imagine.

It’s absolutely within the scope of the book club’s purpose =D

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I’d rather say that the scope of the book clubs are basically nonexistent. We turned Ruri into a cat pic sharing thread at some point

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Thank you!

It really hurt my head for a while and I had to double check what the Genki books really say and do… and you are right, there is no “は” particle to be seen. They really just do “tonight movie (-o) watch?”
今晩映画をみませんか。I had simply not proof read my exercise correctly, hence my confusion after @ChristopherFritz 's wonderful illustration of は/が.

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Those cat pics were extremely on-topic for Ruri. The manga is pure cuteness-induced dopamine, after all, and so are cat pics.

Speaking of…

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So we should bombard this thread with even more cat pics? I like your thinking

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I am finally able to get around to this. I’m just gonna post my translations for the week down here and would appreciate any corrections. The page numbers I use here are what is shown in Bookwalker’s digital version of the volume so it might differ from what is listed at the top of the thread. I don’t have anything to say either about the story yet, we’ll see where it goes.

Pages 3-4

オオカミ：「町のはずれにあるちいさな森」
Wolf: [There is a small forest on the outskirts of the town.]

オオカミ：「昔から人々のあいだでは」
Wolf: [Since long ago, people…]

オオカミ：「オオカミの住む森として恐れられ」
Wolf: […have been afraid of the forest inhabited by wolves.]

オオカミ：「森の奥には入らないようにと言い伝えられてきました」
Wolf: [It had been passed down that people shouldn’t go deep into the forest.]

オオカミ：「はじめまして」
Wolf: [Nice to meet you.]

オオカミ：「この森に住むオオカミです」
Wolf: [I’m the wolf that lives in this forest.]

Pages 7-8

オオカミ：「幼い頃。両親とはなればなれになって。」
Wolf: [When I was very young, me and my parents were seperated.]

オオカミ：「今はひとりだけど…」
Wolf: [Now, I’m all alone. However…

オオカミ：「森にはたくさんのお友達がいるから大丈夫。」
Wolf: […I have many friends in the forest, so I’m okay.]

オオカミ：「毎日楽しく暮らしています。」
Wolf: [We have fun every single day.]

オオカミ：「そんな私にもお仕事があって。」
Wolf: [I also have work like that.]

オオカミ：「それは森のパトロール。」
Wolf: [That’s forest patrol.]

オオカミ：「森に迷い込む人間さんを見つけたら。」
Wolf: [When I find the human lost in the forest…]

オオカミ：「驚かせて追い出すの。」
Wolf: […I surprise them and drive them out.]

オオカミ：「そう私はみんなが恐れる。」
Wolf: [Everyone is afraid of me.]

オオカミ：「強くて怖いオオカミなのです。」
Wolf: [I am a strong and scary wolf.]

Pages 9-10

オオカミ：「あっ早速人影が…」
Wolf: [Ah, a human immediately…]

オオカミ：先回りして待ち伏せしよう。
Wolf: Let’s go on ahead and ambush them.

オオカミ：よし完璧…
Wolf: Right, perfect…

オオカミ：あとは来るのを待つのみ…
Wolf: After I wait for them to come…

オオカミ：なかなか来ないなぁ。
Wolf: They won’t come very easily.

ミア：何してるの？
Mia: What are you doing?

おオオカミ：しっ静かに！
Wolf: Shh! Quietly!

オオカミ：今待ち伏せしてるの！
Wolf: We’re ambushing now!

ミア：楽しそうね！みあもやるわ！
Mia: This seems fun! I’ll do it as well!

オオカミ：いいいいつのまに！！
Wolf: When did you…!!

ミア：だって耳としっぽ丸見えだもん。
Mia: I mean, you’re ears and tail were completely visible.

ミア：気になったから追いかけてきただけ。
Mia: I was concerned, so I just came and ran after it.

ミア：あたしみあっていうの。
Mia: I’m called Mia.

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p7-8

そんな私 is the topic here, meaning “someone like me”, put together it’s “even someone like me has a job”

p9-10

No implication of a definite article here, she’s saying that if she finds any human, she’ll scare them away

Here this has a sort of meaning along the lines of “suddenly a person appeared…”

This is closer in meaning to “they are really taking their time”, Ookami-chan is frustrated that she’s been waiting and the girl is nowhere.

気になる in this case is more likely to be just “curious”

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@ChristopherFritz just a heads up, the “Next Week” link is linking back to the same thread (Week 1) rather than to Week 2.

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Thanks for that! It’s fixed now.

I need to get back to work on my WaniKani book club manager I wrote to avoid these issues. Just need to clean up the interface a bit so it’s easier to use when creating templates…

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It’s always worth looking at the alternate meanings of something if the one you default to right off the bat doesn’t feel quite right. Here I can see from jisho that 間あいだ means ‘among (a group of people)’ (meaning 4), so that would have been a help there!

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Just wanted to make a post here so I can be “part of the book club” This is my first book club and my first time trying to read “real” native content. Also my first time buying a Manga. It should arrive in the next couple of days.

I had a look at the eBook preview and tried to do the first 8 pages. I already know this is well beyond me, but I’ll try my best. I look forward to trying to read with you all.

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First few pages are the hardest in most manga. Exposition and stuff. After that they get significantly easier, so 頑張れ

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Be sure to read through the discussion threads each week, and absorb what you can there. You don’t need to understand everything all at once, but every bit and piece you take in gets you closer to finding even just once sentence where you think, “I might actually understand this one!”

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Starting this now. I’ve flicked through the first 50 or so pages to screenshot and crop them to take them out of bookwalker’s app as it doesn’t work so well on my tablet (and unlike ルリドラゴン, I didn’t manage to find someone’s already done the work :frowning: ). I thought I used to have an app to strip the DRM as I thought that’s where my epubs of the english Bookworm light novels came from, but then bookwalker tells me I hadn’t even downloaded my copies of the parts of volume 4 from them, so apparently not.

But anyway, that flick through seems to indicate that it’s generally less text per page than ルリドラゴン and this book club is doing fewer pages per week, so I’m going to try share my translations (both from my first pass and a cleanup pass after going through translating unsure/unknown words) as I go :slight_smile:

So here goes.

p1

Narrator: 町のはずれにあるちいさな森。
Narrator: There is a town where there exists a small forest.

ずれに is a bit unclear, that’s on my second pass list. Assuming it’s something like “near”

Second pass: Yep, it’s edge per the vocab list, so I was close enough from context

Narrator: 昔から人々のあいだでは
Narrator: おおかみの住む森として恐れられ

Narrator: Long ago, before the time with people…
Narrator: Wolves could live in peace with the forest.

So this is one I’m mostly relying on genre-savviness and the words I recognise to guess. So let’s see:

おおかみ(wolves)の住む(live)森(forest)と(with)して(do)恐れられ(can something) is the raw part of what I understand. The のすむ is the first thing that throws me a bit, as I thought noun の noun was valid but noun の verb wasn’t. I guess a couple of ways it could be parsed is “The wolves’ living” (aka their life), or “the wolves’ (living forest, aka the forest in which they live)”. The last part that throws me is 恐れられ, which the furigana gives as おそれられ. I’m really making genre based assumptions that the おそ here is some form of peace, since it seems unlikely it would be late which is the one meaning I do know for that sound.

Second pass: おそれられ is apparently afraid, so I guess it’s more a the wolves could live in the forest as the people were afraid of it.

Narrator: 森の奥には入らないように言う伝えられていました。
Narrator: To the forest’s 奥 (???), not entering is like, became transmitted

Harder here to get the full sentence, but I guess it’s something like “The forest’s reputation became one of do not enter”.

Second pass: 奥 is apparently interior, so it’s basically a “Don’t go deep into the forest” rather than don’t go full stop.

p2

Narrator: はじめまして
Narrator: このもりにすむおおかみです。

Narrator: To start, wolf living in this forest.

I think this would be a bit clearer with the topic, but maybe it will get implied. Not sure if the wolf is supposed to be just a character, of if ther narrator is the “wolf”

p3 is just a cover
p4 is a table of contents

p5

Narrator: 幼い頃。
Narrator: 両親と はなればなれになって

Narrator: ??? (幼い) cry
Narrator: with both people, if they don’t become

Nope, just lost on this panel really. I guess this is supposed to be a jolty flashback of some sort from the distant people and broken glass visual effect

second pass: So the first bit that seemed like crying is actually “when one was a small child”, so I guess okami-chan’s parents seperated. Or maybe they both left, given she’s living in the forest like this.

Narrator: 今は一人だけど
Narrator: Now alone, but…

Narrator: 森にはたくさんのお友達がいるから大丈夫。
Narrator: In the forest, there are many friends so it’s ok

Narrator: 毎日楽しく暮らしています
Narrator: Every day, doing “暮ら” in a fun way.

p6

Narrator: そんあわたしもお仕事があって
Okami-chan?: 鳥さん
Okami-chan?: いこっか！
Narrator: それは森のパトロール

Narrator: Like that, I too have work
Okami-chan?: Mr. Bird
Okami-chan?: You said!?
Narrator: That is, the forest patrol

So I think the wolf girl is the titular おおかみちゃん, and I think she’s meant to be the narrator. But I think I’ll still list them seperately until that’s more confirmed

Narrator: 森に迷い込む人間さんをみつけたら。
Narrator: 驚かせておいだすの

Narrator: In the forest, when a ??? (迷い) ??? (込む) human is seen
Narrator: ??? (驚かせ) them and remove them

Going to guess it’s something like when a human is found intruding, find them and remove them (probably more in the escort them out sense than the mafioso sense)

Second pass: Ok, so it’s "When a human wanders in, driving them out [is okami-chan’s job]@

Narrator: そう私は皆が恐れる。
Narrator: 強くて怖いおおかみなので

Narrator: So, for me, everyone is ???ing (恐れる)
Narrator: Strong and scary wolf (implied “I am”?)

Second pass: 恐れる is apparently a form of being scary, but that makes the sentence make less sense, not more :frowning:

p7

Narrator: あつ早速人影が
Narrator: At once, a person

Okami-chan?: 先回りして待ち伏せしょよう。
Okami-chan?: Let’s arrive ahead (待ち伏せしょよう)

Second part loses me, I think that’s the same kanji as “wait”? Or maybe hold. But I’m not sure what the form of it is.

Second pass: Ah, so it’s let’s go ahead and ambush, since 待ち伏せ is ambush

Okami-chan: よしかんべき。
Okami-chan: あとは来るのを待のみ

Okami-chan: Alright, ??? (かんべき - my IME couldn’t even find the kanij shown for that reading)
Okami-chan: Wait for that coming

Second one is one I’m pretty sure on the meaning from the key words of waiting and coming, but not quite on how grammatically it gets there.

Second pass: Ahh, it’s かんぺき, so just misread the accent on the へ. So sort of a “perfect, let’s wait here”

Okami-chan: なかなか来ないなぁ。
Voice from behind: なにしてる

Okami-chan: Lit: Very not coming, right? Guess it’s more of a “she’s definitely not coming here, right?”
Voice from behind: What are you doing?

Okami-chan: しつ静かに
Okami-chan: 今待ち伏せしてるの

Okami-chan: Shush, quietly
Okami-chan: Now waiting

p8

Girl: たのしそうね！みあもあるわ！
Girl: Seems fun, I’m doing it too

Okami-chan: いいいいつのまに。
Okami-chan: Mostly an expression of surprise, I’m guessing?

Girl: だって耳としぱ丸見えたもん
Girl: 気になったから、追いかけどきただけ。

Girl: That said, something around see thing?
Girl: Something something following energy only?

Nope, lost on this box on the first pass.

Second pass: Seems to be a “you were totally visible and interesting so I decided to follow”

Girl: あたしみあっていうの
Girl: あなたは

Girl: I’m Mia, to say? (I guess this is supposed to be a sort of “by the way I’m Mia” type intro?)
Girl: You are?

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If you’re on a desktop computer/laptop, this does the same. You still need to crop them if you want them cropped, though!