Well probably because it is a compound verb (or that is how I think of it, I’m not very good with grammar terminology so don’t quote me on the name!), where the only thing that would change with conjugation is 来る.
All movement verbs (or at least most, don’t quote me on all either) can be changed to て form and then add 行く or 来る to mean that the thing/person doing the movement is either doing the movement and coming closer to you (来る) or moving away from you (行く). The 来る and 行く parts are most often written with kana, but not always. In fact you can see in your picture that under “other forms” for 出て来る.
(Basically if someone is exiting a building and you are standing outside that building you’d use 出て来る (because they are coming outside towards you), but if they were exiting the building you are inside (aka moving away from you), you’d use 出て行く.)
This also means you probably won’t find all combos of Verbて来る / Verbて行く because it is a grammar structure really.
Some things I use that were already mentioned: Jisho, Buchanan’s verb chart (kinda tempted to print that one out and glue it next to the kana charts on my wall)
Something new: context.reverso.net
You give it Japanese or English and it finds matching real sentences. I used it to check whether I understand かどうか (whether) correctly. You can even let it search “both sides”, for instance かどうか with “know” in the English translation gives me
私はそれが本当である かどうか 分からない。
I don’t know if it is true.
Yeah, unfortunately the lack of kanji can trip up ichi.moe sometimes. Knowing this of course does not help if you have no idea what the kanji is. My IME can only get the kanji right if I type でて, convert that to kanji as 出て, then type こなければ and convert that to kanji as 来なければ.
Note: I believe this is typically written as 出てくる, not 出て来る. This is just showing a way to get the right answer out of ichi.moe.
The fun part is I think sometimes you don’t need to. But when it’s multiple verbs strung together with て, taking just the last one should always do the trick.
Be sure to take this as an opportunity to discover, absorb, and learn as much grammar as you can. The first few pages are always the hardest, but if you stick with the book to the end, you should be able to re-read the first few pages and find them much easier.
I’ll be starting reading in probably about a week, so I haven’t seen the initial discussion yet, but I imagine there’s a bunch of breakdowns, taking apart many of the sentences. And of course you can ask about any material and should be able to get a helpful response.
I did that last night too, once I figured out what the long string of kana was (the lack of kanji in the book can be frustrating) - have a look and see that it has it as くなければ.
My whingeing about this particular instance aside, it’s a great tool - thanks for letting us know about it.
I feel very old that nobody seems to have mentioned Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. It was state of the art back in 2004!
WWWJDIC allows for searches in English, Japanese, and romanised Japanese, and also features a “text glossing” helper (where it just breaks sentences apart and attempts to unconjugate verbs, etc). There are also a variety of other tools including a handy example search. Several tools allow for searching using regular expressions, which is good if you know how to use them.
The underlying dictionaries are extensive and contain not only ordinary language but also specialised technical terms and nanori (can sometimes make it a bit cluttered). Dictionary entries are cross referenced to the library of example sentences from the Tatoeba project (which has built on and expanded beyond the Tanaka corpus). The “[Links]” button after a dictionary entry also allows you to view a conjugation table, google search, image search, relevant JapanesePod101 lessons, ngram counts, further examples and so on.
It correctly identified かどうか, providing this:
かどうか (exp) whether or not (in phrases like “I don’t know whether or not I can come”); (P)
昨夜、彼があなたがお元気かどうかたずねてましたよ。 He asked after you last night.
May be useful for some, although the UI is a bit old and clunky!
Isn’t jisho based on WWJDIC? At least it seems to have the same info, and also functions like romaji search, searching for conjugated verbs, etc. You can also input complete sentences which jisho then breaks apart with varying success (it doesn’t parse かどうか as one part when looking up a whole sentence, but the entry for かどうか on its own is there). It also links to a sentence search featuring Tatoeba sentences.
@Radish8, would you mind linking the weekly discussions in the starting message of the thread? Maybe putting a link in the table with the calendar would be enough.
Like that it will be much easier to find the discussions
Hi! Yes, I’m fully intending to do that - I did promise to do so on Monday, sorry.
I realise I’ve been super absent this week, which was not really how I wanted things to go! My friend broke her foot and has been staying with us since Monday because her partner is away and she can’t get around, so it’s been substantially more hectic than I was anticipating
Gonna try and start this one tonight… and keep up! Bought a couple of the series on my recent trip to Japan. Only previous club I have tried is Shirokuma, but it was just taking too long to get through each page so I bailed!
I have since done chi’s sweet home in my own time - which was literally about 10x faster than Shirokuma to get through!
Hoping this one will be more Cat like than Panda like!
One more tool tip - if, like me, you’re reading this on an iPad, I’ve found that the dictionary app “imiwa?” plays nicely with the new floating window features in iPadOS and the BookWalker e-reader:
How/where did you buy the ebook? I bought physical books from cdjapan, but these handy annotation features are tempting me to buy the ebooks too! I don’t want to end up with a locked down copy that I can only use in proprietary apps, however
I bought it from BookWalker, which you can find in the App Store. It is a little fiddly to use in parts but the overall experience is good. It might be worth doing a howto / translation guide here if someone hasn’t done it already. Some quick points:
I think it made me create my login through the BookWalker website instead of the app. But the login is good as I can also read my books in the browser at work on my lunch break.
The app has an English interface, but not all of it is translated.
In particular, the store part of the app is in Japanese. Using the in-app store is convenient (you can use in-app purchasing), so I just pushed through, but you can also use an English store on the website version.
Edit: sorry, I blanked on your format question. I’m not sure the web version offers free standing downloads in portable formats, but you could probably make your own.
I managed to find this at Junkudo in Ikebukuro on @marcusp’s suggestion. I was kinda surprised that it’s only available in hardcover - I was kinda looking for a paperback in similar style to the なぜ？どうして？ books. Also grabbed volume 1, because it was there (though I passed on the わんわん book), and spotted Zenitendou in the adjacent bay, so I grabbed that too. Gonna have to play catch-up when I get the chance.
I’ve just had a look at the reading schedule and realised that I’ll only be joining for the first two stories as all my attention after January 1st will be going towards the Gundam manga I’ll be reading. Sorry about that!
But so glad you found the book @Belthazar! Both of them even! Even more books for you to carry back! Great!
Sorry to hear that D: but glad to have you with us even just for the first two, and the threads will always be waiting for you if you want to read it later on
I’m just gonna answer my own question about first impressions
I’ve actually finished the second week’s reading too, but I have to say I’m kind of impressed by the mystery itself. I thought from the target demographic that the mysteries might be fairly obvious or cliche, and perhaps we’ll get more clues in the next couple of weeks that will make it easier to guess the solution, but thus far I’m intrigued by the case!
… though I have my theories
As for the reading, my first impression was damn, this really does just jump right in. There is zero context given to the reader. I guess it’s assumed you’ve read the character page, which obviously does help.
The writing seems pretty pleasant and straightforward to me, with a nice smattering of useful grammar points to learn. As always though it suffers from the afflication of most children’s books and has hardly any kanji, where more would probably help a foreign learner. It’s not all long strings of hiragana though.
