にゃんにゃん - Kitty Detectives - Vol. 1

I think it’s just this. “And”.

I mean, a smooth English translation would probably be “I was surprised to hear”, but the て-form is just being “and”.

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Good point, I guess I am just overthinking this.

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Yeah turns out I was just missing something obvious, I didn’t recognise it as a conjunction because in my admittedly incredibly limited studies, I’ve only seen it used to chain verbs together, or adjectives together, not both verbs and adjectives at the same time so for some reason I didn’t see it. Its obvious now thank you very much.

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So I came upon the sentence section「三日まえのよなかに」, which translates to three days ago in the middle of the night, or literally, the midnight of three days ago. Say it’s Friday, does that refer to the night between Monday and Tuesday or the night between Tuesday and Wednesday? More generally, does 夜中 occur at the end or the start of a day in Japanese?

Also, for the the sentence 「ある家のまえに」, ある家 refers to “some house” with a singular some, right? I kind of derived that from this stackexchange answer, but I’m not sure.

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Yes that’s right, it means “in front of some house” or “in front of a certain house”.

Japanese stories often start with a sentence containing ある meaning “a certain…” e.g. on a certain day, in a certain time, in a certain place…

昔々, ある所に…
Long ago, in a certain place…

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The police officers, reporters and homeowners to Hanae and Kuroboshi when they arrive at the house where the eels were placed

Hi there,
Thank you everyone for your posts. I’ve just finished the book, and I have to say that I felt having a long journey with all of you guys, even if I’m a little bit late :slight_smile: A special thanks to @_Marcus for all the sentence splittings and translations, really priceless for understanding what’s going on (but I don’t thank you for having changed your pseudo in the middle of my reading, it twisted my mind as much as a tough kanji ahah), thank you @guillepolito too, and of course thank you @aiju for your grammar knowledge.

I’m glad to attest that this kind of thread can be usefull through time, and can help all beginners to improve their japanese.

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Welcome to the community Jules. You’ve probably spotted from the opening post that the club has read three other books from this series since, and there is a fifth book which we will read at some point in the future. You’d be very welcome to join us.

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Thank you Micki! Yes I saw that, I would be glad to join!

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Somebody may have already posted about this, but I thought that the catalogue of Kindle books was the same around the globe, but it isn’t.

However you can buy the Japanese edition through amazon fr here.

Regarding post & packaging ordering from amazon jp, it can be expensive. When I bought 2 books recently, this was my invoice (always check first before you press the last button to order):

Items Ordered Price
1 of: あしょんでよッ ~うちの犬ログ~ (8) (ジーンピクシブシリーズ) , らくだ ¥ 580
1 of: あしょんでよッ ~うちの犬ログ~ (7) (ジーンピクシブシリーズ) , らくだ ¥ 580
Item(s) Subtotal: EUR 9,00
Shipping & Handling: EUR 12,88
Total: EUR 21,88
Grand Total: EUR 21,88

Hi there, just ordered three books yesterday (Two Meow! and one Bark! detectives. Do not blame me, puffy-fluffy nyans are my Achilles heel!). As it is my first time buying Japanese literature I am kinda hyped up.

I do not fathom how hard will it be for me to read these books, as I have practically zero grammar knowledge (started Genki I not too long ago). However, I do not fret in front of challenges! Maybe, only a little.

My kanji base is somewhat higher than my level on wanikani, as I made Genki I flashcards and speedruned(memorized on + kun pair) through more than half of them, plus covered all required kanji for N5 while I was at it.

Speaking about my vocab, as poor as it is, watching anime with subtitles since my childhood helped a lot. Though, poor is still poor.

All in all, よろしく おねがいします! Glad to be here.

*Funny fact, one new, unused book from the amazon jp with delivery was cheaper than the one without it from Germany for me.

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Neither did I when I started with Kitty Detectives 2 in Sep 2019 and now I am reading in the Intermediate and Advanced clubs :slight_smile: You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll learn once you get past that initial hurdle and just keep reading!

Please feel free to ask questions in the older threads. A lot of people still have them set to ‘watching’, so we’ll be notified of your questions and do our best to answer them :+1:

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Hi there, it is me again! To my surprise I got my books week earlier than it was stated. Terrific! Books look even better than I imagined :relaxed: So, today I started reading にゃんにゃん探偵団 straight away (I suppose I won’t lose anything by reading わんわん later on).

Gladly, I read through て-form explanation, so I at least can recognize the words on the first two pages (some of them I even know). I found I can get the general gist of the written sentences. The particles, though… let’s think I partly ignore them while reading.

For instance, このほんには3つの事件がはいっています I translated as “This book contains three cases/incidents” without trying to understand the には particle, however… if I had to guess, the に particle is there because of the はいっています (gives the “movement” vibes to the sentence) and は just stresses on the topic この本. It will be excellent if someone can clear this moment to me.

I suppose I will just try to improve the grammar on the go with genki and writing exercises. For now, this is all I can ask as I didn’t even start to read the first case. Thanks for attention.

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には can be roughly translated “as for in”, or just “in” if the literal translation feels clumsy to you. Basically に indicates place (or target to be more exact), and は marks the topic of what the sentence is about. You’ll see this には combination often enough.

If you’re a beginner in grammar, one tip I could give you is, focus on particles before anything else. Verb forms and such you can learn along the way and you can always look up. Particles though are what helps you make sense of the structure of the sentence. Getting the particles wrong may give you the wrong meaning entirely, and longer sentences would be a nightmare to decipher without a good understanding of particles.

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Thanks for the answer! Yeah, I am beginner at grammar. Maybe, I am messing with particles :sweat_smile: Till now I tried to memorize their usages without mapping them to English or my native language. Like, memorizing that は is topic marker and に may signify the movement towards something. Just, particles can have multiple meanings… and combine…

As you recommended, I will now focus on particles. Also, will try to break up every grammar point I meet in each of my reading sessions.

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Not translating is a good idea if you can handle it. I need to point out however that に doesn’t only indicate movement, it’s much more versatile than that, which is why I said target. Here’s a Cure Dolly video that explains particles quite clearly, although of course there are many other resources you can use. Good luck with your reading!

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Yes, that’s what I understand as well. I can’t remember where I learnt it, but I heard that adding っこ makes the noun more childish.

I realize this reply is much later, but I didn’t see anyone bring this up. Essentially, this part of the sentence is saying that the book has the characteristics being a copy of the ABC Murders

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I’m sorry if this has been asked already, I tried a few searches but nothing came up. Would anyone know whether or not I could just start learning grammar by reading this book and looking up the grammar in my grammar dictionary or something? It seems near impossible to form a group to go through Genki together, and going through it alone is not very enjoyable imo. Has anyone tried jumping into this book without going through a textbook prior, and would you recommend it?

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I highly recommend at least reading through Genki 1 from start to finish before tackling this book.

If you haven’t already, you can follow along with ToKini Andy’s Genki video series. This might help counter some of the “alone”, even if it’s one-way communication.

Note that you don’t need to learn and understand everything. Just expose yourself to it, so you are aware of its existence.

It’ll be difficult to learn as you go, but you can use the discussion threads here and ask questions along the way.

As a supplemental, you can watch one episode each day from Cure Dolly’s subtitled Japanese From Scratch video series. (Videos are about 10 to 15 minutes each.)

After a month of one video per day, you’ll have decent background for understanding Japanese grammar, at least superficially. Then you can build up your understanding by re-learning the grammar as you encounter it while reading.


That said, the worst that can happen by diving into reading is it takes you a long time to get through each page as you need to look up everything and learn it along the way. This method works for some people (it’s the only method that worked for me!)

And once you get to understand the basics, you can always return to more traditional grammar study resources to see if they start to work better.

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I found it excruciatingly boring to do the exercises from the workbook, but for some reason it was a lot more bearable doing them here: Genki Exercises - 2nd Edition | Genki Study Resources. I just gritted my teeth and ploughed through. It’s all worth it when you start reading :grin:

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