にゃんにゃん - Kitty Detectives - Vol. 1

Looks like you’ve already got well over 200 readers for your next book (なぜ?どうして?)–that’s AMAZING! Good luck!

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Thank you!

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This is listed as “uh” in Jisho and considering it’s surrounded by commas that seems the most likely meaning to me.
I think “well” sounds a bit better in English:
“I set my heart on it and, well, went.”

It’s indeed the explanatory の as @trout mentioned.
One way to think about it is to translate の as “that” (の is here ん; it’s a common alternative pronunciation for the explanatory の, especially before です)
Before the explanatory の, the copula だ changes into な (it’s a bit like how “a” in English becomes “an” before a vowel).
しりたかった だけ だ “I only want to know the truth”

しりたかった だけ なんです “It’s that I only want to know the truth”

It’s not particularly relevant here but I explained ら in general here:

I suspect this sentence is intentionally a bit unnatural.
In English you could do something like this:
“Yesterday I thought about turning myself in (to the police) and I was quite nervous, but when my wife used her quick wits and pretended to be sick…, well, thank you for letting us deceive you.”
I think he doesn’t want to explicitly state the consequences of her fakery, so he skips straight to the “thank you” part.

I think “skillfully” is more likely to be correct. I don’t see 妻 used as a name ender anywhere and I think a family name would be written in kanji.
But I also find the position of the adverb to be a bit odd, so I don’t really know.

The first の here is not “of” but more like a copula (“(which) is”), like in むすめのリリ (“Lily, who is my daughter”).
Here “with” or “which has” works well in English: “the cat with a sulky face” / “the cat which has a sulky face”

It’s short for ~なければ いけない
literally “If I don’t …, that would not go”
here “would not go” is similar to English “won’t do” (i.e. “would be bad”) (cf German “das geht nicht” :))
of course translating it as “have to” / “must” is more natural

Maybe it more literally means conclusion.
“Nevertheless, the conclusion is I have to take care of this sulky faced cat?”

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Thank you very much @trout and @aiju - that helped a lot!

And thanks @marcusp for creating this reading group - I learned so much and I’m happy to have finished reading my first story in Japanese. With the help of all members it was much fun, but much above my current level. So I’m going to put that book back on the shelf for later and instead read the なぜ?どうして? one next with the group. :wink:

I also want to say that I found it very interesting to see how “too much” hiragana really makes reading harder. Sometimes it was difficult for me to see where one word ended and the next one began. And when I didn’t know a word and there were multi possible Kanji [is that correct English?? :sweat_smile:] I had to guess from context which one it could be. So we can see again how important learning Kanji is :wink:
I just wonder how kids know what is meant? :thinking:

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I think it’s a lot easier if you already speak the language. After all, there are no spaces in conversation.
Japanese in general seems to be an extremely context heavy language, where context can greatly change the meaning of words and even whole sentences, but it is still relatively unambiguous once you know the context.

I think either “kanji” or “kanjis” is acceptable as plural in English but I think people that know Japanese gravitate towards the first one (this is a general rule to applies to most Japanese words used in English).
It’s similar to how many English words from Latin/Greek use the Latin/Greek plural, e.g. formula → formulae, curriculum → curricula…
(Of course “formulas” is also acceptable and sometimes the “correct” plural is not acceptable! octopus → octopuses, not octopoda)

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Oh, thanks, but I meant the phrase “multi possible Kanji” :wink:

Oh. Yes, that should be “multiple possible kanji”.

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Head → desk :woman_facepalming:
Of course! Now that I read it :sweat_smile:

Thanks again!

Just a shout out to @marcusp. Just took the JLPT and there was a specific question asking for the meaning of ぺらぺら (ペラペラ) on the test. I chuckled to myself while thinking, “Hey, that’s a word I learned reading にゃんにゃん.” Remember in the first story when Hanae was talking to the Japan tongue twister champion?

So like I mentioned before, にゃんにゃん helped prepare me for the test. lol

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That is fantastic! Thank you! And good luck with the test, I’m sure you’ve done great! (They ought to make にゃんにゃん a set text! lol!)

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So uh, not to sort of necro the thread (as I haven’t quite finish this yet, but I’m getting close.) But… Any chance we read the next book in the series in the next month or so? I really did find this whole thread and the reading practice invaluable!

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Hi @DrFreedomMLP! I noticed that you’ve been reading the book from the likes you left! Thank you so much!

Yes, it would be fabulous to read the next volume some time. But personally I couldn’t start it any time soon. I’m behind with Yotsuba, and the Shirokuma bookclub starts tomorrow! Plus, I’m super busy at work these days!

But I agree that we must do it some time! There would be two routes… (1) go through the process of submitting it to the bookclub thread and getting it voted as next read (I doubt it would win, what with it being the second volume and all), or (2) just setting up the thread and going for it regardless of how many readers it might have. I reckon the second route it best and least fuss. I’d be happy to that, but not now. Perhaps later in the year?

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Sounds good to me! @ me if/ when you set it up!

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Will do! Thank you! :+1:

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I finally finished the book today! Thank you so much for everyone who commented! Having this forum helped a lot and I learned a TON. This was my first Japanese book ever, so I don’t think I can overstate my improvement in the 8 months it took me to read it ahaha. Thanks again, and hopefully we do another soon!

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That is great! Congratulations on finishing the book, and thank you so much for posting! What’s your next reading project?!

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Well, I own a couple of Darling in the Franxx manga so I’ll try those next. I tried them before this book originally but it was REAL hard. I also own the first two Sword Art Online light novels, but just looking at them still spooks me lol.

So I’m gonna try the manga I already own, and failing that hunt up some nice kids book to read and order it from Amazon Japan lol

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I just finished this book today, and wanted to thank everyone involved, especially @marcusp and @aiju, but including everyone who asked and answered questions throughout. I followed along with this thread as I read, and I think I didn’t have a single question that wasn’t already dealt with here.

It’s been a fun journey. After starting to read native material for real with the しろくまカフェ book club, I picked up this book so I’d have something I could read fully at my own pace to complement the club reading schedule.

It was a real struggle at first. I was basically just barely able to to keep up with the original club’s reading speed. But I’ve been somewhat amazed by my improvement over the course of the book. From just being able to get through a couple of pages per day at the start, I slowly got faster and faster at reading (and understanding), to the point that I finished the last story in just two days (with the same amount of time per day it used to take me to get through 2-4 pages.)

It’s been a huge confidence booster, and probably the biggest increase in my Japanese reading ability since I first learned how to read hiragana, heh. This is my first completed Japanese book, and the improvement I’ve had makes me believe I might well be able to keep up with the next beginner’s book club when it starts soon.

Anyway, I just wanted to post something now that I’ve finished. Thanks everyone!

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Wow, thank you so much @jaearess! I am so glad that you found this thread useful! Thank you so much for letting us know! That is brilliant!

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I tried to open the vocabulary spreadsheet for this, but Google says I need permission to view it. I pressed the button to ask for permission, but maybe the permission setting should be changed so anyone who has the link can see it (I think that was the original setting when I read a few of the early messages, maybe it has gotten changed by mistake?). I’d really like to start reading this, but I’d also like the extra help from the vocab spreadsheet. ^____^

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