I’m going with は as simply putting the following as context:
「かわいいメスねこのほう」
The prior sentence, Hanako is talking about Capone. Now she’s shifting her narration over to the cute female cat. Apart from Capone, there’s this cute female cat, and she’s the one being talked about now. The narration was on the side of things about the cat sitting in the window, and now we’re over to the side of things of this cute female cat.
I haven’t reached CureDolly’s video that covers ほう yet, but it may have useful information about ほう as a concept:
I’ve finally started reading this book, so I gonna be asking a few questions to anyone who cares to answer in this thread if that’s ok.
So the section 誰よりも早く is translated as “much more than anyone else”, which I agree with, though the sentence as a whole doesn’t completely make sense if that’s the case.
本やのしごとはいそがしいけど、だれよりも早くあたらしい本をみられるのがだのしい。
I’d translate this as
Bookstore work is busy, but much more than anyone else, it is fun to look at new books.
That doesn’t really make sense to me.
Should I interpret it as that she is the person that loves looking at new books the most?
Or could it mean more than anything else, she loves looking at books the most?
I interpreted this as という, so it would say “a book called (…)”
However, while looking online I found only that って is used as a colloquial と, but never て on its own. Can someone confirm that it either can be used this way, or if it means something totally different?
I agree with your translation. て is being used as a casual quotation particle. It’s not there as a separate entry in Jisho, but it is listed in Jisho as an alternative form of って.
I encountered こまったな
Intuitively I would translate this as “Don’t worry about it” or something (こまった = past tense of to be troubled/distressed, な = negative imperative, together, don’t be troubled)
However when looking online, I have mostly encountered examples where it implies a meaning of “oh no!” or “this sucks!”
I checked if anybody else had this problem, but it seems not.
On (according to the vocab guide) page 15 there’s this sentence
でも、あたしはそれより、ここの家の人の名前をきいてびっくり
I grasp that the sentence means “However, apart from that, I was surprised to hear the name of the person that lives here”
I don’t understand why 聞く is conjugated to its て form here (きいて). It doesn’t seem to be linking multiple verbs, or used for a continuous action. And I wouldn’t understand why it would be a casual request.
Is there something obvious I’m missing? Or have I got the meaning of the sentence wrong?
My understanding is that the て-form of a verb can be used to express the means by which something happened or was achieved. This is kind of generalization of how you can use a noun + で to express what has been used to achieve an objective, as in 車で学校に行った (I went to school by means of a car).
In a similar fashion, a verb in て-form can sometimes indicate the cause or the means by which something happened. 歩いて帰える => I went home by the means of walking.
名前をきいて + びっくり => “I heard the name, and I was surprised” => “I was surprised by the means of hearing the name” => or more naturally, “I was surprised to hear the name (of the person that lives here)”.
Strictly speaking, I believe this is just a more broad interpretation of the て-form being used to link sentences together.
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.
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.
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 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.
A special thanks to