Haha, yeah I’m aware of that ever since we discovered the Flying Witch translation on the Bilingual Manga site.
I had a specific sentence in mind when I wrote my post, but I can’t remember which volume or chapter it was in. It was in a different manga and not a long or hard sentence anyway. I think I understood it subconsiously, but did not do so actively in the moment I read it. But whatevs, no need to sweat it!
Definitely agree on the rest of your post! And thanks, I’m relieved my brain is not borked.
Even more off topic rambling
Oh, btw I noticed loads of people say already knowing a second language is an advantage when learning a third one, but I think that doesn’t really hold true when you start with L2 in school as a kid, does it? I certainly can’t remember anything I’ve done at home back then that helped me get decent other than that I probably somehow used it on the internet and of course in class.
Wow, so this was definitely a challenging book club!
What stands out most to me is how much longer it takes me to do the weekly reading for this club compared to Doggy Detectives or Crayon Shin Chan. It stands to reason that the pace should be quicker (it’s the Beginner’s BC after all), but it’s still a bit of a step up for me! Only knowing 800 kanji also made it challenging, as well as the dialect and the fact that I often knew all the words, but not the subtext. So basically ‘manga is hard’ lol.
Looking forward to reading Kiki, and I made sure to order the book with furigana
What is で doing there? I can more or less understand に, I guess it’s like “honesty in the direction of your desires” → “honesty about your desires”. And I guess she’s saying that’s a good thing. But で?
わからんでもないけどさ strikes me as a set expression meaning something like “I don’t know” (as per some googling), but how does it work grammatically? Doesn’t わからん already mean “I don’t know”? What does the rest add?
What’s こっ supposed to be? I figured it might be ~て行く in the volitional, but that’s supposed to be a long o-sound, whereas the っ seems to indicate it’s more of a short sound…?
I imagine 怯み is that masu-stem-acting-as-connective thing, so “I flinched from the 2000 yen campsite fee, [and] I cheaped out on the firewood fee, but…”, but it’s not really making sense to me Also why 私だ at the end?
And then finally there is that sentence on page 162. I read the discussion about it but I am not confident I understand it entirely. Does it mean something like “Demon assassins that completely seduce customers that soaked in the onsen”?
This is a bit terse because I’m functionally one handed for now:
I can’t explain specifically, but I think she’s saying “say what you want for real please”. I think 正直で is something like “for real” and よろしい is “please” here.
わからん (わからない) - not understanding
でもない - it’s not that
けどさ - but…
It’s not that I don’t understand, but…
You’re right, it’s a slur of て行こうか
You’ve pretty much got this. Everything before 私 is acting as an adjective.
I am not very confident, but my understanding here is that there’s some implied words here being skipped. I’m not sure how to explain this, so let’s look at a similar example.
Suppose you are discussing with a friend whether to go to Osaka either by bus or by train, and your friend says:
電車でいい => it’s fine by train.
So, here the implied things missing is that the friend is talking about going to Osaka. The verb 行く and the destination are missing because they are obvious from context.
So here something similar is happening:
おんせ～ん => hot springs yey~!
欲望に正直でよろしい => It’s good (to see that you are) honest about (your) desires.
The 私だ in this case is "It was ME the ONE that… ". She’s making a constrast between how she was reluctant to spend money before but now she has decided to actually splurge and treat herself even if it’s expensive.
I managed to get to the last chapter before this book club was completely done! Thankfully, having watched the anime I was able to understand what was going on, so the real challenge was parsing out the grammar to understand how those ideas were being conveyed in Japanese.
I can’t think you guys enough for organizing the vocab sheets, it was a lifesaver. Between that and speaking into Google Translate, this has been a fantastic way to practice both reading and speaking Japanese. Still not at the point where I’m comfortable creating Japanese speech/writing on my own, but all things considered I’m extremely proud I’ve been able to work my way through.
The one thing that’s been super interesting to see is how things like slang, truncated speech, and use of furigana can give someone’s speech a lot of personality (and also is impressive how well those voices were captured by the anime’s VAs). Granted, that kinda slows me down cause I have to double check what they’re saying, but it’s a good kind of messy haha.
