Thanks everyone for this very helpful thread! I gave up on reading よつばと！one year ago because I hardly understood anything. This thread makes it possible for me to understand much more than I could only by myself.
I am trying to catch up, just finished the chapter 2. There is still one part I did not understand at all, hopefully someone can help me:
Page 77, Yotsuba: どうぞおあがりたまえ！おまかいですが！
I think this must be some kind of polite greeting, maybe for welcoming someone? I really have no idea what おまかい is supposed to mean.
For anyone having trouble searching for info about a specific page, the key is to just put the number of the page (ie, “77”) into the search box at the top right and click the “search this topic” checkbox that appears beneath the search field. Seems to work well for me, at least (not that the search tool doesn’t have other problems, though )
Hi folks, I’d like to join this reading group as well as the second book one! I’m going to read the first chapter tonight. Where is everyone now? Working through chapter 3? Is there a time limit?
Just finished chapter 3! I think that was by far the easiest chapter so far. I felt like I actually struggled more in chapter 2 than in chapter 1 and was a bit nervous lol. Glad to see it’s eased up as everyone promised it would
Another good chapter, and another example of Yotsuba’s strange fascination with everyday objects. But now we know she and her father lived with her grandparents previously! So some explanation for this one at least
Me too, just finished reading chapter 3 this very minute!
This chapter was great fun (imagine being よつば’s dad!) and in terms of language, the most useful yet. Rather than slogging through as in the previous chapters, I really got a sense here that I was actually ‘reading’.
And some parts could have been almost designed for beginners like myself! How nice of あさぎ to give both the plain and polite negative forms of 悪い in the same frame on page 112!
Now I think I’ll re-read the chapter again, quickly this time in one sitting, just for the pure fun of it!
Thanks everyone!
Something came up in the first chapter that I recently learned and people may be interested in:
On page 7, Jumbo tells Yotuba “えらい” in the last panel, which is directly translated as admirable, but it’s a bit more complicated than that in Japanese culture. Someone’s “erai” is basically how successful/high up someone is. You can say someone is/has more erai than you if theyve written more books than you or are older than you or are a president of a company, etc and it ties in a little with how important status levels are in Japan’s culture.
But it’s also common to tell little kids this when they do something good. “えらいだ!” Its kind of equivalent to telling a child in a sugary voice “You’re such a good girl!” Or “You did SUCH a good job!” It can also be a bit condescending. For example, my friend (who is a full grown adult) tried to impress us all by eating a super hot takoyaki the other day in one gulp and I said to him when he finished “えらいよ！” to both congratulate him and let him know he’s a child.
Long story short, this is a very interesting word, and I don’t know if I would’ve given it a second thought had I not learned more about it. There’s a lot going on in that simple “えらいぞよつば！”
Just read this part, and I am actually wondering if this is not the 1st meaning that is meant here (suitable; proper; appropriate; adequate; fit), with the particle に showing direction. So I am translating テキトーに into “go in the direction of feeling adequate”, which would be in proper english “make yourself at home”.
Disclaimer: I probably don’t know what I’m talking about, but – the way I’ve heard Japanese people use 適当 like that is basically as ‘do whatever you like/whatever seems good’ (e.g. when buying food or the like). I don’t really know which English definition you would pick for that since you can kinda make each of them make sense (“do whatever seems suitable” or “it’s fine to act randomly/do however you like”), but that’s the sense it’s going for, I think.
に is just being used to make the な adjective into an adverb; so something like 適当にして (“please do/act てきとう-ily”) is implied, I’d assume.
I have heard that when a word is written in katakana it is to imply it’s being used with it’s colloquial meaning rather than it’s literally dictionary definition , which is the case of テキトー would be carelessly or random or ‘whatever’. So I interpreted it that way, as in ‘do whatever’.
Ah, I didn’t mean to directly contradict you or say you were wrong! What you wrote does make sense, and I’m not sure which is which. Just put in my two cents here and how it came across to me, see what came of.that discussion
One other thing that I wondered about in chapter 3 was the use of セリフ on page 94.
But I just worked out what it means by writing this post!
I guess it is the same セリフ that is used on page 11 when ジャンボ says “where did you learn that line?”
But here on page 94 the person speaking is よつば’s neighbour. She’s gone to the wrong house and rung the bell again and again (so funny) and now they are speaking through the intercom.
よつば says “who is that?” (so funny!) and the neighbour says “…それはこっちのセリフよ…”
[Lit: that is this side’s line]
ie - “that’s meant to be my line”
So funny!
I stand by my original interpretation here. Other responses already mentioned the reasons I was going to bring up, but I’ll briefly repeat them here again:
As I mentioned previously, when 適当 is written in katakana it is pretty much always the second meaning. Now, you can say that katakana can be used for emphasis but I don’t see any reason to put an emphasis there.
There is no set expression using 適当に that means “make yourself comfortable” directly, or that is used with に as a particle signifying direction. However there is a fairly common expression 適当に that means something along the lines of “however you like”. In this case, に is an adverb form and not a particle.
Given this meaning, I also think that it is much closer approximated by “carelessly/unseriously” in a sense “don’t think much about it”/“feel free to do however you like” rather than “suitably/appropriately”. I feel like the second case would have a hint of doing “the proper thing” as opposed to doing “whatever you want”.
The distinction is not that important here, I think at this point it should be pretty clear what the phrase means in that particular context, no matter which interpretation you are going with.
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