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Discussion Guidelines
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Spoiler Courtesy
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Proper Nouns
Name
Hiragana reading
Notes
Kindle location first mentioned
赤川次郎
あかがわじろう
the author
cover
尾田医師
おだいし
Doctor Oda
24
目高組
めだかぐみ
Medaka clan
86
星泉
ほしいずみ
main character, Izumi
170
酒井好子
さかいよしこ
aunt Yoshiko
172
星貴志
ほしたかし
main character’s father, Takashi
179
酒井呈一
さかいていいち
Uncle (Yoshiko’s husband)
201
知子
ともこ
Tomoko (?Izumi’s mother)
211
奥沢哲夫
おくざわてつお
Classmate of Izumi, Tetsuo (son of an executive, smart dresser, family expect him home for dinner on time)
251
渡辺周平
わたなべしゅうへい
Classmate of Izumi, Shuhei (stocky, bowlegged, loves Judo)
251
竹内智生
たけうちともお
Classmate of Izumi, Tomo. (Smart, heading for Tokyo university, wears glasses)
261
マユミ
-
mysterious woman in Izumi’s apartment
348
三浦久子
みうらひさこ
Miss Miura, teacher
357
保科校長
保科校長
Headteacher Hoshina
368
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Are the ending page number and line definitely right this week? All the other schedule endpoints match up with the page numbers in my paperback copy, but not this one, and I couldn’t see the line on any of the nearby pages either…
Week one was rough, went at a very slow pace to understand everything. Had some free time to get a jump start on week two. I wrote all the names down at the front of the book for reference. @Domjcw thanks for list of names in week one, it’s been a huge help.
Done with this part! Btw, how should I mark the locations of the sentences I have questions on? The pages kindle gives me aren’t going to be of much help for people with paperback.
What is the meaning of the second こと, the one before 泉?
question 2 (kindle page 26)
泉は、少しこの女、イカレてるんじゃないかしら、と思った。
I looked for a translation for イカレてる. I found this on Jisho, but that one is written イカれる. I didn’t think you can decide yourself what parts get written in Katakana, so do I have the wrong word?
So… does 完璧に近い円筒 refer to the shape of her body? And the students are making fun of her for that by saying we might need a new category of mammals that are similar to metal barrels? Wow that’s demeaning…
each of those were bits that I had highlighted as causing me headaches or uncertainty
I’m not sure I have answers to any of them. For your first question - it would be great if someone could help break down the whole sentence. I can work out the gist, but hard to work out how to get there.
For イカレてる I have flagged that in the vocab page with a question mark. I haven’t been able to find a good explanation.
For #3 - I liked your explanation. That made more sense than anything I had been trying to read into that sentence!
I got about halfway through writing out a slightly offbeam answer and was googling around for references to back me up when I found that forum post by sheer chance
You’re right on the others, but this one’s a little off. It’s more like “they had in common the point that they harboured faint/vague feelings for Izumi”.
For イカレてる when I googled it I got shounen manga panels so it seems to just be a literature/manga thing to spell it like that. I guess it makes sense since it is a more colloquial word.
I’ve noticed in the past that a lot of manga do this where even the stuff usually written in hiragana is written in katakana which can be very confusing sometimes. Stuff like オススメ or ナマケモノ (I’m talking about しろくまカフェ in particular here)
オ getting Katakana’d with the rest of word can make the word difficult to noticed. One that comes to mind and is missing from Jisho is オトク (お得). There might be ゴ ones as well.
I don’t know about others, but I found a couple of points this week where I got stuck by some really complicated and long sentences.
A couple of them were mentioned already by @Jiell
Another example
Mmm. It doesn’t help when the long sentences also have words you don’t recognise in them – for instance からきし was new to me, and so からきしだめ = からきし + だめ = “absolutely hopeless” wasn’t my first guess about how to parse that string of hiragana.
Side note: からきし + だめ seems to be a very common collocation for this adverb: three out of four of Progressive’s example sentences for からきし use it:
私は酒はからきし駄目です – I can’t drink at all.
あの人は仕事の方はからきし駄目だ – As for work, he is utterly useless.
化学ときたら僕はからきしだめだ – When it comes to chemistry, I’m hopeless.
Done with this part, again, pretty quickly, feels like my speed at reading the intermediate books went really up recently. I do read with a hover dictionary and do not stick to every single sentence to completely translate every word in it, but it still feels like I get what’s going on and learn new vocabulary and that’s pretty cool considering I finished this week’s part in 29 minutes
