Please add to it when you have time because I don’t always have any
Characters and Concepts
Characters and concepts
Multiple races exist in Dungeon Meshi. The five major races are Tallmen/人間 (baseline humans), Half-foot/ハーフ フット (Halflings), Dwarves, Gnomes and Elves, but a few other species also exist which we won’t get into here.
Last week’s カモネギ’s reference made me have my eyes open this week for any funny saying or reference, as it looks like this manga is trying to be funny on many levels, and I think I might have caught one. (if anyone of you have easy access to a Japanese person, would be awesome if they could help find some more!)
主人や口うるさい監督者など、気がねする人がいなくなると、使用人や下位の者がくつろいで、自由にふるまうことのたとえ。
Sounds to me a bit similar to the French proverb quand le chat n’est pas là, les souris dansent ( When the cat’s away, the mice will play)
Reckon it’s some kinda weird variant of 爬, but I can’t find any information about it on the internet. The kanji’s not Joyo, so perhaps Kui-sensei just… misremembered it. Word as a whole is 爬虫類.
Yeah, I spent about five minutes searching before I gave up and tried ?虫類 instead.
He’s talking about how he’s discovered a new appreciation for chickens after seeing them as part of a basilisk - even without the snake tail, the chicken is still kinda reptillian. I guess?
Ok, done. I really enjoy the humor still. It’s also a rather comfortable level of difficulty for me, weird handwritten kanji notwithstanding. Even when the grammar gets a bit tricky or very casual, the intention is usually clear enough that I can piece it together from the context. Honestly the level 30 natively rating seems excessive for me so far, but we’re not even halfway through so we’ll see. Also maybe my Japanese videogame experience helps, obviously there’s a lot of overlap…
This is annoying because I could do without yet another spin off club…
We’re going to end up like the people reading Harta magazine expect we’ll be reading the IMC magazine…
This week! Volume 5 of Atelier, Volume 2 of FMA, Volume 2 of Dungeon Meshi and Volume 1 of Bocchi!
The tricky part is managing to improve my reading ability at a linear rate to keep up with the ever increasing pace. I definitely read faster now than when we started Atelier, but I’ll hit diminishing returns eventually…
The more i read the more i find comprehending what is going on and knowing all the words are two seperate (though related) forms of difficulty. I was reading love bullet earlier today and while it was using a bunch of words i mostly didn’t recognise, the whole thing was easy enough to read and understand that i kind of read way more than i expected to casually.
Still, meshi is dense enough that it still takes me like half an hour to an hour per chapter, so
I agree, vocab lookups are annoying but complex grammar slows me down a lot more and is usually harder to search for.
I also find that a lot of meshi’s vocab is unknown to me but very easy to understand and memorize because it’s made up of fairly elementary kanji. This week we had 食生活, 全滅, 満足感, 香草 etc… I can guess the meaning from the kanji for most of those and when I can’t at least I can remember the words if they come back later.
Is he asking what happens if you eat tainted medicine? It seems like such a non sequitor … Is he kind of suggesting that it just looks like a bunch of random plants, like questioning Senshi’s plant expertise?
Looks like it got corrected in the tankobon?
Same. But even having watched the anime already, it just feels like there’s so much going on that it’s so worth it to read the manga. Also, I am the kind of person who always reads the nutrition label, so I need the practice for when I’m in Japan.
That part confused me too, there’s obviously a joke but I couldn’t quite make sense of it.
Here’s where I landed:
The dwarf guy whose name eludes me right now insists on cooking the medicine because he claims it’s more efficient that way, despite the obvious urgency of that explorer being on death’s door.
Above on the page you can see that various healing plants are introduced, with very simple names like “anti-poison plant”, “anti-petrification plant” etc…
In the strip you copied, thief guy whose name eludes me right now then remarks that it looks “suspiciously simple” while looking at the healing plant. He then muses "couldn’t we make an ointment out of it and drink it?
Then him and warrior guy whose name eludes me right now feel awkward because they’re clearly aware that this cooking step is almost certainly unnecessary and they’re letting that guy agonize for no good reason, so he quickly adds “can’t hurt I guess”.
I really need to memorize the name of the main party, I guess.
塗り薬 isn’t tainted medicine - it’s a salve/ointment (“smearing medicine”). Medicine applied to the outside of the body.
I think you’re overthinking it a little…
The plants that are 外傷に効く are presumably meant to be applied to external wounds, i.e. 外傷.
So Chilchuck (the guy who asks the question in the middle panel) is just expressing concern that the ones meant for external use maybe shouldn’t be eaten.
I’d say the gag is that including a bunch of medicinal plants sounds good and extra healthy, but this question points out that it’s not completely logical (and Senshi - the dwarf - indeed is probably just including them for culinary reasons).
I think you got turned around a little in reading Chilchuck’s lines. I would interpret them like this:
素朴な疑問なんだけど ~ “this is a naive question, but”
塗り薬を飲んだらどうなる？ ~ “what happens if (we) drink ointment?”
The last panel reaction is them grappling with that and being worried about the possible answer to the question - but hey, it probably won’t hurt…
Ooh, that does make more sense. I think it’s the 疑 part of 疑問 that threw me off.
I was definitely confused by the “drinking an ointment” part that seemed contradictory but I thought maybe in this case it could mean “potion” or something like that in this case.
- Week 4
But even having watched the anime already, it just feels like there’s so much going on that it’s so worth it to read the manga. Also, I am the kind of person who always reads the nutrition label, so I need the practice for when I’m in Japan. 
