Absolutely no worries, and feel free to do this any time you feel like your questions have been overlooked. Because that’s what it is, more likely.
Would you mind mind making a new post with just the questions you’d like to have answered though? I have to admit that at least for me (and maybe for others too) it’s sometimes a bit hard to find unanswered questions between translations and already answered ones.
“But, on the inside he’s not much different to a human.”
見た目: appearance
(が: subject marker)
怪物: monster
な - not sure, to be honest
だけ - just
“He just looks like a monster.”
From the video (timestamped) it sounds like a mumbled (I think she’s eating?) そんなわけないだろう.
So, something like “There’s no way that’s true”, I guess? Possibly to her mother’s description of her father, but maybe more probably to her describing Ruri as “roughly human” despite suddenly having sprouted horns and spewing fire.
(There’s a な in there that I couldn’t identify, for anybody better at grammar than me.)
My instinct tells me the random な is just a ‘this is an answer to your question/answer to a query’ sort of indicator but i’m desperately googling to figure out why i think that and I can’t find it lol
might be a corruption of the explanatory の … or I could be nuts
Hell it might even be kansai-ben. They replace explanatory の・んだ with ねん, which is sort of close, but not really… and I don’t think I’ve see mum speak any kansai-ben really, so seems unlikely.
Ok, seeing if this is a better way of formatting stuff.
p 69
My understanding is this is more like
もっとも 遺伝すればの話し だがな Although / a story about if (genetic) inheritance occurs / [this is also], right?
However, this is a situation where genetic inheritance also plays its part, right?
So Dragon-dad (or whoever) is saying it’s not just about Ruri’s body’s current adaptation only for her fire breath, but [if you read on] he doesn’t really know what she’s going to inherit as well. Something like that.
To explain the の話し, it kind of just modifies everything before it and dumps it into a sort of, like… this is a story about [everything in the clause before the の]. At least that’s how I explain it to myself.
You have most of this, but 安心して is the exact opposite meaning - it means ‘stay calm’ or ‘have peace of mind’. So more like "If you just relax and wait, it’ll work out fine’.
…that said I’m not sure what the じき in じき体 is. “This phase of the body”?
p 70
@yamitenshi mentioned this earlier upthread, but キレ散らかす is something like ‘to get mad’, so it’s actually キレる を 散らかす (to get real mad). Also, the 適当 here is less ‘careless’ and more ‘vague’ or ‘aimless’.
Casual speech cos she’s mad basically. 思っている ＝＞ 思ってん.
何のために 山登ったと 思ってんだ！！！ [For what purpose / mountain climbed /] are you thinking?
Why the heck do you think I climbed this mountain for?!?
叩き込むしかない = My guess is since the first part of the sentence is still present tense (That monster… he doesn’t take into consideration human circumstances") so the back half is also present tense ("so I have to beat it into him).
So, I’ve been reading through this chapter but I completely gave up now. This manga is either a bad choice for me to start with immersion or I’m just not ready yet for this. I have to translate every sentence via translator or AI and need explanations for almost every part, it’s just too much and takes too long. The colloquialism and all the abbrevations make it incredibly hard.
From now on I will still read on but just go through each week quickly in like an hour or two, put every sentence in a translator and hope that I will pick up a thing or two each week that stays in my memory.
It got too discouraging for me unfortunately.
You know, I had the same experience with my first book club. It was very disappointing and I decided to stop and use my time differently. I did a lot of grammar (Genki 1, reinforcing with Bunpro), different reading (Satori Reader, grammar is explained in the notes), and came back stronger!
A few month later, it’s a completely different experience.
All in all, 10/10 can recommend giving up and trying again later.
Good luck!
It’s definitely tricky at times with how casual everything is. No shame in recognising something’s beyond you for the time being. I did the same when I tried よつばと！ early on - read in various places it was a good starting point, but then I just couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and it’s hard to stick with something if it just feels like you’re bashing your head against a wall and hoping something sticks.
Getting a bit more of a foundation in grammar and vocab (but in my experience mostly grammar) can make reading a much better experience.
The good news is the more you encounter them, even if you need to look them up repeatedly, the more you’ll get used to them.
I remember when I thought I’d never get used to recognizing 「verbて＋いる」 with the い dropped. I had to look it up each time I encountered it to recognize it, sometimes looking it up two panels in a row because I forget it in between! (I have really bad memory…)
But with repeated exposure comes unconscious pattern recognition, and eventually you reach a point where you just “know” it. It just takes enough repetition of exposure to get there.
On the one hand, that means you need to keep building up that pattern recognition.
On the other hand, we have about six weeks until starting the second book club pick from the last poll (I should probably get the initial thread up for it this week). If you focus a bit on grammar studies during that time, you should be in a better place to feel you are making progress.
What matters most in learning anything is to keep making progress, whatever that may look like for you individually.
Pity to hear that, @wanisnani! Like others, I also dropped my first book club, and then succeeded on the second - so hopefully it’ll be the same for you.
You should definitely give @ChristopherFritz’s book club in a little over a month a try. ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん 1 | L16 seems to be a fair bit easier than Ruri Dragon’s L19, but I’m not sure how much colloquialisms are there.
I’d suggest just letting it rest, doing something that’s more your speed for the meantime, and then trying to pick Ruri Dragon up again in half a year or so. You’ll probably get something out of it if you force it, but I think for now finding something that feels more like a challenge instead of a struggle might be a better use of your time.
To be fair, this chapter was a pretty hard one.
But when it comes to the colloquialism and abbreviations, you won’t learn them if you don’t encounter them. You’re encountering them now, so if you stick through this book, you should have gotten used to them a lot more than before.
Personally I know what they’re trying to say because I have watched so much anime with girls who speak like this, and so I just picked it up naturally. But I didn’t just automatically know it, I had a lot of exposure to it.
Maybe in your downtime you can try and listen to podcasts or something you know would speak in this manner?
I still don’t know what I would recommend as an absolute beginner manga. (Definitely not よつばと! 1 | L16 - too much kiddy talk!)
Maybe 今日から始める幼なじみ 1 | L18 or ふらいんぐうぃっち 1 | L20. Despite the levels I found them a lot easier, though they still have some levels of slang … that’s probably unavoidable.
Honestly the Tadoku graded readers were far and away the best option I had, but I have access to a library so getting them is quite easy… the free options are alright though.
The other thing is I think it’s important to have a way to ‘crystalise’ any learnings you get from reading through stuff. Reading by itself is important (the motivation factor from finishing a book is amazing and necessary) but I basically always read a book twice: the first time just using dict lookups but not making notes or writing anything down, simply aiming for 70% or above comprehension, and the second time looking up everything and adding flashcards for words/grammar I don’t know or don’t recognise intuitively.
The second run especially I think is where these book clubs shine (though ルリドラゴン is the first one I’m following along with live). Sometimes you have nfi what to even look up grammar-wise, so it’s great to have others around to help out.
Also, as they say, teaching something is just as good as learning it for getting it jammed into your head. Possibly better.
It’s very important imho to aim for something you can comprehend about 70-80%. Bashing your head against a wall is incredibly discouraging. English learners don’t go straight for Tolstoy, lol.
I remember one of the first things I tried to read was 【TVアニメ化】響け! ユーフォニアム 北宇治高校吹奏楽部へようこそ | L30 because I loved the anime so much. Mistake! Amazingly I stuck it out for about 3 months and read like, I dunno, a prologue and one chapter before melting. Much too high level for someone who wasn’t even N4 at that time.
Careful with this one, as you will be teaching those that have even less clue than you. This sounds great on paper, but unless you are pretty sure about what you are saying, you might just cause more confusion.
C R O C K S