レンタルおにいちゃん - Week 2 Discussion (Absolute Beginners Book Club)

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Page 17

This is a form of だ.

Here we have a “A is B” sentence (AがBだ), but rather than ending the thought there, there’s an “and” followed by her next sentence. That change the だ to で (AがBで).

You’ll all see this with verbs, where they get て or で added on to string together multiple actions in one sentence, or to join together two or sentences.

What you’ve determined is correct. It can be “they say …” or “it’s said that …” or even (depending on context) “is known as …” or “is called …”

For this dialogue, I might go with, “This is a famous pudding. They say it’s really delicious.”

Note that the Japanese って alone doesn’t tell who said it, only that it has been said. In English, we tend to fill in a pronoun for an otherwise unstated speaker (“they say”, or “it’s said that”).

This is where having pronouns left out because they’re known from context can make things more difficult for a language learner. Since this is 寂しい rather than 寂しがる, I agree with your translation of “I’m so lonely.”

Page 21

It’s a bit hard to tell, but this is actually…not a つ!

I know it looks like one, but I assure you, it is…not!

It’s actually a っ!

There are resources out there that explain this usage (I don’t know any off the top of my head to link here), but you can preliminary think of it as being similar to ！ at the end of a sentence.

You need to use a little bit of HTML for that.

The proper HTML is a bit complex:
<ruby><rb>kanji</rb><rp>(</rp><rt>kana</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>

So some people prefer to use the HTML minimal that does the job:
<ruby><rb>kanji</rb><rt>kana</rt></ruby>

There’s also a script somewhere for use on WaniKani forums to streamline it a bit.

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64

Hah! I knew there was something off about this one. This would not be the first time I mistake a つ for a っ, especially when they are alone (here after the …) so there is no reference to compare to.

Wow, I absolutely did not know that HTML had a tag for this, that’s awesome.
Here is some documentation if anyone is also interested about it.
Edit: I guess this is how Anki does the furigana rendering too!

Thanks for the mindful response (as always).
And extra thanks for pointing me to Japanese The Manga Way some weeks ago, I’m using it all the time as a reference, and it is a very precious resource indeed. :bowing_man:

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65

This is fascinating! I read through the source link. Thank you for sharing!

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66

I saw this simply as being about how you connect two adjectives in a sentence.

If the first adjective is is an い adjective then you drop the い and add くて e.g. おいしい becomes おいしくて.

If the first adjective is a な adjective you dont include the な and add で e.g. きれい(な) becomes きれいで.

Some examples

From this link:

い adjective

  • このりょうりはおいしいです。
    kono ryouri wa oishii desu
  • このりょうりはやすいです。
    kono ryouri wa yasui desu

Becomes:

  • このりょうりはおいし くて やすいです。
    kono ryouri wa oishi kute yasui desu
    Meaning: This dish is delicious and cheap.

な adjective

  • たなかさんはきれいです。
    tanaka san wa kirei desu
  • たなかさんはしんせつです。
    tanaka san wa shinsetsu desu

Becomes:

  • たなかさんはきれい で しんせつです。
    tanaka san wa kirei de shinsetsu desu
    Meaning: Ms Tanaka is beautiful and kind.
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67

That makes a lot of sense when you connect the two speech bubbles from that panel.

That is something I definitely need to get better at, knowing when it is safe to end a sentence, since the lack of punctuation and space between characters make it a lot harder than in other languages.

Normally I write down one bubble at a time and start breaking down the sentence from there, but I don’t know if this is a reliable pattern, as I’ve noticed that sometimes even two columns on the same bubble can be translated into one or two different sentences.

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68

Not necessarily related to this case, as it’s just a connection between two adjectives, but, regarding the -te form uses:

The idea being, in casual speech, it is common to leave sentences incomplete, by means of using the -te form. This is partly the reason we’ll see many -te form cases when reading manga.
They are connectors to an unspoken continuation of a sentence.

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69

So… my question is now, why did they use the te-form and not something like say, the past tense form of いなくなる？ Is the te-form playing some grammatical rule here?

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One of the multiple functions of the -te form is conjuctive. It’s used as a way to chain a series of actions (in the case of verbs, but it can also be used with adjectives with the same purpose). There’s a very slight sense of consecuence as well: this happened and then this other thing happened, though it might not always be the case.

So, by having a verb in the -te form, one says:

verb1 AND verb2 AND verb3 AND […] verbN.

The tense of -te form verbs is dictated by the verb at the end of the sentence.

So the sentence is:

パパとママがいなくなって変わっちゃった。

“Mom and dad passed away and (then) (brother) unfortunately changed.”

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Thank you. I understand now.

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Very interesting article, thanks.

A little above my level I think to understand it fully but enough to get a feeling that sometimes “less is more” in this language.

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Page 19

うっせーんだよ

I wanted to check my interpretation of this because I think I had it about three different ways…

Summary

Didn’t recognise the vocab so put it in a translator which came out with something like “Yuck!” or “Disgusting!” That would make sense if he was referring to the pudding.

But then I saw in the reading group’s dictionary this was derived from うせる: telling someone to get out or leave in a derogatory way.

However, I also came across this:
https://www.jlect.com/entry/471/ussee/
That says it could be from a slangified version of うるさい (煩い) meaning “Stop bothering me!” or “Shut up!” Also plausible.

So I’m not sure now.

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74

When I first read it I thought it was a slurred うるさい but I could believe the うせる interpretation as well. Either way, I think the meaning is clear enough…

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75

Yeah, that’s definitely true. I think a lot of it comes down to if you translate Japanese sentences into English, you’re often left with this weird-sounding, basic and/or incomplete English sentence. It’s just a difference in how the two languages operate: you can communicate a whole lot more using a single adjective or verb in Japanese than you can in English.

This took me a while to figure out. I used to think I was missing something when I would read sentences because they didn’t make a whole lot of sense in English.

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Looking a bit on Japanese sites, the takeaway I get is that 「うっせんだよ」 is a profane (eep, I don’t use profanity!) version of 「うるさい」. I wonder, is it built off of 「うるさい＋のだ」?

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77

Yes, definitely happens to me a lot, when I can recognize all elements that form a sentence but I cannot make sense of it, but when I put it into a translator (or check your answers here) it suddenly makes a lot of sense.

One approach that has been (most of the time) working well for me is breaking down sentences similar to how Japanese The Manga Way tries to explain them. For example:

image

Basically:

  1. Trying to recognize the boundaries between each word/particle/etc that forms the sentence, and separating them with spaces;
  2. Writing the dictionary translation under each one of them, trying to guess the correct meaning given the context (either from my memory or from jisho/ichi.moe);
  3. [optional] Creating a very bare-bones translation of the sentence, one that does not always make sense in English, but it is enough to give an overall understanding;
  4. Finally giving a proper translation, one that I could actually replace the Japanese text for the English one if I were formally translating the material.

Here is my take on it:
image

It is a lot of work, and most of the time I am not able to do it fully because of my limited knowledge, even with ~a lot~ of deep diving on Japanese materials and dictionary searches, but so far this is the way that I feel I got the most out of my reading, both in learning new things and understanding it.

I would love to hear about how you guys go through this kind of material. Do you have any streamlined process to it? Any specific tools that you like for taking notes and organization (I’m currently using OneNote)?

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Hidden, since my reply feels like I've gotten a bit off-topic

Back in 2018, I found a bit of success in writing up notes on my newly-learned grammar, with source citations, and examples from the manga I was reading (struggling) through.

Here's a sample of how that looks

Screenshot_20200817_125941
Screenshot_20200817_125941609×820 118 KB

I tried doing similar to learning some grammar, and then looking for examples in manga. (Very time-consuming!)

One of my “if only I had time for it and wasn’t so lazy” dream projects is to do a “Japanese the Manga Way”-style breakdown of each line of text for the first chapter of various manga that have free previews available.

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So, he is saying (I hit you) because (you’re) annoying! (You’re) garbage! in response to her questioning look of “Why did you just do that?”

Did I follow that correctly?

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I was thinking similar but I don’t really understand why the のだ would apply here.

See above. I don’t really think the brother is offering an explanation as such. I’ve just found the exact phrase he uses in a screenshot of a book of Japanese slang terms and yes, it’s a profanity. It’s a very crude and direct way of telling someone to shut up!

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Page 16

お兄ちゃんの好きなプリンだよ 一緒に食べよ

First time I read this I read it as something like, “A like of brother’s is pudding, let’s eat it together.” (It sounds kinda dumb ik). Second time reading it through I noticed the な in there and my brain went な-adjective. So I re-read it as “Brother’s favorite pudding, let’s eat it together.” Did I get closer to the meaning the second time?

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82

Perfect I’d say. Though you might want to just say “your favourite pudding” when put into English. And, considering the だよ I might say “it’s your favourite pudding”.

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