あー is essentially just a noise, yes. Drawn out like this, it can be annoyance, but it’s context dependent (I’ve seen it used for excitement in other contexts, but usually annoyance.)
It is the same もう, indeed.
さ is a sentence ender that usually has a bit of assertiveness to it, emphasising the sentence a little bit more. In English, we would stress the word a little more:
“Ughhh, c’mon, I know…”
Or perhaps add an, “already” to the end of the sentence.
In this case, it does play into the “annoyed” vibes, because Sacchan is annoyed, but it’s not necessarily an annoyed noise in and of itself.
Just remember it’s essentially an assertive sentence ender that emphasises the action in the sentence.
Yui (brown-haired girl) is the one who drew the monster, not Sacchan, so the sentence would actually be:
“It was completed, Sacchan,” with Yui saying it as she presents the drawing.
It’s た because it’s the “past” tense of the verb できる.
It’s a stuttered sound which is completed on the following page in the panel where Sacchan says:
“化け物だ完全にこれ!”
Edit: I replied on my phone, so forgive any typos I have missed, because goodness, I have already fixed a lot of them.
Well, I just worked out why they’re called the Colors. I was checking out the character names on Wikipedia, and it turns out the main trio’s family names are 赤松 (Yui), 黄瀬 (Sacchan) and 青山 (Kotoha) - that is, red, yellow and blue. The same colours they’re wearing on the cover, in fact.
The explanation of grammar なの is beyond me and I’m ok with that for now.
if you ever have a bit of time just listen to this video in the background, i think it really helps hearing how it can sound atleast once. the explanatory の shows up all the time basically.
Unsure of the ordering here. I know ’な’ marks the noun but in this instance it’s two nouns. Is it just proxmity / particle applies to the thing before it?
While waiting for someone better than me to chime in I translated this as
Panda looking cat
My reasoning for this is that, みたい is a na-adjective suffix, so パンダみたい means panda-looking or panda-like. Then like any na-adjective, when modifying a noun you add な before the noun it modifies.
I think the main thing I’ll be taking from this reading is humility Everything is so different from the example sentences that I’ve seen so far that I can barely decipher it even with the vocab and answers here. It’s a struggle to even identify what are words, particles or exclamations, so I think I’ll mainly be focusing on getting better at that for now.
Let’s see, this is…page 5. Good to have, so someone answering can check the correct page. There aren’t many page numbers in this manga (unfortunately), but the first post in this thread includes a (hopefully handy) page number guide!
As @Belthazar wrote, we have a question and a command here. Learning where a sentence ends in Japanese can be a tricky affair, but it gets more or less easier over time. I hope. (I still have trouble with this in some manga panels…)
Breakdown
The first part is a question: 「どんなのだったか」
どんな = “what kind of” (and needs to be attached to a noun)
の = filling in for a noun, similar to “one” or “thing” does in English (example: “Which one do you want?”)
だ = appears at the end of a noun sentence
った = marks the sentence as “completed” or “past tense”.
か = essentially a “verbal question mark”
=> “What kind was it?”
The second part is a command:
描く = to draw
描いて = the verb 描く with て to be able to join it with another verb
みる = has a meaning of “try doing”
みろ = the verb みる with る changed to ろ to make it imperative (essentially, Sacchan, telling Yui to do it)
みそ = mentioned earlier, みそ is a pun on みろ, so we can consider it has the same meaning
=> “Try drawing it.”
In the translation, I wrote “it” to fill in what Yui would be trying to draw, but if she put the first and second parts together, we get:
“Try drawing what kind it was.” (“what kind” in context means “what kind of monster”)
It gets easier over time.
Some important milestones for this to happen include:
1) Learning particles and what their function is.
Some particles appear after a word to identify its function in a sentence.
Other particles appear at the end of a sentence.
Recognizing particles helps get a feel for where individual words are.
2) Learning very common vocabulary words.
Consider the following gibberish sentence:
“Keo jwps panda nwoe ifkeh cat setnf iakwje.”
If you look it over, there’s a good chance you will recognize two words in it.
That’s how Japanese (or any new language you’re learning) comes across in the beginning. The more words you learn, the more clear sentences will be.
3) Learning grammar.
I tend to think of this one as the most important one. But it’s also the hardest one, because it involves concepts more complex than individual words.
Grammar (including particles) helps you get an idea of the basic meaning of a sentence, even if you don’t know the meaning of most of the words.
For another gibberish sentence example:
“The oljwyfj gave the nawygr to the hfyatrs after pwyyfse.”
You may be able to get a sense for the structure of the sentence, even before knowing the words.
4) Repeated exposure to all of the above.
By following along with picking apart the dialogue in the manga, and by reading along with the discussion threads, you’ll get plenty of exposure. You don’t have to understand everything in the discussion. It’s fine if you think, “I didn’t understand that at all” for some things.
Chances are, the same kind of material will be asked about again when it comes up later, and next time you might think, “I don’t get this, but I remember it came up before.” And if the same grammar is asked about later, you may read the description and think, “I’m kind of getting to understand this, at least a little…I think.”
It can be a bit difficult to see where you’re actually starting to understand things because the more you understand something, the less you notice it. The less you understand something, the more you notice it. It creates a blind spot to how well you’re doing, and puts a spotlight on everything you still don’t understand yet. Be sure to take a moment to appreciate what you have learned so far!
I’m still working on the last two pages for this week, but I feel just from the discussions here that I’ve already learned a lot. Gotta say this is definitely a lot harder than チーズスイートホーム though. I started reading that recently as well.
Something else that might help regarding page numbers, for those who are using Amazon Kindle (I don’t know how other epubs mark their location, but if it’s similar to Kindle, this should hold true), subtracting 3 from the “location” tracker gives you the correct page number. I.e.: “Location 8 of 154” is Page 5. It worked for Ayumu, and looks to work here too!
This is an excellent idea! As a newbie, I worry about asking a question that has already been answered, so I will trawl the forum looking to see if it’s been covered already. There can be a lot of posts to cover, so that can take a few minutes, getting you further away from thinking about the sentence or question that was foremost in your mind.
Apologies for leaving off the page number & thanks for the answer to my sentence question! I won’t lie, after five pages I’m struggling to make the story coherent in my mind. It feels like the characters are each having their own conversations!
The good(?) news is, that’s kind of what’s happening in the beginning. So if that’s what you’re getting from it, you may be doing better than you think
Everything is so different from the example sentences that I’ve seen so far that I can barely decipher it even with the vocab and answers here. It’s a struggle to even identify what are words, particles or exclamations, so I think I’ll mainly be focusing on getting better at that for now.
I started reading that recently as well.