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This is my first time reading native material so I’m not really able to tell if something is considered a spoiler, please inform me if I need to blur anything. Thank you in advance.
In the first panel of page 4 there is the sentence うんちなのさっちゃん。 I’m confused on why there is the な between a noun and the の particle.
In the third panel of page 4, what is the purpose/meaning of いた at the end of the sentence パンダみたい猫がいたの. I’m currently reading this as “It’s a cat that looks like a panda!”
In the first panel of page 5, what is the purpose/meaning of だって in the sentence だって全然大変じゃないじゃん. I’m currently reading this as “Not at all serious, right?”
In the fourth panel of page 5, I’m confused about the use of だった in the sentence どんなのだったか描いてみそ. I’m used to always seeing this at the end of sentences as a casual past tense (was/were), so I’m reading this sentence as “what kind of (possessive) was go ahead and try to draw.”
Hi everyone! I have a few questions regarding the book that I hope someone can clarify for me.
In the first panel of page 4, there is a sentence called それよりアジトにこんなの落ちてたぞ。I translate this as
I don’t think I’m correct here. I would love to hear how other people translated this sentence
In the first panel of page 5, what does もおマジメに聞いてよ mean?
In the second panel of page 5, there is a sentence called もっと大きな事件はないのかよ リーダー！I’m guessing this means There would be no bigger incidents! Leader! In this sentence, does that mean さっちゃん is the leader?
I’m not very sure myself but maybe others can clarify for you. This is how I approach your questions
I think の is used here as the explanatory particle that kinds of have the feeling of “tell me, I’m curious!” For nouns, な must be put before の as the basic construction. Here is a link for more details : 【Ｎ４文法】～のです／んです | 毎日のんびり日本語教師
I translated the sentence roughly like yours. Mine was: There is a panda that looks like a cat, right?
3 and 4, I’m sorry to say I have no idea how to answer these as I have the same questions
I’d say the primary thing to mark as spoiler would be any English translations.
I’m starting with mention of what the の is doing, then at the end I’ll address the な. The following is going to be a bit to take in, but don’t worry about it! This grammar will come up a lot, so I’m sure it will be asked about again.
The heart of this sentence is:
「なんで うんち だ」
“Noun sentences”, that is sentences that say “[noun] is a [noun]” end in だ. (There are exceptions, but we’ll see some of those later.)
Consider if you are saying the English sentence, “The paint is wet.” That’s a simple “[noun] is [noun]” sentence.
But consider if instead someone asked you why there is a “don’t touch” sign on your fence. You might replace “It’s because the paint is wet.” Basically, it’s taking the sentence and adding “It’s because” in front of it.
In Japanese, this same concept is done by taking the sentence, and adding “のだ” to the end of it. (This is the usage @foxabell mentioned.)
Now, for the answer to the specific question: Why is there a な before the の?
When adding のだ to the end of a sentence that ends in だ already, you don’t say 「…だ のだ」. Instead, the first だ changes into な, and it reads as 「…な のだ」
This is a “[noun] is doing [verb]” sentence, with the verb being いる. The verb いる is used to state that the sentence’s subject “exists”. (The subject is the noun marked with the particle が.)
Japanese verbs don’t have tense like in English (past, present, future). Instead, they are either an incomplete action or a completed action. Completed actions have た added to them (in this case いる, changing it to いた).
If いる means “exists”, then いた means “existed”.
But that sounds a bit weird in English, doesn’t it? “A panda-like cat existed.” However, we can word it a little differently for something that sounds more reasonable to an English speaker: “There was a panda-like cat.” Same thing, worded differently.
だ is used at the end of “[noun] is [noun]” sentences.
When used at the start of a sentence, as I understand it, it’s essentially referring to what came it. (Really bad explanation on my part, I know.)
The って is used for (indirectly) quoting someone.
Put these together, and you have だ (referring back to what was said) and って as an informal quote, and it’s kind of like in English if we say, “You say that, but…”
In various contexts, this だって may translate as “but” or “because”. (This is due to an imbalance in precise meanings of words between English and Japanese.)
どんな requires a noun, and were we have の filling in for the noun.
Consider in English if someone asked you to hand them a box of cereal. You can say “Which box of cereal?” but you’d probably just ask “Which one?” This “one” is standing in for the actual noun.
Likewise, this の is standing in for an actual noun. What noun is it standing in for? This is where context comes into play, which can take some time to build up. In this case, it’s referring to the panda-like cat.
Your translation didn’t quite make it through, so I can’t quite comment on that. But, I can break the sentence down a little, and if you have a question on any specific part, just let me know!
Break-down
それ＋より = that + more than. This wording is common, with the meaning of “more than that” or “rather than that”.
アジト = This refers to their secret hideout, the little clubhouse they’re in.
に = A particle that identified a noun as a destination. This is marking アジト as the destination of an action.
こんな = Like the word “this” in English as in “This cereal is mine.” It requires a noun follow after it.
の = Fills in for a noun. Like in “This one is mine.” It’s substituting in place of the actual noun.
落ちてた = The verb 落ちる (to drop) in the joining form 落ちて, which joins to いる. This gives the meaning “dropping”. And then add た to mark the action as completed, “having been dropped”. The い is often dropped in such casual speech as we have here.
All together: “Rather than that, such a thing as this had been dropped in our hideout.”
This is Yui (the girl who run into the hideout) speaking to Sacchan (the one with the sproingy glasses). She’s saying:
もう, but exaggerated a bit that it comes out as もお = “geez” or “come on”.
マジメ＋に = serious + the destination particle = do (verb) toward serious = do (verb) seriously.
聞いて = short for 聞いてください. 聞く means “to listen”. In the joining form 聞いて, joining ください “please (do for me)” results in a meaning of “please listen (to me)”.
I’m so sorry for asking a few other questions on the same day but please bear with me. Any help would be appreciated
On page 7 panel 2, there is a sentence called 「つか いくら 情報が欲しくても ヒーローごっこで 警察に 頼るのは ズリィだろ お前は」I’m not quite sure what いくら and ズリィ mean here but I translated it as “How should I put it… no matter how much the news is wanted, we should rely on the police and not people playacting as superheroes. It’s unfair, you guys”
On page 7 panel 4, 斎藤 thought 「こいつだけはマトモで逆に やりづらい」Could someone help me break down this sentence, especially マトモ ans やりづらい
I think no one addressed this question so I’ll try to.
もっと大きな事件はないのかよ リーダー
If I understood correctly, this is something that Saki (aka Sacchan) is telling Yui. Yui is the leader.
もっと => more
大きな => big in adjective form (that’s why it has a な there)
事件 => incident, case or happening
は => Topic-marker particle
ない => not exist; the negative of ある
の => explication-tone の
か => question particle
よ => emphasis sentence-ender particle
リーダー => leader
So this literally says “Not exists bigger incident, leader!?”
In more natural English this would be “Don’t you have a more bigger incident, leader?”. This builds on what she said in the previous panel “だって全然大変じゃないじゃん” (“That’s not a serious incident!”); she’s implying that some panda-cat is not interesting enough - that she wants to work on something more important or interesting.
The explication-tone の was already explained by @ChristopherFritz in a previous post, but I’ll add that it’s being used here because Sacchan is implicitly asking for an explanation with her question. So this の can be used both in questions and affirmations.
For anyone already overwhelmed by all the grammar discussion, it’s okay to read over it, only partially understand it, and move on. The most important grammar will come up again and again, and it doesn’t hurt to ask about previously-covered grammar when it comes up later!
(I know I sure didn’t catch on to a lot of this grammar stuff the first time around…)
Condensed for length
(Typo catch: His line ends with お前ら, which is effectively the plural of お前.)
Your translation is very close. As you may have figured (based on your translation), ズリィ is ズルイ. Saitou is a bit crude in his wording when talking with the kids, so sometimes you’ll see a word turn out different from you’d expect.
「いくら情報が欲しくても」 is along the lines of “No matter how much (the) information is desirable…” The いくら provides the “how much” portion of these.
The second half of the sentence is a clause containing a topic, and a comment on the topic. This is the core of the Japanese sentence structure.
In the topic-comment structure, you state a topic, and you make a comment on that topic.
Topic: ヒーローごっこで警察に頼るのは
Comment: ズリィだろ
The topic is comprised of:
ヒーローごっこ＋で = “playing hero” + particle which in this context we can think of as “with”
A topic has to be a noun, so の is added to turn 「ヒーローごっこで警察に頼る」 into a noun. Then は marks it as the topic.
The comment portion is:
ズリィ = ずるい = “unfair”, “dishonest”
だろ = short for だろう = has a meaning like “don’t you agree?” or “you know?”
=> “It’s unfair, you know.”
Keeping the topic-comment structure when translated to English, it wound be something like, “Regarding relying on the police with your playing hero, it is unfair, you know.”
Bringing all of it together (and making it sound smoother in English:
“No matter how much you want information, it’s unfair to rely on the police for your hero play-acting.”
Note that it may be better to translate this as “it’s cheating to rely on the police”.
マトモ means “decency” (among other closely-related English words). Essentially, Saitou is saying that Yui is the only decent kid in the group.
For verbs, you can add づらい to the end to make them into an adjective meaning "(verb) is difficult to do). With a “godan” verb like やる, the う sound becomes い (resulting in やり), then づらい is appended.
The で here I believe is だ (which we see at the end of “a [noun] is a [noun]” sentences). However, it’s in the joining form, で. This allows another sentence to attach on to this one, similar to “and” in English.
I don’t have a good translation for his line here, but I’d say along the lines of, “Just this kid’s decent, and conversely that makes this difficult to do.” Essentially, it’s easy for him to tell off さっちゃん and 琴葉 because they’re bad kids, but his technique doesn’t work the same on Yui.
Thanks for catching that one; I went on a bit long answering that I missed it =(
There’s no limit on how many questions you can ask =D Especially when you’ve put in the effort to glean what you can from the material before asking.
Just to add to what others have said, the sentence is in full: えっ なんでうんちなのさっちゃん？ It has a question word at the start, and a question mark at the end. If it was spoken aloud it would have a rising intonation indicating a question.
So rather than this being an explanatory sentence, this is a question sentence seeking an explanation. Eh, why poop Sacchan?
Page 5 - どんなのだったか描いてみそ
I don’t remember seeing this みそ before. I wondered at first if it was a contraction of some sort but it actually has a dictionary entry of its own. Interestingly it’s described in the dictionary as being a “pun” on 見ろ (みろ). I presume the pun is that みそ sounds like miso as in miso soup.
Verb ending in て plus みる means “to try doing something”
みろ (with ろ rather than る) is an imperative or command form; so Verb ending in て plus みろ means - “try doing something” (command)
Verb ending in て plus みそ apparently also means “try doing something”
So our sentence means Try drawing what kind of thing it was.
Is it a rule that we don’t refer to textbook grammar when explaining grammar points? Because to me as a textbook student, saying X is casual form of Y is more helpful than having X explained with a completely different descriptors and trying to click what it’s supposed to be in a sentence pattern that I already know.
ex.
"Japanese verbs don’t have tense like in English (past, present, future). Instead, they are either an incomplete action or a completed action. Completed actions have た added to them (in this case いる, changing it to いた).
If いる means “exists”, then いた means “existed”." - it’s also short/causal form of well known います → いました
I don’t think there are rules about how to explain grammar. So far, it looks to me like people explain grammar points the way they personally find them most understandable. That will differ from individual to individual, but since you can find several variations of explanations to most grammar points throughout the forum, chances are you’ll find one that will click for you.
The way @ChristopherFritz explained that particular point does seem different than most books do it, but it works perfectly with the wiring of my brain, so I was very happy to see it expressed that way
Oh I agree that the explanation is good, I just think in basic tense forms relating them to the textbook forms may help not cause unnecessary confusion. I asked because I thought maybe we don’t like the “polite” forms here
If いる means “exists”, then いた means “existed”." - it’s also short/causal form of well known います → いました
it’s a matter of perspective, many who learned from different sources will see いる as the base form or dictionary form, and います as a modification of it, the polite form, so it might not even cross their mind to explain it relative to the polite form.
i guess it’s personal preference, but it seems to be easier to derive every other form from the dictionary form, so it makes sense to explain using it.
Oh, now I see what you mean (or I believe I do …)
Well, that assumes that people are more familiar with います/いました, and I don’t know if that is true as not everyone starts out with Genki or such.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find a resource that does not start a student with MASU form? Nativeshark maybe?
edit: So, I checked and TK grammar doesn’t, though I always considered TK as more of a reference book, than teaching thing. I also never really studied with TK so that’s on me.
Nice to see there are a lot of people reading. So I have to put a few words. My first impressions of this book are that I am pretty terrified and it seems a bit harder than Soreayu. There was a number of grammar points I had to look up which showed JLPT3 next to them, namely どころじゃない、 いくら～ても albeit the thing they express is not hard to understand. Nevertheless, I’m absolutely charmed by characters so far, the book is goofy and has うんこ right at the start teehee.
English textbooks for teaching grammar often use English grammar concepts to explain Japanese grammar concepts. This works effectively as an analogy for a shortcut to vague understanding. Keep learning Japanese long enough, however, and you’ll realize that the English grammar you were taught doesn’t really convey what is happening with the Japanese grammar.
Verb tense is a perfect example of this. Thinking in terms of past, present, and future, one is told that Japanese verbs have a past tense, and they have a present/future (or non-past) tense. This can lead to wondering, “How do I know if this verb is present or future?” In reality, Japanese verbs are completed actions or not completed actions, so the question of whether it is present or future doesn’t conceptually exist. The action of the verb simply has not completed.
There’s no harm in referring to grammar here in the way textbooks teach it. I personally lean more toward what the actual Japanese grammar is (as best I understand it).
I agree 100% that this is a good route, so long as the person has learned verbs with the ます helper verb attached first. (It’s the route that I was taught back in high school, and I know it’s the route the very-popular Genki teaches.)
Authors of modern (online) Japanese learning courses and materials understand it’s better to teach the most common (casual) form of the verb first, and save the ます helper verb for later on. This means we’ll have a mix of people who learned the ます helper verb form first, and people who did not.
As you can probably imagine, this makes it an un-level playing field (so to speak) when it comes to explaining grammar, because everyone’s starting from somewhere different. But I think by the end of the volume, a lot of basic concepts will have leveled out in readers’ recognition and understanding of them.
This is it.
For some people, this will be the way they first learned it, and this can differ wildly whether they were introduced to Japanese grammar by reading Genki, or by watching Cure Dolly, or by picking up a Japanese novel and doing a Google search every time they encounter something unknown.
For others, it will be based on the deeper understanding they’ve gained over time, as they’ve read up on grammar from different sources, possibly including Japanese language resources in Japanese.
I agree that there is possible room for confusion when a textbook says one thing, and another source says another thing. But I also know that I learned a lot the textbook way, and it hindered my proper understanding of various concepts for a long time.
There’s no easy solution to this. But if you see a question answered with grammar concepts in a way that differ from how you learned them, don’t hesitate to give your own reply to the question explaining things the way you learned them. It’s perfectly fine to have two or more people answer the same question, and different explanations will help different learners!
There’s not much utility to the polite forms for this specific manga, because they only come up a few times in the volume. But as a teaching tool (“いる is the casual version of います”), don’t hesitate to mention it at any point =D
Over time, readers will come to recognize various patterns with verbs. For example, 飲む (to drink) becomes 飲みます when polite. 行く (to go) becomes 行きます when polite. And it’ll be easier to understand the concept of “godan” verbs, where the last letter (む and く in these examples) changes from the う sound to the い sound (み and き here) before adding the ます helper verb.
Once learners get used to enough of these patterns, the verb recognition game takes on a whole new conceptual level.
Ah, I wish I worded it like that. That captures perfectly what I wanted to convey!
I agree with you on this regarding formal textbooks.
I think resources originally started with ます decades over half a century ago because people learning to speak Japanese would want to speak politely in Japan. And then later resources just copied that because that’s the way it was always done. I’ll be surprised if any modern (created in the past five years) resources lead with ます unless they are doing things “the way they’ve always been done”.
As examples of this, Sakubi introduces ます at lesson 6, but doesn’t really cover it until lesson 12. Cure Dolly also holds off on it until later on.
This is normal. You’re coming from a manga with short chapters, mainly only two characters, one of whom speaks in a polite manner. And you’re entering a manga with longer chapters, more complex situations, and more casual/colloquial speech.
Do the best you can, hang on tight, don’t give up, take in as much as you can, and you’ll make so much progress over the span of the volume!
One thing that first-time readers (and maybe even second- or third-time readers) will notice is that higher level JLPT grammar shows up. This can lead to the question of: should I be learning this right now?
When it comes to grammar, if you can memorize it on one pass, I say go for it. If you’re like me and it takes (quite) a bit longer to learn things, it’s okay to loosely understand it, and move on without trying to commit it to memory.
The reason for this is because when you’re still relatively new to learning grammar and recognizing it when reading, it’s best to learn the most common grammar first. After all, that’s the grammar you’ll see the most.
You can think of a JLPT level as a frequency guide. JLPT5? It’s ✭✭✭✭✭ frequency grammar. JLPT3? It’s ✭✭✭ frequency grammar. JLPT1? That’s ✭ frequency grammar.
It’s not a perfect concept, but when you have a lot to learn, always aim for higher frequency items, because they’ll come up most often.
For those who don’t want to look up the JLPT level for grammar (I never did), you can determine frequency by recognizing “I saw this grammar a few of times now in this manga” and determine that’s something to give extra focus to.
Yeah, but the whole point is afaik that dictionary form is used in spoken language as simple form of “present” tense.
the thing is, even in polite sentences the dictionary form will be used, from my understanding, the -masu ending only appears at the end, all other verbs from connecting clauses before, will be in dictionary form or in forms derived from it, so understanding of it is necessary even if the majority of speech in whatever context you find yourself in was polite.
Summary
Over time, readers will come to recognize various patterns with verbs. For example, 飲む (to drink) becomes 飲みます when polite. 行く (to go) becomes 行きます when polite. And it’ll be easier to understand the concept of “godan” verbs, where the last letter (む and く in these examples) changes from the う sound to the い sound (み and き here) before adding the ます helper verb.
this point @ChristopherFritz made is important and the more you read and work with godan verbs, you’ll realize why it’s more useful to talk about the dictionary form.
take 飲む (to drink) again, notice it ends in む and now look at this chart from the wikipedia page of japanese verb conjugation, which was not too long ago rewritten to be way better.
now look at the endings, and see what you can do with the verb when changing the む to its equivalent uiaeo endings. (むみまめも and んで) in this case.
see how many different helper verbs or grammatical constructs exist and see how the -masu ending is one of many, note that you can also combine some of them and speaking from experience, it’s so much easier having a good grasp on how to modify the dictionary form to end up with whatever you need, instead of working backwards from the polite form.
i really get where you are coming from, especially when most textbooks start with the polite form, to get students speaking as quickly as possible in a classroom setting, but i think even textbooks will have to work with the plain form at some point in later chapters and the argument is that it’s simply easier in the long run to start with it right away.
