I’ll let someone more knowledgeable to answer that.
My gut feeling is that it’s not ungrammatical, just a slightly different nuance? Not sure though.
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FWIW, I agree that it’s grammatical, and while I’m not positive, I think the shift in nuance is from a second-hand knowledge type of thing with the って i.e., “consultations about things said to have been stolen by a panda-like cat”, versus a more firm “consultations about things that have been stolen by a panda-like cat” without the って, which would imply that Saitou has seen the cat stealing things himself.
I’m going by gut feel, for that, though, so I would definitely want confirmation from somebody more knowledgeable.
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I’d say your explanation is pretty much spot on. It’s the difference between discussion about X, versus discussion about people saying X.
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Hey there! I have some minor questions left – as the major ones were already proficiently answered by the brilliant minds in this thread!
Page 6
そうだ じゃあ 捕獲ならいいかリーダー
What is this ならいい construct? I tried to power my way through this grammar point, and broke it down like this:
My breakdown
捕獲 - capture
なら - if
いい - good
Literally: “if capture, good”, which you could also interpret as “you should capture”.
Therefore, my translation ended up being: That is right, ok. Leader, should we capture [it]?
Page 7
黙れクンガキどもこっちは忙しいんだ！
My question here is more specifically about the クンガキ. The vocab spreadsheet gives stupid brat to it; but is the police officer really calling 3 small children stupid brats? Or is there another, more subtle meaning?
I don’t know, English is not my native language so I may have the wrong interpretation of it, but I found it kinda too harsh.
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Your breakdown is pretty much how it goes.
In Japanese, a lot of grammar goes along the lines of “X + conditional + good” or “X + conditional + bad”. You’ll see いい for good or fine, and bad may be ダメ, or いけない, or ならない. These often get translated as “should do X” or “should not do X”.
For the 「 捕獲ならいい」 portion, I’d go with, “It’s fine if we capture it”. The whole line starting from じゃあ, I might go with, “Then, if we capture it, that’s fine, Leader?”
Typo alert: This is ソ.
Yes.
クソガキ is defined as:
- “A child who does pranks (いたずら) and mean mischief (悪さ).”
- “An expression used when badmouthing a child.”
For a different translation than “stupid brats”, I think “(little) troublemakers” is a good choice.
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So that’s why I couldn’t find it anywhere, only in the vocab. spreadsheet! Gosh, I’m bad with Katakana… Thanks for catching it @ChristopherFritz, and I like your “(little) troublemakers” suggestion 
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I wonder if it still takes you (or anyone) this amount of effort these days. I can’t imagine needing several websites now. I believe technology has advanced! I simply use the Jisho iOS app, typing in words I don’t know (which is sometimes every word), and piecing together the sentence.
I have noticed that the Jisho website is vastly inferior to the app for some reason. It doesn’t seem to have a broad algorithm to recognize entries. Searching for slang, casual, or “kid speak” often turns up nothing on the website, but is at the top of the list in the app. In fact, I have yet to find any resource that works as well as the Jisho app for dictionary lookup.
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Just finished this week’s pages. I bought the full series back when this book was being read, but never got around to it. I managed to get through the pages on my own fairly accurately. Then I read through all the replies here. I’m reading this alongside Nagatoro, and this is a little easier for me.
I still have trouble with names unless they are obvious or explicitly stated. I didn’t even know who was who in this book until a few pages in. I find myself tying to translate some names before realizing. It doesn’t help that Japanese names tend to be actual words. Imagine a non-english speaker trying to read an English story featuring names like “ocean” or “tree” or “yellow”.
Anyway, I am going to try to follow the original schedule for this book many years after the fact. I have yet to actually finish a Japanese manga. I got halfway through オオカミ and started a few others. I always fizzle out due to the stories being very simple yet requiring high amount of effort to read. よつばと is a good one, but I find it’s relatively difficult due to the mix of baby and adult speech. 三つ星 seems like a great balance.
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It helps that English has capital letters and articles, so there’s less room for confusion between “He called Archer over” and “He called the archer over”.
After many years reading manga in Japanese, I do still get caught up on names sometimes. It’s usually when I’m reading something without furigana, as it’s harder for me to get to know character names when I don’t see the reading often.
When I first started out on reading manga in Japanese, the best OCR tool I could find was able to OCR one kanji at a time. (And my first manga I read in Japanese had no furigana…)
Nowadays, we have decent OCR tools (Mokuro, Copyfish) as well as being able to simply paste a manga panel into ChatGPT and have it transcribe (and explain) the text for you. Over time, whole toolchains will be written utilizing ChatGPT and other large language model systems with very specific instructions to be able to take specific Japanese material input and break it down in detail in a consistent format. We can already see the first stages of this in various tools (including in Migaku), but there’s massive potential awaits.
I’m a bit fearful that it won’t take this much effort for people going forward. The quicker and easier it is to get an answer, the less likely it is to stick for the learner.
I don’t have a good estimate of how long I was in the “large amount of effort” stage, but the required effort does decrease the more one learns, and now I’m at a point where I can effortlessly read most (not all) manga with furigana. The main thing that gets in my way is when it’s a series with a lot of unknown vocabulary.
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