三ツ星カラーズ — Week 12 Discussion (ABBC)

I’ll answer what I can:

Pg. 87

ないと is a grammar point that means, among other things, “must do”. It’s short for ないといけない.

https://jlptsensei.com/learn-japanese-grammar/ないと-naito-meaning/

Pg. 89

というのに is a fairly common way to basically express frustration with something. More info here:

grammar - What is this というのに? - Japanese Language Stack Exchange

Pg. 91

That’s how I read it also!

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Looking at example sentences (here, for example), it seems 我先に almost always goes with と, although I haven’t managed to find an explanation why. My theory is that, as a set expression, it may not be functioning as an adverb on its own, and needs と to function adverbially. Or と is added for empahsis, like in other particle combinations (へと for example). But don’t take my word for it.

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FWIW (read: nothing. I have no idea!), that’s the same conclusion I reached, but I have zero idea if it’s correct, so I wasn’t going to give an answer I had no way of backing up. :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit to add: I lean more in the direction of it being for emphasis, to be clear (if this what’s happening), by the way, since Jisho would usually mention if a word requires と to become an adverb, and it doesn’t give any indication that this is the case for 先に entry.

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Adding to this, this general form of “if one doesn’t do X, then it’s bad” is very common in Japanese. That commonness is probably why the part after と often doesn’t get spoken (left implied). You’ll also see cases of “if one does do X, then it’s good/bad” (and I’m sure there are even cases of “if one doesn’t do, then it’s good”).

For the longest time, I had difficulty grasping this grammar well, likely because the grammar is uncommon in English while being very common in Japanese. Even now that I know it well, and encounter it all the time when reading manga, this grammar it still feels “foreign” to me. (I’m not sure how to shake this feeling.)

One thing I don’t have a deep grasp for the “why” is かわいい vs かわいそう, but it’s something where it’s good to know the difference. While かわいい is fairly well known as “cute”, when you replace the い with そう, it takes on a meaning along the lines of “pitiful” and “pathetic”.

In this case, the plight of the elephants makes Sacchan feel pity for them, or feel sorry for them, so the elephants are かわいそう.

If it helps any, Kotobank says it can be used with or without と.

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Actually, that does help and pushes me back in the other direction. That seems to say that it can be used alone as a noun or a na-adjective, but if it’s being used as an adverb, it takes と, unless I’m misreading that definition, right?

Edit:
But then we’re still left with both われさきに and 先に entries in Jisho giving zero indication that’s the case, so I feel like I’m just misreading the definition a bit, and that the と might just be for emphasis.

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“Pitiable” is an obsolete meaning for かわいい - etymologically, かわいそう is かわいい (in its “pitiable” meaning) + そう (appears to be).

One does see where they were coming from, though. Lemme demonstrate:

sad-eyes

Look at this girl. Look at those big sad eyes, that pouting mouth. So pitiable.

But you could describe her as cute for those exact same reasons.

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I just noticed that although I did a web search for “我先にと” with quotes, the Kotobank result which came up as the first search result doesn’t actually include the に…

Personally, I’ve never knowingly encountered 我先 before, so I’m completely unfamiliar with it. Thus, I’m at the limit of being able to comment on it!

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Nor have I, and I can hardly find any sentences that include it when I do context searches (basically just the same ones @omk3 already posted). I’ve posted a question about it in a language-exchange group I’m in, in the meantime, and I’ll post any answer I get here. :smile:

我先に Exchange

This is what I have gotten back so far this evening. If I get any more details or different answers, I’ll share that when I see it in the morning. Goodnight, all!



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Uh, so this is how you feel when you understand the puns they’re making.

Also oneechan’s dry remark about her food budget made me laugh.

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I just looked back from the very first thread to now and realized the sheer amount of people that dropped off reading altogether. :sweat_smile:

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I was really hoping to be able to remain a larger number of readers with some of my pre-start postings, but in the end it looks like it didn’t help much =(

Various drop-offs by 11 weeks in for ABBC

Shirokuma Cafe: From about 204 to 13 active in 11 weeks
Chi’s Sweet Home: From about 69 to 27 active in 7 weeks
Kekkon: From about 34 to 9 active in 9 weeks
Rental Big Brother: From about 120 to 29 active in 11 weeks
Takagi-san: From about 163 to 29 active in 9 weeks
Soredemo: From about 70 to 23 active in 8 weeks
Wadanohara: From about 24 to 14 active in 7 weeks
Mitsuboshi Colors: From about 85 to 22 active in 11 weeks

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Oh wow Shirokuma Cafe hurt some folks :joy:

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Must be difficult trying to balance content that will appeal to people without it being too hard to consume.
A lot of people come to Japanese for the manga but it might not be the best place to start reading.

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If we look at the non-manga ABBC's...

なぜ?どうして?科学のお話 2年生: Started with about 62 people reading along, and ended with 10 people finishing.
10分で読める物語 二年生: Started with 25 people reading along, and ended with 2 people reading along.
10分で読める伝記(2年生): Started with about 59 people reading along, and ended with 16 people reading along.

Here is a reenactment of someone running a book club, wanting everyone to progress and succeed, only to find the number of readers continually falling over time.

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It’s no reflection on the book club runners… this sh1t is hard
look at it differently, each book club produces around 20 new readers of Japanese, potentially people that go on to read Japanese for years to come…

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Maybe a bit fewer than that when you consider long-time readers participating, but I’ve definitely enjoyed seeing a bunch of the first-time readers in the past year who’ve kept at it and are making good progress =D

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I cannot thank you enough for running the book club. I have made it this far and am looking forward to the challenge of doing a full chapter in a week. I have tried reading native materials on my own several times and never made it anywhere close to this far. The people who answer questions (especially, as I have mentioned a few times, when the dialogue is written how people really speak so things like ichi.moe and dictionaries are not helpful) make all the difference.
Now my goal is to get to a point where I can answer some questions and not just ask them!

edit: there was a typo that was driving me nuts.

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I need to second everything that @pjames43 is saying and offer a huge thank you for running this. I really didn’t think I was ready to read manga but decided to take the plunge; I still find it difficult to fully grasp everything but with patience and a lot of dictionary lookups I’m getting about 80% of it without having to use DeepL.

I’m already planning to join the Happiness book club and planned to start a second manga on my own but became distracted by a video game and some graded readers I bought a while back that were too advanced for me (and now I’m finally tackling them!).

Also your advice that it’s deciphering more than reading was invaluable to me for setting my expectations and not getting discouraged after the first week took me seven hours (to be fair, several of those hours were figuring out how I wanted to tackle this)!

To avoid double-posting, I’ll give my questions now.

  • (Page 87 panel 2) 牛が食べられてんのに安心してられるか!: I spent some time wondering if 食べられて is using potential (the tigers can eat a cow) or passive (a cow is being eaten). I settled on passive because the particle was が and not を. Is that correct?
  • (Page 89 panel 1) 動物園 遠足ぶりだけど楽しいなー: I’m trying to figure out this sentence, especially the ぶりだけど part.
  • (Page 89 panel 6) われ先にとパンダに走ったくせに: How is われ being used here. The only definition on Jisho that makes sense is you but it’s marked as an archaism. Also I’m not sure I understand why we have the にと particle. I understand this sentence as Even though you first ran ahead to see the pandas
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I can confirm that my first ABBC, not all that long ago, was invaluable in giving me the confidence to start reading, and in showing me ways to break down sentences and look up grammar when things got confusing. It was enough to allow me to now try and read almost anything I set my mind to. Some things are harder than others, but knowing how to go about the difficult parts and how to find support makes all the difference.

To your questions:

  • (Page 87 panel 2)
    Yes. Particles are the key to breaking down any sentence apart from those cases where they end up being confusing

  • (Page 89 panel 1)
    So ぶり according to Jisho is a suffix that means “style, manner, way”. Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns says this about ぶり: “Means the way things are or their state when comes after action nouns or verb stems.” (It can also mean “after all this time” after temporal expressions, but I don’t see a temporal expression here, although Deepl still chooses to translate it this way). I can’t find a simple, straightforward way to translate it into English, but I believe she’s saying that simply wandering around the zoo as an excursion (possibly implied: instead of as a mission to save the animals) is fun.

  • (Page 89 panel 6)
    われさきに is a set expression, so I wouldn’t worry too much about the われ part. It, and more specifically the と after it, has been discussed quite a bit further up in this thread.

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I am far for an expert, and I was just going by the “style, manner, way” definition I got on ichi.moe when looking things up, but I took it to mean:

However, a zoo excursion like this is fun.

The ‘however’ being as you mention, opposed to the implied mission to save the animals.

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