三ツ星カラーズ — Week 5 Discussion (ABBC)

三ツ星カラーズ Week 5: Pages 31–38

Notice: As per conversation last week, we’re continuing to split chapters over two weeks for now.

More advanced readers planning on reading the whole chapter in one go, feel free to fill out the vocabulary sheet for the remainder of chapter 3!

Start Date: 11th of December

Home Thread: Link
Last Week: Link
Next Week: Link

Characters

The following characters appear this week.

Week 5 Yui  結衣(ゆい)

Week 5 Sacchan  さっちゃん

Week 5 Kotoha  琴葉(ことは)

Week 5 Oyaji  おやじ

Week 5 Saitou  斎藤(さいとう)

Week 5 Taisa  モノクロ 大佐(たいさ)

Page Numbers Guide

Due to a general lack of page numbers, it can be difficult to know which page you’re asking a question on. You can use the thumbnails below to see at a glance which page number each is.

Thumbnails with page numbers for this week's reading. (Spoiler warning!)

Read Online

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Vocabulary List

Please read the editing guidelines in the first sheet before adding any words!

Discussion Guidelines

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Quick Links

The following links will take you to previously-asked questions. Because this list is manually put together, some questions may be missing from the list.

Links will be added after there is discussion.

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Context for the first page of this week’s reading: Not shown, Yui has just placed an envelope in the mailbox that looks like a panda. The first panel follows this.

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No questions (for once), just really like how おやじ is kind of caring in this chapter by buying their cat a food bowl :slight_smile:

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Might want to mark spoilers. :wink:

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Just changed it, thanks for the reminder :slight_smile:

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Also, side-note, but ぱんこ is listed on the vocabulary sheet as “not an actual word,” but ぱんこ is absolutely a word… Panko is pretty common, even in American/Canadian households. It’s bread crumbs, essentially… (though in this case, it’s also just a funny play on words and way for Sacchan to segue from ぱんや to うんこ) . I was just curious if there was a particular reasoning for it being listed as “not a word” before I changed it.

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Just me failing at dictionary lookup and getting zero results when checking to see if it was an actual word =(

I had even double-checked, at that…

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No worries, then! It’s just something that I have in my pantry at all times, so I didn’t even have to think about it when I saw the word. :stuck_out_tongue: I’ve updated the sheet!

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Except from the criminal’s note, I think I understood everything more or less, even if I don’t understand how some of the constructions work structurally…

The whole joke of the week is that Sacchan is randomly confusing other words with “poop” and it culminates in her asking in the bakery whether they have any poop, right?

As for the criminal’s note:

I think I understand the second line. “What is bread that isn’t/can’t be eaten?”? Accordingly, Sacchan asks the bakery if they sell inedible bread? But I can’t really make sense of the first line, especially that に is confusing me.

On that same page, I’m also confused as to whether Saitou is trying every combination beginning from 0001 or whether he’s been trying combinations since one o’clock or something else entirely.

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Joke of the Week, Pg. 37

That’s definitely one of the jokes this week, yes. Sacchan enjoys her poop jokes and makes them all the time, so she walks into the bakery and says, “Excuse me! Do you have any poop?” And then follows up with an even more insulting question, “Is this the bakery that sells bread that nobody can eat?”

No wonder the shop owners got a bit angry. :stuck_out_tongue:

Culprit's Note Breakdown. Pg. 36

First line:

金庫の中に = “inside of the safe.” The に that is confusing you is a location particle, saying that whatever follows the に is inside (中) of the safe (金庫).

お宝を = “the treasure” with an を particle, indicating it is being acted upon by the subsequent verb.

かくした = “to hide”, past/completed action tense.

Altogether: “Inside of the safe, (I) hid a treasure.”

As is common in Japanese, the subject has been dropped.

(I’m realizing after typing that, that by first line and second line, you probably mean the main body of the message and this part I just broke down may have been obvious to you, but I’ll leave it in case others find it useful).

Second line:

皆の思いがたくさんつまっているのに食べられない is two “sentences” (you’ll see why I put that in quotes in a minute) that are connected with a conjunctive のに, meaning roughly, “even though”

I broke it down as follows:

皆の思いが = “Everybody’s love/affection” followed by the が topic marker

たくさん = “a lot”

つまっている = “to be packed (with)”

のに = “even though”

食べられない = “to be edible” in negative form.

Now the reason why I put “sentences” in quotes is that, in this case, those are actually one whole “phrase” that is modifying the word パン as opposed to being individual sentences in their own right. It was just easier to break them down if we treated them as sentences first. If we put the パン in there at the end, we get:

“「パン」which is full of a lot of everybody’s love/affection, even though it can’t be eaten.”

Edited for correctly maintaining structure:

“「パン」which can’t be eaten, even though it’s full of everybody’s love/affection.”

And finally adding in the last part of the sentence (with the は particle marking that パン as the subject of the sentence): な~んだ? meaning, “What is?”

We get the full line to read:

“What is パン which is full of a lot of everybody’s love/affection, even though it can’t be eaten?”

“What is パン which can’t be eaten, even though it is full of a lot of everybody’s love/affection?”

The full note altogether reads to me:

"Inside of the safe, I hid a treasure.

What is パン which is full of everybody’s love/affection, even though it can’t be eaten?

What is パン which can’t be eaten, even though it is full of everybody’s love/affection.

*Hint:
Look from below."

One thing I will add: The culprit’s note makes a lot more sense if you read the full chapter and don’t just stop midway through. This is another instance like last week where you’re missing some information until the very end that makes this note make sense.

Saitou's Strategy, Pg. 36

I read it as he is trying every combination from 0001. If it were since 1 o’clock, it would mention 1時, not just 1 by itself and I can’t really think of any other potential things he could be doing.

Here is a good place to ask those kinds of questions, if you have any more! You’ll likely get some answers and resources that will help you make sense of structures you don’t quite get.

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Conjunctive のに is exactly what I was missing, thanks.

Still not sure about the structure of that sentence:

Riddle Note
  1. How do you know that 思い is “affection”? I can find that meaning on jisho but the one I remembered (and which seems more obvious?) is “thought”.
  2. given the が, I think it should be the 思い that is full of something and not the パン… Is it possible the sentence rather means something like “what is the bread that everyone is thinking about (= that everyone’s thoughts are full of) even though it can’t be eaten?”?

I’ll probably add more questions during the week, too tired for it now.

Edit

Actually, looking at that grammar page for のに, it seems like the structure is Xのに = even though X, so I think it should be the other way around: “What’s the bread that can’t be eaten even though everyone is thinking about it a lot?”

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All I have to say is that I’m glad to see the glasses trend continue, and that on the very first panel I was briefly excited that パチパチ is one of the few onomatopoeia I’ll actually recognize… then realized they didn’t quite write it that way. Nevertheless!

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Riddle Note

First, you are right about のに. I got myself turned around. So it would actually be:

“What is パン that can’t be eaten, even though it is full of everybody’s love/affection. (i.e., everybody loves it, as a layered meaning).”

  1. I picked the “affection” meaning because later context means I tie it to something else that happened in the chapter. I could equally have picked the “desires/hopes” meaning, but it didn’t fit the riddle as well, so I went with second pick.

  2. This is a really tough one, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around how to explain this simply. I could be wrong, so I definitely welcome any corrections, but to me, if the 思い were what was full of パン, it would need to be に or には, not が following the 思い, to indicate that’s where the つまっている was acting. Without that に/には, the つまっている is far more likely to modify the subsequent noun (especially since it’s part of a noun-modifying phrase). I’d also add that the other interpretation only makes sense if you take the “thought” definition. “Love and affection” can’t be full of パン like a “thought” could. But a “thought” doesn’t really make sense to me in the full context of the chapter, and in the context of the riddle.

Here’s an example sentence which uses the same verb:

この箱にはぎっしり物が詰まっています。

It is translated (by the source it was found at) as “This box is tightly packed with stuff.”

Note that the が follows the 物 (stuff), not the 箱 (box). There is a には after 箱. If we were to drop the この箱には, it wouldn’t suddenly change the sentence to mean, “(something) is tightly packed inside the stuff,” it would be more like, “The stuff is tightly packed (inside here).” (Though we wouldn’t know what it is packed inside of without more context.)

Instead of having some kind of “where it is packed/where it is full” area preceding the 思い in our sentence with a に/には, it’s directed to the noun being modified, I think. Either way, I really don’t think 思い can be where the つまっている is happening, in this case, but it’s something that I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

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You know, at first this bit of the conversation made me wonder if perhaps the multiple possible interpretations contributed to this being a riddle, but since they’re all kind of similar (perhaps with a little lateral thinking) I’m assuming this instance is more a case of Japanese just slicing a concept differently, and somehow all 思い is a unified thing I can’t fully wrap my head around after a few decades thinking about the world differently. My guess is 思い is just 思い, it just takes a lot of English words to talk around it, but my one-language-knowing brain is often not happy about it, haha.

This is probably not contributing much, and who knows if it’s even right, just a thought I had on a subject I am totally unqualified to talk about that I wanted to type through anyway.

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I think you’re probably right on the money there; that to Japanese it is the same concept, and it’s just us trying to map it into English that’s causing the headache. (Which at this point is 95% of my headaches in Japanese. If I leave it in Japanese and just try to understand it for what it is and not translate, my head hurts a lot less. I just usually can’t make myself do that because I have to know the details of everything.)

What I can say is, with major spoilers for the discussion:

I checked the anime to see how it translated this. Their translation:

“I am Pan, a loaf stuffed with everyone’s love, but you can’t eat me. What am I?”

Edit: This is obviously a very loose interpretation on their part that doesn’t map perfectly to the Japanese grammar. But honestly, after having spent the better part of 2 hours trying to explain why I think the riddle says what it says, I can relate to them taking a shortcut, especially because the パン is vitally important (hence my steadfast refusal to translate it) to the riddle… But yeah. This also is a pretty strong argument in favor of, “Read the whole chapter if you can,” because part of my dancing around is trying to explain the riddle without giving away the end.

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On 皆の思いがたくさんつまっている

I actually think the more general translation “thoughts” works equally well, if not better, in view of the end of the chapter. Thoughts can be affectionate or not, but whatever they are, they’re still something you can put in this パン for sure. :wink:

See, beginners are always told to pay special attention to the particles, as they hold the key to undestanding what is doing what in a sentence, and then you get が, which, to quote Jisho,

1.indicates sentence subject (occasionally object)
2.indicates possessive (esp. in literary expressions)

So yeah, not very clear after all. As always, context (and experience) is everything.

Here is another example sentence that might help:

彼女は別れた彼との思い出がつまったアルバムを捨てられないでいる
She can’t bring herself to throw away photo albums filled with memories of him.

And another one straight from Wanikani:

魚の骨が喉に詰まっちゃった。
I got a fish bone stuck in my throat.

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Thoughts

“Thoughts” just didn’t read as well to me in the riddle, with the double-meaning of パン (one can’t put their thoughts into bread, like they can the other, but food is often “made with love,” and the other option also often contains “love”), but I don’t disagree that “thought” works well enough for the final result.

“What is パン that can’t be eaten, even though it’s full of everyone’s thoughts/packed with everyone’s thoughts?” would immediately rule out bread as even a potential option to me. Nobody packs thoughts into bread.

I just tried to pick a definition that works best with the double-meaning of パン to try and maintain the actual riddle as much as possible. Or, at least what I felt the riddle was trying to do. Maybe I’m ascribing a double-meaning that wasn’t intended, but I mean, the anime picked similar wording (“love” in that note, “feelings” when 思い is mentioned verbally later) so I’m leaning more towards it being intended than not.

It’s kinda an awkward riddle to translate in general; between the パン double-meaning not translating well, and the idea of 思い representing something so much more meaningful than just the English, “thought,” it’s just a pain overall. Haha.

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More thoughts

At first I interpreted thoughts as in the general sense of putting some thought into doing something, doing it with care. You can make bread with special care. (not that “care” works in the riddle)
There’s definitely some vagueness intended, or else it wouldn’t be a riddle at all. Riddles are meant to be phrased so that they’re open to interpretation, after all. The difficulty is more in translating it so that the riddle still works in English. Riddles and puns are notoriously hard to translate. :slight_smile:

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Even more thoughts

Ah, see, I hadn’t taken that potential meaning into mind, but that way of reading it, I could definitely see the argument for, though wouldn’t that be more like 思いやり than just 思い on its own? Or 配慮?

Especially when you can only do so with half of the information you have in your hand so you don’t spoil the end. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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