First book club complete! I had a few questions though.
Page 162
ノソムハ…カントウ…ダイシンサイ…
I know the second part onward is 関東大震災, but what is that first part?
Page 167
I know ちきしょー is 畜生, but on this page, Yukko adds a バッ to the beginning of it. Does this just strengthen the expression of frustration? I’m not sure I’ve seen that before.
It is 望むは, the dakuten on the ソ is really hard to see
page 176
According to weblio it has to do with おちゃらけ - to joke around.
Not sure on the ばっ on page 167, maybe someone else knows
And congrats on finishing! Completing this manga feels really bittersweet It was my first book club too.
Not sure if that helps, but I typed this into Deepl and it gave me “damn you (It)” for 畜生 and “F*ck you (it)” for バッちいくしょう. So it is most likely as you guessed
I also have some questions:
Page 175
はかせ、私 (に) 今日冒頭から不自然なコケ方してるんですけど…
なにかしてませんか?わたしに。
When I put this into deepl, I get something along the lines of:
“Hakase, you have been mocking me in an unnatural way the entire day already.
Did you do something to me?”
I am not entirely sure on this sentence. On re-reading the section again, it feels more right to me to say:
"Hakase, I have been acting unnaturally the entire day already. (as in “strange things have been happening to me”).
“You didn’t do something to me, did you?”
I would love to hear your input on this, as I don’t feel very confident here.^^
Congrats to both of you! I am joinging you, this was my first book club as well
I actually already have Volume 2, so I am looking forward to see, whether we will be able to continue this.
I believe rather than 私に it would be 私は. I looked up what コケ方 means, and Hinative makes me think that it comes from 転ける. So the Verb in the sentence is not “to mock” but “to fall over”.
Nano says “Since the beginning of today I have been falling over in unnatural ways”
(I translated it as “to fall over”, but since it’s コケ方する I guess it is more like “doing things in a falling over manner”? But I think the meaning is the same )
Edit: @aamunoz was faster, but at least we said the same thing
Thanks to both of you!
That makes sense.
For コケ I only found “moss” or when I looked a bit more thoroughly on jisho 虚仮にする (こけにする), which means “to make a fool of someone”. So that’s what I thought it was.
転ける does not pop up on my japanese keyboard, and the “こ” reading is not listed on the Kanji Breakdown on Jisho either, so I didn’t find it.
Yeah, I feel like when I see __かた, the part in the blank is usually (always? Not sure enough to go that far) the stem of a verb. I search Jisho by just putting u-ending kana at the end of it. The regulars like る, す, etc. In this case, こける sounded good so I tried that, and found a verb that means “to fall” which matched the context.
Yukko plays with words a lot, so I just took it to be her taking that word おたんこなす and replacing the end with the English word “fool”. No idea what the dog is about.
The dear scene is an absolute classic. The poetic aspect to it and Yuuko’s complete inability to express what she is seeing kill me every time. Honorable mention to just about any scene with はかせ and なの.
I have to say I don’t think that this manga was great from a language learning perspective. The lack of context for any of the humor makes it difficult to decipher and makes you question your interpretations even if you think you understand every word and grammar point. Additionally the dialogue is often choppy, dramatic, or unnatural so it’s difficult to pick up any sort of conversational flow. I’d recommend Nichijou to anyone looking for a good comedy manga, but probably not to anybody whose main purpose in reading is language study. I certainly would never recommend it as a starting point for reading native material. I’d be happy to hear alternate opinions though!
I also think the low quality of the ebook version hurt my enjoyment a bit. I love the art style so it was painful to have to look at all these great drawings as if they were jpegs that have been re-saved and re-uploaded 100 times. I would definitely recommend the physical edition instead.
If we did an offshoot club I might have to pass not because of any lack of enjoyment of the material, but because I’m already a bit overloaded with reading and I a.) currently am not buying physical copies of manga (it gets expensive and takes up so much space!) and b.) currently prefer reading things that I’m not familiar with, and virtually every manga chapter through volume 6 has been covered by the anime. I might try to catch up sometime down the road or jump in for later volumes though!
Also I would really love to read City! I may nominate it sometime down the line for the BBC if somebody doesn’t beat me to it.
Finally, congratulations to anyone who read this as their first manga! It’s a huge achievement, and getting through that first volume opens the doors to so much more. It says a lot about your perseverance that you were able to get through it (and hopefully enjoy it!) despite its difficulty.
As I was doing a pretty big makeup review session I kept getting notifications of activity here. I saw that Radish8 had stopped in with some polls! Excellent, cant wait to wrap this session now. Then this happened.
I whole-heartedly agree with this… this is definitely not beginner-level reading. Things are so over the top it’s hard to tell if one understood the meaning of the dialogue right or not; some jokes rely on references to proverbs or poems that a learner would be very unlikely to be familiar with, and even sometimes they are tweaked which makes it incredibly hard to google.
Not the book’s fault, but I’m also really disappointed about how low quality the digital version of this manga is. It feels really unfair that I got charged basically the same price as a new copy of the physical version for it.
It’s a relief knowing that the struggle was real and shared among us. In order to prevent myself from reading ahead in 日常 I was also reading Tokyo Ghoul 1. I kept thinking, “this is much easier than 日常, right?”. Having never read a manga I really had no idea what was what.
It sounds like I made a lucky choice going with physical copies. I’ve collected the first seven volumes that way so far and I’m hoping other people will want to discuss them in a book club style format.
This was my main issue with this manga. It was cute, and funny and I enjoyed it - but I was constantly second-guessing myself because the humour is so surreal.
And this was my second issue. There were a lot of things that I would have had no chance of understanding without the brilliant people in the bookclub threads! So huge thanks to everybody who contributed to the threads, and to the vocab list.
Despite struggling though, I had fun and I do want to continue reading the series. I have bought the second volume - but I’m going to be waiting for a while, until I have more confidence in my ability, before trying to read it.
It was my first book club too.
