I’m honestly thinking we basically need to sit down and work through it together, sentence by sentence, Beginner Book Club style. It’s hard, yeah, but if we pool our collective grammar know-how, I reckon we can all learn something. As it is, the book clubs here sometimes feel a little to me like everyone reading it on their own, commening “it was good/not good” and moving on - like, why even have a book club? We’re not even having an actual characters/plots/themes style book club discussion.
It was never ever going to be easy anyway - Kyon is an abolute snarker, and Koizumi prevaricates more than Pinocchio in Shrek trying to obfuscate the truth.
I started reading, but several times I’ve caught myself just sounding out the sentences and switching to the English version to work out what it means, but not actually making sense of the grammar.
For example, sentence one:
サンタクロースをいつまで信じていたなんてことはたわもない世間話にもならないくらいのどうでもいいような話だが、それでも俺がいつまでサンタなどとういう想像上の赤服じーさんを信じていたかと言うとこれは確信を持って言えるが最初から信じてなどいなかった。
Probably easier to leave the copying-to-the-forums for someone who has the e-book version…
In my head, I kinda read this as
The question of “when did you stop believing in Santa Claus” is mumble mumble, but for me … uh… something believing in an imaginary red-clothed old guy named “Santa” something, and then with increased confidence I can honestly say I never believed it from the beginning.
I don’t get all the grammar. And even where I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on, there’s still weird stuff happening with particles and conjugations that I don’t even know where to begin breaking down. Like 信じてなどいなかった. What’s など doing in there?
But my point is, maybe some of you do. And maybe working together we can actually work it out. Or maybe, collectively, we just happen to own every single grammar textbook known to man. I’ve got the Dictionaries. And Tobira.
I mean, that’s gonna throw the schedule completely out the window, even if we only do it for the first couple of readings, but maybe if it’s a choice between keeping to the schedule, or edifying the group as a whole, the latter one is the better option.