霧のむこうのふしぎな町 | Week 1 Discussion 🌬 🏘

Don’t forget the vocab sheet! It might not have every word, but it will definitely save some lookup exhaustion. I know it had 思いきって, for example :wink:

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First question?

Page 7

「さあ、きいだごどねえなあ。見でわがるえ。

I assume (possibly wrongly) that that last sentence is 見てわかる or at least 見てわがる, but I have no idea what it means…? Is she compelling Rina to look around? Saying she’s never seen it before?

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I’m guessing 見てわかる, meaning “look and see” (if you look, you will understand)

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More experienced readers! Please help me out.
I feel the dialect will discourage newer readers, and I can already see mistakes in the vocab sheet. I’m starting a new page in the vocab sheet to include the parts of sentences where the dialect is likely to cause confusion. I’d really appreciate you checking through this once I have a bit more in there (or adding to it if you have the time).
I’m going for phrases or sentences rather than just words, as I think it will help for people to be able to compare the dialect with standard Japanese. (I’m just not always 100% sure I know the correct standard Japanese :joy: )

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But I looked that up :sob: what did I type in?!

Oooh, I see, you mean it’s just the two verbs separately? :+1:

I should have thought about this before we started, but what do people feel the standard should be for inputting words? I was adding in the ‘standard’ spellings, but I can see how that might not be helpful if readers don’t make the connection - I’m thinking perhaps put the standard spelling in ‘kana’ column, and then the dialectal version in the notes?

Or should it be the other way round?

Actually, thinking about it - you can’t put the dialectal version of みて in, for example, because we input dictionary form. So I’m thinking put the actual conjugation in the notes column.

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What about having a column with the words as they are in the book, (dialect, conjugation etc.) and then next to that another column with the standardized (I assume 東京方言?), dictionary form? And maybe in another column a quick explanation, saying that this is that-and-that 方言, and this verb is conjugated as, for example, past polite negative?

I like the idea of another column for dialect (conjugated), but I think expecting people to explain the conjugation is going to make it too much work to add things to the sheet. There’s already a notes column for that if they really want, I guess.

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No, that’s not standard Japanese either. Standard Japanese is called 標準語, and is an artificially “neutral” version of the language. It is heavily based on the Tokyo dialect, but there are some variations.

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My ebook has pictures, look :joy_cat:

image

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In the text I came across a somewhat more advanced combination of grammar, so I thought I’d briefly mention it to help others along:

At 4%: … あの町へつきさえすれば、…

Explanation

This is two grammar forms in combination, so let’s pull them apart:

  1. つきさえする
    This is つき + さえ + する. つき is the masu-stem of つく (to arrive), and さえする (in combination with point 2) takes the meaning of “if only”.
  2. すれば
    This is the ば-form of the verb する which means “if”.

Put together, this means “if only you [manage to] arrive in that town”.

I also want to mention one other thing to avoid possible confusion:

At 3%: 何年生なのすか?

The answer to this is ...

「六年。」which does not mean “6 years old” (that would be 六歳) but instead “6th grade” (which should be 六年生 to be precise, but as she is very short-spoken here, she abbreviates it.)

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Woah, I was gonna ask about (1), thank you for answering it before I’d even asked :grin:

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I had to look it up myself (I knew about さえ but only in combination with nouns, not with verbs) so I figured others might benefit from my newly-gained knowledge as well :slight_smile:

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Well, in this case, the い-stem is basically being used as a noun anyway, correct?

I noticed it listed as an adverb – what about this form makes it an adverb rather than the て form of a verb to join it with another verb in a series of actions?

I have a book on Japanese adjectives and adverbs, but I don’t see anything in it about adverbs ending in て.

I also checked for the word in a Japanese dictionary then tried looking up the “part of speech” listed, but that will be a lot of separate learning to understand Japanese grammar in terms of Japanese terminology rather than English grammar terms.

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For Flying Witch, I also made the dialect rows a light yellow colour, so they’d stand apart from the standard words. Don’t know if we’d want anything like that here, but I figured I’d mention that.

So did Belle’s book Gaston flipped through in that movie scene :wink:

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That looks like a good mnemonic, indeed! But it seems to be a bit more complicated:

  • With nouns, the usage is noun + さえ + verb
  • With verbs in masu-stem, the usage is verb-masu + さえ + する (one cannot use other verbs, it seems)
  • It can also be preceded by verbs in te-form, again with a verb after it
  • It can also be preceded by adjectives in continuous form (く/で), in this case it is followed by ある

and maybe some other usages that I’ve overlooked in this long list :slight_smile:

The Japanese dictionaries always leave out the 詞 part of the parts of speech. It says 副 (short for 副詞) so it’s an adverb.


I think て form just acts as an adverb sometimes. Here’s an example that came up on the Bunpro forums:

彼は日本を代表して会議に出た。

My response:

sometimes て form can translate like an adverb. I’d probably translate the sentence to “he attended the conference as a representative from Japan”.

I don’t think I ever found an sources on that. It’s just how it felt to me.

It’s a common pattern though, having adverbs ending in て, some of which are derived from verbs. *て #adv - Jisho.org

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Following my asking, I’ve actually been looking it up online, and came across this article on て.

There’s a lot more written on it, so for anyone unaware of this “adverbial” use of a verb in its て form, I recommend reading the whole section.

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Thanks for the dialect explanations. I am a bit confused with すat the end of the sentence being ね because I had assumed the すto stand forですin the two following sentences (in one of them is not at the end of the sentence though):
何年生なのすか?Page 10
どごがらきたのす?Page 10
My grammar is not very good, so I am not very sure.

Edit: Now that I look at it, if you add the missing か in the second sentence, すwouldn’t be at the end of the sentence either.

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That’s how I took it, but I can’t say for sure that that’s right.

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