I just finished up reading chapter two in the English release of the book, and I found that looking back on when I read it in Japanese, I probably understood at best 25% of the sentences, but understood about 50% of what was going on.
One nice thing about reading the English to follow up after the parts I’ve read in Japanese is that this release has different artwork. All the comments in the story so far about Rina’s weight made no sense to me due her thin appearance in the ebook’s artwork, which didn’t help my already low rate of comprehension.
For the curious, here’s the character artwork in this English release:
When I get back to reading in Japanese this upcoming week, maybe my understanding will be increased by one or two percent if there’s any mention of Rina’s weight, now that I know the ebook’s artwork doesn’t line up with the description of the character in the story.
They may have been meant to be harsh on a little kid to keep them from getting fat… the current Japanese book cover artwork may not be original. However, the artwork inside the text seems like it should be original.
The English book artwork is very different from the Japanese version and there are some interesting translation things in there, nothing really wrong but there are some liberties. It’s still a really good translation compared to fan translations, so it’s possible some of that is why she is drawn so differently in the English book.
Another thing is the English book is part of the Kodansha English Library, so I have to wonder how much of the redone artwork was approved by the author/publisher…a really interesting thing to see would be an original printing of the book from the 1970s if you really wanna confirm any of the authors intentions.
…which is very similar to the artwork for the same scene in the above-mentioned and English releases, and also lists 竹川功三郎 as the artist. This means the artist likely redid some or all of the artwork from one of these releases to the next.
I checked my Italian edition and it made me remember that at the beginning of the story there was that man on the farming truck (or something like that) and he called her a little puffy (but not fat).
Here is the missing bit: 揺する is a transitive verb, which is also indicated by を. With this it becomes „He rocked his belly and burst into laughter.“ (literally) How did he rock it? By grabbing it, it seems. (Or so I think…)
For some verbs you cannot really realize this from the English because the same verb is used (e.g. in this case it‘s „to shake“ but is it „it shakes“ or „I shake it“?) while Japanese uses two different verbs. Sometimes verbs are also used differently, e.g. 分かる is intransitive but is often translated to the transitive „to understand“. Therefore one needs to learn this together with the verb. (See e.g. somewhere in the middle of Genki II for this). Additionally, when reading something it helps to watch out for the direct object marker を which usually indicates a transitive verb.
And sometimes you get lucky and get useful hints from the word itself. 揺する => する => to do (to). 分かる => ある => to be. (So far this has worked for me every time I’ve needed it, but there’s probably a lot of examples where it’s the opposite that I’ve just never noticed.)
Maybe I’m just missing something, but I’m having a hard time with a sentence and couldn’t find it discussed anywhere above. It starts on page 49 and ends on page 50.
「めちゃくちゃ通り」なんていうだけあって、びっくりのしどおしだったし・・・・・・。
I know now (after double checking the vocab sheet) that しどおし means something like “to no end”, so the second part seems to be saying that she was surprised to no end. Based on that I think the first part (saying what she is surprised about) must mean something like “that they went so far as to call it something like ‘preposterous place’”. But I don’t feel especially confident in that analysis. Any feedback would be appreciated!
I think maybe the piece you’re missing is that だけあって is its own thing: “(precisely) because …; as expected from/of …”
So I think I would go with, “As expected of a place called めちゃくちゃ通り, the surprises never end” (or something to that effect, the second half was not attempting to be very exact lol)