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So since this is the week where Eve’s talking while still being kana-bound, I thought I’d help by kanji-fying some of the dialogue for people!
p23
panel 3: お日さま出てる
panel 4: ネムはよく寝てる
panel 5: お幾つ
(Note: Eve is both being quite rude here, but also wrong! You’d ask 何歳 to inquire about age. But then she is a barely literate 5 year old)
EDIT: Yomitan tells me I’m the one wrong here and 幾つ is an option for how old
p24
ネムは挨拶にうるさい
p25
And then Eve learns kanji!
Honestly there was less of kana-only Eve than I remembered.
p36
So now we go from standard non-standard kanji usage to some of this book’s specialities.
人脈、金銭、健康
So the real reading for 人脈 is じんみゃく and it means like “personal connections”. コネ is an abbreviation of コネクション which is a loan word with basically the same meaning.
カネ is obviously 金 though I will say 金 is much more often used as お金 so this shortening feels very casual. For 金銭 , the real reading is きんせん and it means money.
Finally 健康 is けんこう and means health. ホネ is presumably 骨 or bones, so I think this reading is a joke at ネム’s current status.
Anyway, the effect of these non-standard readings is (a) it makes this all short and snappy, presumably to help Eve remember and (b) it comes across very casual, at least to me.
I probably would have burned down my (digital) copy, if the dragon would have just stayed dead
Loved how the dragon taught her human manners via some random book he found. he has no clue if that’s even up to date! or if it’s just a gag book or something ^^ well, we’ll so how well this will work out in the next chapter. At least the “children’s guide to necromancy” was working as advertised.
I don’t think I’d read the blurb for this book, at least not recently, so I had no idea where the story was going - but that was quite a surprise this week! Eve, the self taught witch, was able to pull his spirit back into some temporary existence as a skeletal dragon! Presumably this is the skull dragon from the title. I liked the skull dragon’s design a lot, and conveniently it’s about the same size as Eve.
Eve’s progress in 5 years is pretty incredible. I’m sure that her use of the kanji form 林檎 for リンゴ is there to demonstrate her being more mature and educated, and perhaps to show that she is really quite learned (we are about to discover that she has self taught herself some really quite advanced magic). However, I couldn’t help thinking she’s falling into the trap that lots of Japanese learners fall into when they are not in Japan, and using kanji where normal people wouldn’t!
Difficulty level to a step up this week. I can see that lots of great work has been done on the vocab list already so people should definitely check that out.
Wow that really was a step up in difficulty. I think I’ve got the gist though, the dragon is teaching her those three important skills for interacting with other humans so that they can go to a nearby village to see if they can learn more magic and stuff. This reminds me of the Jungle Book a little bit, I’m liking the story so far.
Actually, maybe Eve is supposed to come off as a little “overlearned.” Her knowledge of Japanese after she was dropped from the sky comes from a 200-year-old dragon and books that might be really old-fashioned too. (Unless there’s lots of modern and casually-written books about necromancy in this world lol.) And Nemu loves to use kanji in weird ways too (…although it gets confusing if you think about it too hard, because it’s not like Eve can hear the use of kanji instead of hiragana/katakana… right?)
That felt more challenging to read than the previous section. I’m still looking something up every few words, but I remember reading being more difficult a year ago.
I still love the art, and Nemu’s death was really moving. I hope I’ve learned the word 義訓（ぎくん）by the end of this manga; it certainly has enough of them.
My approach has been to read the text once using only a dictionary, then to read spoilers here (which help a lot!), then to re-read the manga using the vocab spreadsheet. It goes so much faster the second time. I wonder how other people are reading.
Agree second week was definitely more challenging! I went through it without look-ups first and understood around 50% of what was said with the text alone. Still enjoyable because the art is wonderful and the characters wholesome.
Also unrelated but the cover of the physical book has a really nice texture! Fits very well with the fantasy story.
This chapter was a step up in difficulty for me as well - it took me a while to get through because I had to look up a lot more words this time.
Story thoughts
I’m really curious to see where the story is going. I was surprised that Eve managed to bring Nemu back through her magic powers, and I found it amusing that she only brought the dragon back in bone form - he didn’t seem very happy about that.
Did I understand correctly that the dragon’s blood played a role in forming a connection between Eve and Nemu? That there’s a kind of lingering attachment (未練がましい) between them?
I was also having trouble understanding page 37, specifically 私の子を紹介する. Is Nemu referring to Eve as his child that he plans to introduce to someone else?
未練 is purely psychological/emotional, it’s a regret that you should’ve done something and now it’s too late.
未練がましい is Nemu’s way of self-critique. “just a few years ago I wasn’t attached to anything in life, and look at me now, so unable to let go that I’m even imagining voices” kind of idea.
So, whether or not blood formed any sort of physical connection that helped the magic work, I would say that’s separate from the emotional attachment of 未練.
On page 35 Nemu thinks that both helped independently: 「血の繋がりと未練」.
Of course, donating a child your blood to save its life, and than bringing it up for 5 years is a pretty surefire way to establish an emotional connection, so in that way it’s related.
p 37 紹介する
From context, it’s more straightforward to understand this as “I’ll introduce my child and you to each other, so you’ll have some dragon connections (りゅうみゃく・コネ)”. There are two reasons for that.
First reason is that omitted parts of the sentence are more likely to refer to people present, than to somebody never mentioned before in the conversation. 「（私が）私の仔を（イブに）紹介する」If they’ve talked about some other dragon just before, maybe the interpretation could be different.
Second reason is the use of kanji 仔 (animal offspring), suggesting Nemu is talking about an actual dragon child rather than an adopted child.
That’s also how Eve understood that. Her reaction 「ほほう、お仔さん」“ohhh, I had no idea you have a child” cannot refer to herself due to honorifics.
The Skull Dragon’s Precious Daughter Book Club!
