If I got this right, it’s something like “Now, instead of it’s regular sound, isn’t it making a miserable コッチン、アッチン、ポッチン noise?” Though I’m not sure what まるであくびでもするように is about. Though now that I type this I realized it’s まるであくびで模するように, so “as if it’s yawning”? I first read it as でも する, so it couldn’t make much sense. Though I’m not sure how yawning and those コッチン、アッチン、ポッチン sounds fit together. Doesn’t seem like yawning at all. What’s going on there?
Yeah, I was also wondering about that. I mean, grammar always has its miraculous cases, but it would then mean “as if imitated with a yawn” or something like that? And I’m somewhat struggling to properly understand that…
Like Chilean miners emerging from the depths, I have returned for Chapter 9 of Kiki’s. Or… Majo? I mean, the book technically isn’t named Kiki’s Delivery Service in the form we’re reading it. Should I just mix up my english and japanese and say that I’m reading 魔女の宅急便? Maybe if the book were a bit more modern, it’d have one of those cute short names, and we’d all be calling it マジョタッキュ or something.
Personally, I don’t think the breather helped me much at all. Think I fell out of some good habits. But hopefully it got some folks who weren’t caught up back on pace. My thoughts from the first two pages
I still feel for Kiki. I feel like I’m enduring a yearlong separation from my family what with the whole covid thing. がまん、がまん.
水煮をして保存していたトマト - I admit, while I’ve seen 保存 plenty of times, I didn’t actually realize it meant/could mean ‘preserve’ in the jams and pickles sense.
いい年でしたね、- Boy, can’t remember the last new year’s I thought this. Definitely won’t change this year.
考えようによっちゃ、そんなに悪い年でもなかったら - You know, this one’s weird. I read it, and was able to parse the meaning out of it, but I just can’t seem to follow the whole thing grammatically. Ichi.moe puts it into more perspective. I was trying to read it as かんがえーようーにーよっちゃ, when it was かんがえようーによっちゃ.
While the week off might have hurt my pacing a little bit, I do appreciate the short week. Had to start a little late this time around. Let’s get back to it. From pages 3-4 of chapter 9 (Red book):
そのいいかたがあんまりきどっているので、キキはちょっとのあいだ、ぽかんとおソノさんを見つめました。- Read this as “The way she said it was so stilted that kiki just stared at Osono san blankly for a moment.”
遠くかすんで見える時計 - Another tripup that took me a trip to ichi.moe to figure out. か isn’t a particle here, it’s the て form of かすむ. Similar issue later on the same page with ききのがさない being きき のがさない and not きき の が さない.
Rather than using long hyphen or space to show how you separated the characters, I’d personally recommend using ・. It’s much easier to see than a space and isn’t ambiguous like the hyphen (since hyphen looks like the katakana vowel extender).
Thankfully as you learn more words and get more used to conjugations, these kinds of misparses happen less and less often.
Seems about right to me. Maybe you missed one of the passing of the seasons. Describing the passage of time has been something of a major element thus far.
Anyway, since it looks like we’re back on the original schedule, I guess I’ll need to speed up my consumption before we flip over to the next week tomorrow. Notes from pages 5-7:
I admit, I had to look up how to pronounce 町長. It’s better than I could have imagined.
ますますたよりがいのある町長さんだということを見せなければならない - This is part of an incredibly long sentence, but this is the part that trips me up. Breaking it down, we have spoiler, (たよりがい・Reliability), (のある町長さんだ・A mayor that has), (という・Said), (を見せ・To show), (なければならない・なきゃ・Must do). Specifically what trips me up is the combination of という. Reading over it, my brain wants to ignore that という and read it as “(he) must show that he is more and more of a reliable mayor.”[/spoiler]
I correctly guessed the pronunciation, but looked it up anyway, because I didn’t believe that “mayor” would be homophonous with "butterfly.’ But it IS.
ということ is all one chunk, which you could translate as “that,” so you already have it in your translation. You will like knowing this–many sentences will suddenly seem more natural.
Ah that’s very fair. The establishing of the seasons for summer and and fall were definitely prominent, but I think because there’s the extra hurdles involved with translating then processing, I didn’t register the movement of time with the passing of the seasons. That and my own disjointed reading schedule coupled with the narrative’s episodic pacing threw me off.
I think this was also the first time a specific unit of calendar time was referenced in-book. I’d rephrase what I said earlier to instead comment on how so much time has already passed for Kiki, haha.
