魔女の宅急便 (Kiki's Delivery Service) Discussion Thread: Chapter 1

That part makes more sense now but I had understood the rest of the sentence to mean "it was a good way to get (even one more town or village, or even one more person) to realize that witches still properly exist.

I got that because of the -てもらう as in, the witches are receiving from those people the action of knowing that witches still exist. The に goes with もらうto mark from whom the witches are receiving the action of knowing, so the witches can’t be doing the knowing.

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Oh yes, true!! That makes more sense!

So, @Kyasurin, shall we leave くせ as ‘habit’ or くせに as ‘in spite of’ in the vocab sheet? What do you think now? I was rather in favor of ‘in spite of’ when I saw both meanings in the vocab sheet, but after seeing your answer I’d rather ask you or someone else who is better experience than I am.

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If we look at the jisho entry of ちっちゃな、it says “pre-noun adjectival”. So that tells us we are expecting a noun after it. くせに is a conjunction or particle, so grammatically it does not fit, while くせ is a noun, so looking at it from that angle, くせ meaning “habit” is the only thing that fits here.

EDIT: Sorry, this sounded nice but is wrong, as you can see below :joy_cat:

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woah, you’re like a linguistic detective! :female_detective:

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Thank you so much!
Only one more thing: Why do they use に?

Hahaha now you got me :slight_smile:

But if I’m allowed to speculate, it might be meaning #4 in jisho (because of)?

Apart from that, I think に is like the go-to particle if all else fails or so ^^

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Yeah, my guess is that in this particular case, it would effectively mean ‘by means of’, which can be に or で depending on context.

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Just to throw a wrench into things, I think it means “in spite of”. Based on the context, they are saying that Kiki is unusual. And then this is saying that she is unusual because despite her being small, she rings the bells on the tall trees.

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Hey, good news! My Japanese has improved a LOT since I read Kiki the first time, and I now know that I was actually wrong way back in 2018 and くせに really does mean “in spite of” or “and yet”.
So please accept my apologies for leading who knows how many people astray. :joy:

Now wondering how many other embarrassing errors I made 2 years ago… :sweat_smile:

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The real question is, did you have more embarrassing errors than I had embarrassing questions?

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The な of “na-adjectives” is just the connective form of the copula だ, so what the sentence is saying is that in spite of being tiny (ちっちゃだ), she could ring the bells of the tall trees.

Edit: the grammar ninjas got me first xD

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I like that one! :laughing:

Impressive logic here

It makes sense too!

Excuse me people, but I am as confused as I was before. If I knew how I would make a poll:
Shall we leave only くせ、only くせに in the spread sheet or both? :sweat_smile:

I read this chapter once and I had the feeling I understood more or less what it was about, then I listened to it about hundred times and read it again and I thought now I could read it in one go and enjoy understanding it without having to stop every two words but apparently I understand it less than before. What to do? :shushing_face:

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Hehe, I think I was the last in line of those then :joy_cat:

Fun fact: I first read it as “although she was small” but your post together with my “grammar evidence” made me reconsider :woman_shrugging:

I still don’t really see how this な can connect to it, but I found overwhelming evidence in this Maggie Sensei post:

http://maggiesensei.com/2013/09/24/〜くせに-kuseni-from-facebook-mini-lessons/

So yeah, everybody please forget what I said, the others are right!

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I think that even though くせに is a conjunction, it’s still treated as a noun (due to くせ) for connective purposes.

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Agreed. Checking a monolingual dictionary it says:

くせ に【癖に】
(連語)
名詞「癖」に格助詞「に」が付いたもの。主として話し言葉で用いられる〕

It even talks about how it connects:
活用語の連体形、格助詞「の」に付いて、一語の助詞のように用いられる。

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Juding from the word list on floflo, this book has a lot of onomatopoeic words, which I also struggle with. This review from @KazeTachinu talks about it and the book a bit. Because of this and the lack of kanji usage, Kiki (by looking at the sample) actually looks sometimes harder to read than some of the “intermediate” books I’m reading.

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gulp Alright. Time to read up on them more! I’ve (digitally) acquired the book “Nihongo Pera Pera: A User’s Guide to Japanese Onomatopoeia” in the hopes of gaining a bit of clarity… and also seeing them in action more throughout the book should help. But it is a part of Japanese that isn’t addressed as much in textbook, so I’m excited to learn more - I didn’t realize until a couple of hours ago that ちょっと fell into that category, but now that I do, it makes a lot more sense as to how it can be used in so many different situation it’s conveying the feeling of small/little bit, rather than the action/meaning.

Now on to reading the second half of the chapter…

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You know, it’s weird- I’ve never had any issue with the onomatopoeic words. I mean, they’re not immediately obvious in meaning, so I have to look them up if I don’t know them, but once I understand what they mean, they seem to fit in grammatically just fine.

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