Thanks for your breakdowns, by the way (Belthazar too >.>). Putting my thoughts down on all of it is more typing than I’m usually wanting to do, lol. It is nice to have a reference on what we’re talking about each week and the more detailed notes from someone who knows more.
Belthazar has answered / commented on most things, so just a small note about 70:
Page 70
となり here is “neighbor”. お隣さん is being made polite with the お and the person suffix in that spot is like Yotsuba saying “oh! it’s the neighbor”
なにそれ is her saying “what the..” / heck / hell, depending on the character personality for the translation, but it’s that wth type idea. Your translation for it works, it’s just less literal, which is fine. I just figured I’d mention the wth aspect.
I don’t know the exact amount, maybe 80 - 90%, but I get most of the stuff in the first volume. There are maybe 6 or so spots (with the adults and lots of text) that I have to parse things out. Then there are still the odd small spots where I have to look up a word or kanji - usually in a dictionary, but vocab sheets have helped also. I have maybe like 4k area vocab (don’t have a full list of this yet) and just over 1k kanji and still have to look stuff up. I made an SRS list to study of the more common vocab in the first volume before we started, also.
As the others have said, it just takes time. I’ve read ChristopherFritz’s post about starting reading before when I started looking into manga, and the stuff about accepting ambiguity and how to handle being new to reading native content / the media type were very true.
I think it also doesn’t help that there is a fair bit of social media that down plays how hard languages are, especially when it is a job for most of them. Social media stuff keeps decreasing the amount of time they claim a good person can learn a language.. give it a few more years and they’ll have videos about how they picked up a grammar book, read it in a couple days, looked up a kanji list, and now they’re fluent in 72 hours.. anybody can do that, so easy /sarcasm. It’s getting to the point where when I see someone starting off videos with comments about being a polyglot I’m tempted to write the channel off.
I read a fair bit in English and I’ve seen linguistics studies that show people who read a decent amount typically have vocab amounts in the 60k area. I still hit stuff every so often that I have to look up or interpret the meaning of a word from context. Nobody knows everything in a language and people pick up rarer words they like and others may not have encountered, so there will always be more stuff to look up over time. It just gets easier as your vocab / language knowledge increases.
よつばと！・ Yotsuba&! (Absolute Beginners Book Club) // Home Thread
