三ツ星カラーズ — Week 2 Discussion (ABBC)

@MrGeneric kindly noted the ないで part at the end of the sentence, but my two cents for what they’re worth (i.e. nothing) is that I also agree with the second part of your translation (“私は元からこうなの”, “I was like this from the beginning / I’ve always been like this.”).

I actually thought this exchange might have had a play on words baked into it through “歪みすぎだよ!”, on the one reading this is saying that " (someone) has an excessively warped personality", but perhaps it is not too much of a reach to also read it in parallel as "You are applying too much distortion (to me) / i.e. You are bending me out of shape ".

4 Likes

Page 13, panel 2

この子の盗んだ商品がアジトにあってね

Could you help with the last verb

‘This kid’s stolen merchanise at/in hideout’

not sure about the ending, is it the te form of aru (to have) - in which case why the te form

is it anything to do with te form conjunctive

thanks

4 Likes

Yes to all of it. This phrase is the basis of Kotoha’s reasoning, and the te form connects it to what follows. Since the stolen goods were in the hideout, it follows that the cat lives there .

4 Likes

Page 13 panel 4

俺に預けるとその猫はこの街にいられなくなるんだ

Again, verb woes

俺に預けると - leave it with me and
その猫はこの街に - that cat in this town
いられなくなる - cannot exist to become
んだ - annoying sentence ending thingies that I can never understand.

Please could you help with the ending of the sentence, thank you.

4 Likes

The main verb here is なる. Something will become, or come to be. What will come to be? The fact that the cat won’t be able to be in this town.

Contraction of のだ. の takes everything that’s been said previously and turns it into a noun, a thing. You could see it as " the thing is that".

So, putting it all together, "If you leave the cat to me, the thing is that it will come to it not being able to be in this town. "

5 Likes

Page 13, Panel 4

見たとこお前に懐いてるみたいだし悪さしないようしつけてやれ

I know it's be looked at once but had some questions

見たとこお前に - saw place you at/in/on - the place you were seen
懐いてるみたいだし - continuing state of to become attached + like/resembling + to be /is + and (trailing し)- it is like it’s becoming attached and…
悪さしないよう - not do mischief [task ? unsure about よう]
しつけてやれ - to train + やる imperative (must do) - must train

[seems] like it’s becoming attached to the place it saw you and [you must undertake the task] to train it not to do mischief

much clunkier than MrGeneric’s translation of "By the looks of it, it’s grown attached to you. Train it not to misbehave.”

what have I gotten wrong :upside_down_face:

3 Likes

Incidentally the more I read/learn Japanese, the more impressed I am at how skilful translators are! Before I had just assumed that there is one-to-one mapping between phrases and words… but wow! so much nuance is involved. kudos!

4 Likes

とこ is short for ところ. While this often just means “place”, it’s a very versatile word that features in many grammar points. It can mean place in space or time, literally or figuratively. Combined with a verb it can mean “in the process of doing” or “have just done” depending on the verb’s tense. (Bunpro Reference)
Now, “having just seen” is still a little hard to make sense of. Luckily 見たところ has its own Jisho entry, and is explained as “in appearance; to look at; judging from appearances”. Not that long a jump from “having just seen”.

お前に is better grouped with 懐いてる to give us the meaning “being attached to you”

7 Likes

thank you, actually have done that bunpro lesson! thanks memory…

it might just be me but I find it incredibly difficult to attach a secondary meaning to something once I’ve learnt it a particular way initially.

4 Likes

All Japanese grammar guides…

Parse Japanese sentences by looking at particles; を object, は topic, が subject etc etc

Manga be like

それに猫だってこの街の住人だろ

:rofl:

10 Likes

Don’t worry about that, it gets easier with practice and frequent exposure.

Forgot to answer about the よう part. This is basically ように, with に again confusingly omitted. It can often be very simply translated as just “to”.

I definitely feel that manga are harder to parse than normal prose. The text density may make it look easier, and there are pictures to use as reference, but the writing is certainly full of traps for beginners, what with omissions, contractions, lack of punctuation, unfinished sentences, etc etc.

5 Likes

Makes a lot more sense. Have been doing bunpro lessons on よう、ように、ような、みたい、みたいに、そう、そうに、そうな so everything is like to me at the moment!

5 Likes

phew, and finished for the week.
first time I’m trying to translate fully…

thank you for help & you patience @omk3 @MrGeneric @ChristopherFritz especially

5 Likes

Thanks for all the discussion up to this point! Page 11 and 13 were especially tricky for me!

I still have two questions of my own:

Page 13

I’m not fully confident about my translation of:
お前たちの活動内容は何だった?

My translation so far:
お前たちの: your
活動: activities
内容: contents
何: what
だった: was

Put it together: What was the nature (contents) of your activities?

My main question here is about 活動内容. Why is there no の? I understand that in Japanese there are compound nouns but usually they have an entry in jisho (which is not the case here…). Is the の just omitted? Is there a rule which nouns can be compounded and which ones have to be connected with の?

Page 14

S14_1.PNG

I think I understand what 琴葉 is saying, but I’m unsure about a couple of things:
ブッ: ?? :face_with_monocle: not sure at all what that is supposed to mean… My current theory is that it’s the katakana version of ぶつ (to hit, to beat) with a small つ. But could be something else entirely as well :man_shrugging:
殺したかったんだ: I feel that I know too little grammar for that one…
My current breakdown:
The verb is 殺す (to kill). た: indicates past tense. かったです/かっただ: would like to, want to.
wanted to kill
So the thing I’m missing is ん. In my very rudimentary understanding, this is either a form of the explanatory の or a form of the negative ない. In this case I would go with the latter, although I currently have no idea how to distinguish the two meanings (any suggestion for ressources on this topic are highly appreciated!)
And then, of course が is still left… I have no idea what to do with this particle in this sentence… It’s placed after a verb, which can’t be the subject of the sentence… so :woman_shrugging:

Putting everything together: I didn’t want to beat you to death.
But I think it probably says: I don’t want to kill you anymore. To me, the past tense doesn’t seem to fit into the sentence…

TLDR: I have 3 question about what 琴葉 is saying:

  1. What is ブッ?
  2. What is the meaning of ん in 殺したかったんだ?
  3. Why is there が at the end of the sentence?

Thanks!

5 Likes
page14

ぶっ殺す=to beat to death, to kill
There’s also ブッ as a prefix, meaning strongly; violently; quickly; suddenly​, and yes, it comes from 打つ as you correctly guessed, as they share the same kanji, if kanji is used at all.

殺したかった is the past form of 殺したい, want to kill.

ん or の is usually called explanatory の. It basically bundles everything before it into a single unit, making it something like “the thing is that…”. It does have an explanatory tone even in English, but it’s not always used to strictly explain.

As for が, that’s a “but”. It’s often used at the end of sentences with nothing following it, and its role is to soften the tone.

So putting it all together, “The thing is, I wanted to brutally kill you, but (I’ll keep you as a pet instead/ I got over it/never mind that)”

8 Likes

I don’t have an answer for this, but in a situation like this I like to do some web searches and see how many results there are.

Search Results
“活動内容” 16,000,000
“活動の内容” 22,500,000
“活動の内容” -“活動内容” 19,200,000

It looks like both with and without の have many results. At best, we can infer that 活動内容 is fairly common usage.

5 Likes

Thanks! That makes more sense!

2 Likes

One thing to keep in mind when reading how I “translate” things: Unless I am breaking down a sentence piece by piece, and then Frankenstein-ing it together to keep the Japanese grammar 100% intact so as to explain a specific point, when I give a translation, it’s already been filtered through English grammar, so it’s more of an interpretation than a direct translation. The reason why my interpretation for that specific sentence sounded more natural is because I have skipped the step of “Here is the exact Japanese structure” translation and gone straight to shuffling things around for the English structure and giving a natural-sounding English sentence.

To give an example, if I were I to “show my work,” so to speak, on the sentence you were asking about, keeping the Japanese structure intact:

Breakdown example

見たとこ = short for みたところ, “judging from appearances”

お前に = “you,” with a に particle attached, indicating the verb is being done to this

懐いてる = 懐く, in て form

みたいだし = みたいです, casual form, with a し sentence ender, which is sometimes used to give a reason, the English “so” works fairly well as a similar device in this context

I would consider that one “unit”, and stop there to get:

“Judging from appearances, to you (the cat) seems to be becoming attached, so”

Then I would move on to the next “unit”

悪さ = “mischief”

しない = “to do”, in negative form

よう = I took the “way; method of” meaning, it’s a suffix that turns the preceding verb into a noun

しつけてやれ = しつける in conjunctive て form + やれ in command form, so “do training,” roughly

Second unit becomes, with more twists and turns required than the first:

“(In) the way of not doing mischief, train (the cat).”

Putting both units together:

“Judging from appearances, to you (the cat) seems to be becoming attached, so in the way of not doing mischief, train (the cat).”

Which is really awkward and wordy, but (mostly) retains the Japanese grammar. After that, I just sorta go to what sounds intuitive, and it’s not a far leap to the more natural:

“By the looks of it, it’s grown attached to you. Train it not to misbehave.”

I dropped the extra “seems to be” because in English that “by the looks of it,” or “judging from appearances” covers that, and it’s redundant. I also sort of changed the tense of the “becoming attached to,” to a more past-tense “has grown attached to”, just because that sounds more natural in English. As for why I dropped the “so” conjunctive, honestly, that was just me forgetting about the し, to an extent. We don’t necessarily need the “so” in English, though, since that second sentence following the first sort of implies it, in my head (though that could just be because I’m vaguely aware of the し existing, and thus ascribe that to it. Perhaps out of context, it wouldn’t sound as if it has any implication at all.)

Regardless, that’s the basic process that I would go through when interpreting into English. It was how I broke things down when I first started out, and even now, if I run into a particularly difficult sentence, I’ll do that, but for the most part, nowadays when I read, I’m actually just reading, not deciphering, to use @ChristopherFritz’s terms, and like when reading English, I just sort of “know” what the sentence is trying to say without having to go through that process, though admittedly much more slowly than I comprehend things in English, and I run into far more Japanese sentences that I have to think about than English ones, as well as often having to re-read to catch mistakes (like thinking that Kotoha was the one speaking, just as a recent example).

The best comparison for how my reading feels nowadays I can think of is it’s like reading a highly technical/specialized textbook or research paper in my native English. I know what most of the words mean, excluding some jargon, and I understand the grammar mostly, but when put together while describing a difficult subject, I have to slow down and pay more attention, and have to either look up or guess from context what the jargon or certain words mean. Simple Japanese now feels like highly-complicated English to me, if that makes sense? I’m bad at analogies and explaining myself. Haha.

The tl;dr of that breakdown, by the way, is that the reason why my translation didn’t sound as clunky is because it wasn’t a direct translation so much as an interpretation.

10 Likes

A perfect analogy, actually. That’s exactly what reading Japanese feels like for me too! The words are mostly known (or easily looked-up), the grammar is mostly there, but putting it all together still often takes considerable mental effort. :slightly_smiling_face:

6 Likes

To catch a criminal, you have to be able to think like one. The crawling was cute. Got a bit of whiplash when it cut to the criminal post - capture, but the clues were there all along! And here I just thought they had those glasses cause they’re whacky and it’s fun to write in something whacky.

Not much to say on the reading front, it’s a comfy read but I still have issues with a few nuances that were already covered by all the conversation in this thread, so thanks a lot to everyone answering AND everyone asking things. The couple things I wanted to know had already been asked, which made this very simple <3.

That してみたかった took me embarrassingly long to work out because my brain has an absolute mental block about line splits in manga that aren’t very cleanly separate words. Something I have to work on forcing myself to look at for sure. Don’t tell anyone :shushing_face:

6 Likes