Don’t worry, I still have questions it was just a busy weekend and I felt really ill on Sunday cos I stayed up super late the night before playing computer games
So before we reach chapter 9…
Page 255
Right-hand panel in the middle, left speech bubble
まあ その儚さが
ウケてる理由の
一つなんだけどね
I’m struggling to parse this and I think I’ve reached the stage where I’m just confusing myself further.
From context, I think this means “that transience/fragility is just one reason why they are popular”.
But… I can’t quite see how the sentence actually translates, to that, other than 理由の一つなんだけ meaning ‘one reason only’. Rather than the wind chimes, to me it feels more like“the fact that the ball inside the chime itself disappears ??? is just one reason why the transience is popular”.
Basically, I’m getting confused by the relative clause, please send aid, how is this so hard for me.
Edit: okay, as expected, I just had to type it out and then start reading ahead for my subconscious to work it out while I wasn’t thinking
Okay, so after last night’s pointlessness, let’s try this again.
Page 259
Bottom-right panel
ちょうどよかった
そろそろ帰ってくる
頃かなって スイカを
切ってたのよ
Help me parse it?
what does そろそろ mean here, exactly - ‘just as’?
I assume that 帰ってくる is a combination with 来る meaning to return/come back, rather than being like… “you kindly returned home for me”?!
is そろそろ帰ってくる acting as a relative clause with 頃, giving us something like ‘just around the time you were coming back’?
why is there a か / かなる after 頃 (not sure whether it’s a standard なる with a mysterious か, or whether it’s an overall mysterious thing)?
is the ちょうどよかった phrase a separate part of the speech, just meaning “perfect timing” (liberal rather than literal translation), or is it too acting as a relative clause on the following bits?
Think the main trick here is the か. I’m of the opinion that it’s marking an embedded “whether or not” clause. I was thinking something along the lines of “Ah, good timing. I was thinking it was about time for you to come back, so I’ve cut up some watermelon.” (though that’s extremely paraphrased for natural-ish English rather than a direct translation).
soon, momentarily
Yeah. We had a similar conversation in the Yotsuba thread - I figured the main difference between 帰る and 帰ってくる is that it’s “returned home to here” rather than her home being somewhere else. “Came back home”.
Yep.
Explained above.
Yeah, I went with the “perfect timing” translation. Aria seems to subtitute linebreaks for commas.
Oooooooooooooh that changes the whole meaning really, as it means there was intention rather than coincidental timing. It also makes the そろそろ make sense - soon/momentarily was what I understood it to mean, but that didn’t fit with the fact that they had already done the thing.
So to give a more butchered literal stab at it:
it got to around the time when [I expected] you would momentarily be arriving home and [so] I cut the watermelon up
That seems like a logical distinction for 帰る vs 帰ってくる too.
Yes and then I get confused over whether it’s a continuing sentence or not
fun fact: I can’t type watermelong correctly on the first try, ever
Like, “it came true that it was about time for you to come home, so I cut some watermelon”. For the record, I’m not really sure that it does actually mean that, but it could. Of course, I could also be completely misunderstanding how かなう works and @Belthazar could be completely right.
Also, I think 帰ってくる is used by someone speaking to the person who just got home to mean something like “came home”. Similar to what @Belthazar was saying I suppose, just from a different perspective.
Possibly, but it kinda doesn’t seem like かなう can mean “a specific time has come to pass” (just more along the lines of “a wish has been fulfilled”). Maybe I’m just misunderstanding the usage.
I don’t know who to reply to to butt in this conversation but かな is a way to ask oneself. “I was wondering/ I was thinking” (that it was about time for you to come back)
+って is to give a reason, in that context.
→ “so I cut the watermelon”
You and @Kyasurin are obviously right, and now I feel like I read it that way when I first read the chapter. But am I just tricking myself into thinking that? Who knows.
This is one area where listening is superior. It would have been super obvious if I had heard the dragged out かなぁ～って
Yeah, Alice gets added to most storylines that the anime moved from before her arrival to after. Also, the first half of the episode comes from later in the manga - basically, from the same time of year the following summer. Or possibly the summer after.
It is kind of interesting to see what changes the anime makes sometimes. For example, a later chapter features Alicia and Akari rolling giant snowballs through the streets of Neo-Venezia. In the anime, they roll one big snowball for the entire episode, but in the corresponding manga chapter, they roll three smaller ones, one after the other, then leave them sitting on a street corner somewhere.
I don’t know who to reply to either but thank you everybody!
I felt like the かなって bit was the key to understanding, but although I considered かなる / かなう and か + なる it never occurred to me that there was a かな hiding in there
It was me… and I did wonder if it meant “munch munch” at the time, but couldn’t find any reference to it being that sort of a word. Anyway, it shows up again in the next chapter p285 & p286, and is definitely not related to food. It seems to be more of a “potential for something to happen but nothing is happening at the moment” kind of vibe.
Either that or it’s the summer mating call of the lesser spotted Martian water cricket
Reckon on 285 and 286 it is the lesser spotted Martian water cricket (or, like, waves lapping), but it’s written in a different font (and a different character set) to 259, so I still think 259 is chewing on watermelon.
Ooh, waves lapping. That has potential as a background noise.
Good point about the different character set (somehow I failed to notice that minor detail!)
it was just a busy weekend 
that changes the whole meaning really, as it means there was intention rather than coincidental timing. It also makes the そろそろ make sense - soon/momentarily was what I understood it to mean, but that didn’t fit with the fact that they had already done the thing.
