I am new here, and also new at Japanese. I have been studying for six months, and I think it is time for my first book. I have started with children’s books available on the internet, level 0, and chosen one about “tea”.
Everything was fine for the first 5 pages, but I have found something I can´t make sense of. On the list of ingredients necessary to make tea, saucers are included, but I don’t understand what it says between the brackets. Something about the guests using them? Why should the guests use especially the saucers, but not the cups, for instance?
It might help if the whole sentence or paragraph were included to provide context, but I expect that the note about お客さん用 (“for use by guests”) is there because 茶托 are most commonly used by the waiting staff to serve tea, so the fact that these 茶托 are for guests use is worth noting.
It could also be that the tea house has two different types of 茶托; one kind for guests, and one kind for service staff.
Oh, there are no paragraphs, just images. The book is for very young children. I’m not sure if I should post an image showing the complete page, so I won’t. The book shows just the drawings of the 3 saucers, and the text.
In the particular case of 「 お茶をいれましょう！」though, it is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 and you are allowed to share it but need to attribute the author and provide a link to the license itself. Therefore, instead of uploading a picture I think it is easier to provide a link to the books page on Tadoku as it contains information on the author and license:
As for the question on the saucer: I’m not really familiar with the procedures on how to make green tea properly but my humble understanding when going through the graded reader is that …
Spoiler warning ~ in case you haven't been through the rest of the book yet
… they are about to explain the different steps in how to prepare the tea. You’ll see that will use all the mentioned utensils except for the saucer. The saucer is only used when actually serving the tea.
Please feel free to not look into the spoilers before you’ve been through the rest of the book. And also feel free to ignore anything I’ve written in case it is not helpful or you have a different opinion on it
Good luck with your upcoming studies and hope to see you around from time to time
Thanks a lot, tls. It’s true, the books are free to download and quote from, I didn’t realize.
Also, thanks for your help. It was a silly thing, the saucers, but it was bothering me.
Litlle by little, I hope I’ll be getting there…
A big tip that made a big difference for me personally when I started reading is that you don’t have to understand everything. Your brain will make sense of it unconsciously.
My rule of thumb is that I look up words if they are recurring X amount of times or if I’m really invested in the story and I’m dying to know what’s being said. Otherwise I just ignore words I don’t understand completely.
It is really hard! The amount of ‘just take a guess and move on’ that works for you will vary. You have to get somewhat comfortable with having a vague understanding, especially when you move to native material, but I personally haven’t reached ‘ignore stuff I don’t know’ yet - I go for ‘take a guess at what makes sense and keep going for a bit - come back to the unknown stuff if confused by later material to see what I missed’. Obviously this works better once there’s a plot to the book
Graded readers are definitely meant to just be read without looking stuff up - the idea is that they are at about the level that you can understand enough to figure out the rest, and can just get used to reading. But if you really want to know, asking questions and looking stuff up is a great way to pick up some new stuff!
Absolutely not On the contrary, I think it is really good you’ve asked since it will help you as well as other durtles just starting their adventures in Japanese. Please feel free to ask anytime when questions come up.
