Cure Dolly 「Discussion and Practice Sentences」

How…how is fluffy a sound? Japan?? How?? I was going to ask what fluffy sounds like…but I guess it’s モフモフ :woman_shrugging:

There is others like キラキラ (twinkling), チカチカ (flashing, flickering)

You can also say stuff like:
あの人はいつもベラベラ話しているね。
That person always chatters a lot.

ベラベラ means “chattering” or “blabbering”.

1 Like

Some onomatopia just make more sense to me than others. Twinkling sound, we have that in English. Chattering makes sense too. Fluffy? I just haven’t heard anything be fluffy haha

Here’s a suggestion for your goals. Instead of constructing a sentence, how about breaking down a sentence?

At least in the beginning, I believe this would be helpful, and less confusing than trying to come up with a sentence.

So, for example, as you’re watching a video, you could write down all the example sentences that show up. Later on when reviewing, you can try to break down each sentence, without rewatching the video and without checking your own notes. After doing that, you could translate the sentence in a way that would sound more natural than the broken down version. Having done that for all example sentences, finally you could go back and “check” your answers by reading your notes or rewatching parts of the video.

As you progress through the videos, you will see more grammar points, more particles, and more examples of each of them in use. As you work through them, things will start making more and more sense.

4 Likes

You mean you’ve never heard もふ from the fluffiness of an animal before?

i-029x

(I’ve learned not to question it.)

1 Like

So is this kind of like, the animal appears and a person goes “oooo fluffy!” That’s as rational as I can make this.

You got me curious, so I checked Weblio’s entry on もふもふ.

多量の柔らかい毛をもち、ふかふか、ふわふわ、ふさふさ、もこもことした様子。猫やウサギの愛くるしい様子などを形容するのに使われることが多い。

I’d loosely translate this something like:

Having a lot of soft fur that has the appearance of ふかふか, ふわふわ, ふさふさ, or もこもこ. It is often used to describe the cute appearance and such of cats, rabbits, etc.

Aside from that, I just accept that when a rabbit shows up in a manga, もふ can be the sound effect for its fluffy appearance =)

4 Likes

The girl actually says “ugh, I’m so tired from walking”:
歩き疲れる comes from:
歩く - to walk
疲れる - being tired

歩き is the verb stem form, in this case attached to the beginning of 疲れる to form a longer verb with a compound meaning.

The 〜ちゃった at the end is the familiar form of the helper verb しまう which expresses something unfortunate (no matter how small). So the full form in this tense would be しまった and the full walking + being tired combo would be 歩き疲れてしまった.

Onomatopeias like モフモフ are super common in manga, but sometimes they’re written in really ugly Katakana so they look more like random strokes. Have a look at Bleach, for instance. The Hollows make a lot of weird ギギ sounds, for instance.

1 Like

I hope you didn’t think I was actually translating her text bubble to that. I was just joking around trying to rationalize fluffy as a sound.

1 Like

Not wrong per se, but people don’t usually say 尾. They would say 尻尾 (しっぽ).

EDIT: If you’re wondering where you might see the word 尾, I think most people would be familiar with it in proverbs and older expressions.

たいよりいわしかしら - literally “better to be the head of a sardine than the tail of a sea bream”

とらむ - literally “to step on a tiger’s tail”, something like “to play with fire” in English

2 Likes

Sooo I don’t think another Cure Dolly video is happening tonight. I listened to some ahead while I was drawing, but my attention wasn’t fully there. So I’m moving that goal to tomorrow in good conscious. I think the sentence work I did today was enough.

4 Likes

After watching Lesson 4, I felt like it was a sort of precursor to Lesson 5 and I couldn’t do anything new without watching that as well. Luckily events lined up just right so I had some extra free time today. I went through both videos while taking notes. Lessons 4 and 5 dealt with verb tenses.

I did borrow from the post, and jotted down all the sentences. But I broke them down into parts as I watched and right after the video ended. I think this was a useful exercise, but not really the practice I need to feel I’ve confidently understand what I’ve learned.
I’d be happy to post my three and a half (collage ruled) pages of notes, if anyone is interested. They are color coded because color coding is fun and effective for memory.

I’m going to go ahead and make a list of sentence constructing goals, but I’m not going to feel bad if it bleeds into tomorrow. There is a lot here to cover.

Lessons 4 and 5 review goals:
:ballot_box_with_check: Post the checked box for easy copy and pasting later.
:ballot_box_with_check: Identify 12 verbs from Renshuu starter words list. Class them as Ichidan, Godan うつる, ねぶむ, くぐ, す or Irregular. Two of each.
:ballot_box_with_check: Conjugate 6 of those verbs into the て form.
:ballot_box_with_check: Conjugate the remaining 6 verbs into the た form.
☐ Write a sentence with an English translation for all 12 verbs.

Identify 12 verbs, two of each class
Irregular: くる to come → きて coming, する to do → した did
Ichidan: みる to see → みて seeing, おきる to wake up → おきた woke up
Godan ぬぶむ: のむ to drink → のんで drinking, あそぶ to play → あそんだ played
Godan くぐ: かく to write → かいて writing, およぐ to swim → およいで swam
Godan うつる: かう to buy → かって buying, わかる to understand → わかった understood
Godan す: おす to push → おして pushing, かえす to return (something) → かえした returned something

I looked over my notes while doing those exercises. I don’t feel bad about it, but I do think more practice without notes would be good… maybe tomorrow?

2 Likes

This is seriously great advice for all of us overzealous folk.

5 Likes

That might actually help more with verb conjugation… the last part that felt too easy but this part feels like almost too much haha.

The conjugation of the く and ぐ verbs is a little different.
You exchange the く sound for いて and ぐ sound for いで, so:
書く → 書いて
泳ぐ → 泳いで

I try to think of these conjugations as kind of intermediate between the regular って godan verbs and the う ending verbs like 買う, phonetically speaking.

1 Like

I have that in my notes…and was checking in my notes…and still got it wrong :cold_sweat:
I think I should do more of those.

Flash round
おく to put, おいて putting, おいた (have) put
あるく to walk, あるいて walking, あるいた walked
あく to be open, あいて to be opening, あいた to be opened.

1 Like

It might become a little clearer once you start using kanji in verbs more, because then you’ll notice how the kanji is the core of the verb and then the kana that’s left outside undergoes conjugation.

There are unfortunately some godan-ichidan 〜る pairs that are very misleading so you have to look at the sound preceding. Verbs ending with the “aru” or “iru” sound will typically be godan and the ones ending in “eru” always ichidan.

The reason I wrote “typically” is because there is plenty of ichidan verbs which end with the “iru” sound.

1 Like

This is good to know. The video didn’t cover it so I just cheated and looked while identifying るgodans and ichidans. I figured I’ll get to it when I get to it. But Im glad to have a (rough) rule to follow.

Ah, that mightve been a good idea. I opted to go with hira so I didn’t have to worry about writing down a bunch of kanji I didn’t actually know.

Just to throw my own 2 cents in on the は が topic.

Rather than establishing topic, it might be better to think of は as implicitly contrastive. It limits the discourse of the sentence (supplied by subject + predicate) to more specific bounds.
ビールは 飲まない。
As for beer, I don’t drink (it). (although I may drink other things).

たけしが 来ませんでした
Takeshi didn’t come. (Does he normally come?)

今日は たけしが 来ませんでした。
As for today, Takeshi didn’t come. (He may have come other days.)

This becomes more obvious when you get to more advanced sentences where you can start using explicit contrasts, rather than implicit.
From: https://jlptbootcamp.com/2012/02/japanese-particles-the-contrastive-wa/

この本は、
写真はきれいだけど説明はつまらない。
Kono hon wa shashin wa kirei dakedo setumei wa tumaranai.
As for this book:
The pictures are pretty but the explanations are boring.

In the above example, if you didn’t lead with この本は you’d be saying:
Pictures (everywhere) are pretty and explanations (everywhere) are boring.

クマ 人を 食べます。=> bear(s?) eat people (sheep probably don’t)
このクマ 人を 食べます。=> As for this bear, it eats people (others may not)
このクマ 人を 食べます。=> This bear is the one that eats people [There is nothing contrastive in this sentence]
ヤギは 人を 食べませんが、 クマは 人を たべます。 While goats don’t eat people, bears do.
普通に クマは 人を 食べませんが、 このクマは 人を 食べます。 While bears don’t normally eat people, this bear does.

3 Likes

Are you using her book for the exercises, or is this just based on the videos?