Sadly for us, Japanese children don’t learn to speak in line with the JLPT 
Completely as Rowena said - I’m thrilled whenever I see there’s a question!
(on Monday morning I was pretty devastated to find there were no questions yet… )
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Same. I have a soft spot for the Doggy/Kitty book clubs. They gave me such a good start that I am really keen to pay it forward.
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Is there a list of dogs somewhere? So far I have found a St Bernard of the Alps and a Shepherd of I think arano . It is my first book too- finding page 8 challenging! And if I knew how to blur I would do it!
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To blur, you can type:
[spoiler]blurred text here[/spoiler]
Be sure to post your questions about page 8 and we’ll have a look
As for the dogs, Alps and Alan are from the previous book so I guess that’s why they’re getting a shoutout 
Thanks- so on page 8 shepherd of Alan is the name of a dog?
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Did that work?- it doesn’t seem to have blurred on my view.
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You forgot the / in the last tag. It’s [/spoiler] for the one on the right.
As for the question: X の Y doesn’t just denote possession (Y of X), it can also denote a more general relationship:
３時のでんしゃ = the three o’clock train
むすめのやすこ = my daughter Yasuko
So in this case it’d translate to ‘Alan the shepherd dog’, ‘a shepherd dog named Alan’.
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Thank you so much. It feels like wading through treacle at the moment. Im just trying to get the broad sense of it rather than understand every thing but the names are a challenge- since I don’t know they are names!
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Don’t worry about that, it would’ve been that way whenever you first tried reading Japanese texts for native speakers It’s something you just have plough through, and after a while you’ll start recognising these grammar points more and more. So keep going and keep asking questions! 
Also, if you click the pencil icon at the bottom of a post, you can edit it. That means you don’t have to double post You can also select text from another person’s post and click the ‘quote’ button that pops up to collect multiple quotes in a single post. That should make it a bit easier as well
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As @Phryne says, that’s normal when first reading.
To expand on this, you can think of the first word as modifying the second word. This is how modifiers work in Japanese: the modifier comes before the word being modified.
In 「３時のでんしゃ」, the core word is でんしゃ (train). Let’s say you’re visiting a relative, and you’re going to head home by train. There are three trains leaving that day, so you modify the word train to make it clear which one you’re taking: it’s the ３時 train, the 3 o’clock train.
In 「むすめのやすこ」, the core word is the name やすこ. But maybe you’re talking with family, and you have an aunt やすこ, and a cousin named やすこ, and your grandmother has a pet turtle named やすこ. In order to make it clear which やすこ you’re talking about, you modify the word with むすめ (daughter). This makes it clear that when you explain why you won’t let boys anywhere near やすこ, no one thinks you’re talking about Grandma’s pet turtle.
You can also see from what Phryne wrote that these modifiers work exactly the same as in English:
In “the three o’clock train”, you have “three o’clock” modifying “train”.
In “my daughter Yasuko”, you have “my daughter” modifying “Yasuko”.
Another thing you’ll see is where a whole mini sentence (called a clause) modifies a word. In English, we often put this clause after the word it’s modifying, such as:
“My friend who borrowed my car and used it in a bank robbery has fled the country.”
In Japanese, this would read like:
“My borrowed-my-car-and-used-it-in-a-bank-robbery friend has fled the country.”
No need to worry about understanding it all yet. Just reading about it once means when you’re seeing it in action, you may just recall “oh yeah, I read about this”, and that should make it easier to learn later on.
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Page 14: クレオパトラの腹まき is in these triangle brackets. What are they and why are they used instead of the normal square brackets?
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I’m also a beginner and haven’t been reading native material for very long 
. So I’d just like to add that just reading without understanding everything, like you’re doing, really does help.
I did the same with NHK Easy News, actually. And now, I still do that but then also put it in DeepL afterwards to check.
Keep going it will stop feeling like treacle eventually!
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If anyone knows more confidently, please chime in, but my understanding is that they are quotation marks, which seem to be used more to denote things like titles / names of things. Well, they’re definitely quotation marks of a kind, but that’s my understanding of what they’re used for.
(As opposed to e.g. dialogue)
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I have just discovered a wonderful page of vocabulary! I was looking at the sheet labelled radish experiment- and hadn’t noticed Week 1- so I hadn’t seen the full list- hence some of the feeling of treacle wading- and my questions about the animal names. Nice though reading through all the stuff I looked up or worked out for myself! All good practice. Anyone know what radish experiment is?
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I’m so sorry! I duplicated the week 1 page to see how many words were left if I only kept the ones I felt were actually useful for beginners to learn, after the conversation with e_w0205 about whether to bother learning the vocabulary.
I don’t know why it would have linked you through to that sheet rather than week 1 though - the Google URLs sometimes seem to behave a bit unpredictably.
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It was such a lovely surprise finding the fuller sheet so many thanks- it has made me really appreciate it!
page 14 question I understand the last clause is insisted but the bit in quotes seems to just have a version of " I" (I haven’t come across before), “criminal” and “is not”. Is there something I am missing?
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こんども『自分は犯人じゃない』といいはるんだ。
『自分は犯人じゃない』is direct speech (hence the quotation marks).
といいはる introduces the direct speech (you can compare it to という, that is also the quotation particle と).
んだ (or のです) is something you often find at the end of a sentence. It gives it a bit of an explanatory or emphatic vibe. It’s covered in Genki 1 (2nd edition) on page 270 I believe.
So I’d translate it as: This time, he’s also asserting “I’m not the culprit!”
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Just to make sure I understand correcly wouldn’t that be more This time also they will assert that "I’m not the culprit I was also a little wondering about that んだ ending in that sentence and the first sentence in the page 14. Is the explaining tone used to explain why the police arrived to the house or why it is used?
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Yes, you are quite right, forgot about that wee lil’ も Edited it for the sake of clarity. As for whether he will say it or he says it at the moment, I am not sure. I was assuming they’d already brought him in for questioning, but maybe not. Peeking ahead at page 17 it looks like they want to swing by his place for questioning, so a future tense looks more apt.
I don’t think I’d go so far as to pinpoint exactly what each んだ-sentence is explaining. It is used so commonly, you’ll soon learn just to take it in your stride rather than consider too deeply how to ‘translate’ it.
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I found this happening in the Rental Oniichan Volume 2 thread as well. I’d uniquely link to each chapter’s sheet, but found that the link would bring up the last viewed sheet. So if I was on chapter 8’s sheet and used that address for the link, then someone followed the link they would be on chapter 8. But if they then switched to chapter 6’s sheet, then next person to follow my same link would be on chapter 6’s sheet.
I’m sure there’s a proper way to link to a specific sheet, but I haven’t looked it up yet.
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