Doggy Detectives! Week 1 Discussion 🐶

And the word for wife: 家内 :confounded: It might have a more ‘acceptable’ etymology, but at first sight it made me shudder lol

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First time reading a Japanese book. Struggled a bit with reading top to bottom out loud. It’s also hard for me to tell what pages I am on the kindle desktop app. I think my questions/points were primarily from page 6 or 7.

The grammar points tripped me up were:

~と ~when
thing とnatural response/result

おれのいえをみるとにげだしてしまう

When (women) see my house they regrettably can’t help but running away.
lol a bit funny…

というと

どうしてかというと

I understand what he means through context, but I don’t understand the grammar for this.

だらけ and ばかり
They seem to have similar uses in our reading thus far.

Overall this seems great for my level. I’m on Genki ch 19 and I feel challenged and comfortable at the same time.

This book is already reinforcing some new grammar points I’ve learned in the past week. Glad to be here and looking forward to seeing this through with everyone!

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They’re from page 7, but I’ll let you off :wink:

Are the page numbers not visible on eBooks, or is it just something about the Kindle desktop app making it tricky? I thought that if they were images from the book they would have the page numbers :thinking: I can add the last sentences to the OP if needed.

:+1:

This is と言うと, and the first と is being used as a ‘quotation marker’, indicating that the previous bit is being quoted. It’s easiest to imagine it in English as having actual quotation marks around it, so “どうしてか”

と言うと sort of means “if one were to say”, so in this context it gives a ‘if I had to say “why”…’ vibe.

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I would recommend watching this video. I think that Dolly explains it quite well :slightly_smiling_face:.

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Ah, gotcha - not all the pages in the paper version have page numbers either, so you have to flick back and forth a bit sometimes.

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Honestly I usually just read this as “and” anyway. :smiley:

They see my house and regrettably run away.

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This lol I read all the way to page 12. Although I wasn’t super clear on our reading schedule. I planned on reading up to 10 tonight. The only page numbers I saw were 6 and 12. In hindsight, I should’ve noticed earlier. Will be all set for the next thread.

Sweet, thank you! that’s kinda where my mind was as far as the feeling was concerned. Sorta like ‘hmm I wonder why…’.
How the construction translated directly was lost on me.

Overall it seems like he doesn’t have a clear grasp on how others see his lifestyle.

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I think I’ll post my promised list of grammar points a bit early then, if you don’t mind @Radish8. Otherwise it’d be ‘mustard after the meal’, as we would say in Dutch :wink:

Page 7

V + にいく

みたい
てしまう
〜かというと

Page 8

とか〜とか
だけ
‘Passive’ (honestly, I really recommend CureDolly’s video. Yes, it’s weird, but put the speed on 1.5x and turn on the subtitles, and then it becomes quite doable :wink: )
〜になる
おかげで
たり〜たりする

Page 10

のように
らしい

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Definitely, but as I’m still trying to solidify the nuance behind the grammar I feel like with that one in particular it’s important to point out the cause and effect feel to it. The clause after と cannot be something you control right?

ex
春になるとあたたかくなります。
When it becomes spring, it gets warm.

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Oops, I’ve just seen from nienque’s links that there’s a specific ~かというと grammar point; essential meaning of “if I had to say”. So similar but not quite the same as what I said! :bowing_man:

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I really broke my head over that one too! But I guess you could say the か is for the embedded question, the first と is the quotation particle, the いう is 言う and the second と is of the conditional variety. So that’s pretty much the same as what you said.

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Yes, that’s how I was putting it together, but the actual grammar point is more well-defined and specific :sweat_smile:

also I am super excited that we have started, haha, just wanted to say that :grin:

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Page 6:

So (I think) the verb is いる in:

妻も子もない

But it’s ある in:

相手がいない

Is that because 相手 is considered inanimate?

Is there a way to know whether a noun is animate or inanimate? I would have guessed ‘companion’ would be animate.

Edit:
Whoops, I got that backwards.
いる => いない and ある => ない

So companion is animate, but 妻も子も is not. Now why is that?

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My best guess is that 妻も子も is treated as a list of things, whereas 相手 is treated as a person.

An example in English would be saying, “I don’t have things like a wife and child. I don’t have anyone like a partner.”

But I could be wrong, and my English counterpart example might be a bit out there.

Edit: Another way of looking at it is that “wife and child” are being used as a concept here.

Here’s reading related to いる and ある for anyone who wants to know more about the two:

http://maggiesensei.com/2010/01/15/いる+ある-iru-aru-request-lesson/

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I explained the whole sentence and its grammar above. I hope it’ll help you :).

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Alright, the second sentence on page 7 is definitely throwing me for a loop.

女主人のはなえさんとはなしているとたのしいけれど、むこうはおれのことなんか、気にしていないみたいだ。

My current working translation is something like…

Talking to the store owner, Ms. Hanae would be fun, but I don’t want to look like I’m giving her too much attention.

How far off am I?

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Thanks for this tip - I’ll give it a go, because as-is, her voice is very off-putting.

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REMINDER:

Please, please include the page number in any and all questions, comments and responses about vocab and grammar in the book - doing this makes this thread searchable for anyone still waiting for their book to arrive or for anyone reading the book at a much later date (the reading threads are open for 10 years for this very purpose).

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On page six, his t-shirt in the illustration names his business as “Spit’s Dog Training”. Maybe the pun in his name is dog spit :stuck_out_tongue:

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Page 7

Thanks very much for all your work in putting together this whole grammar package with links, but especially the bit I’ve quoted above - as others wrote, I thought I had the gist of it, but it’s always good to get concrete confirmation.

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