Doggy Detectives! Week 2 Discussion 🐕

Japanese Language Book Clubs
41

Thanks for the replies everyone >`< I’m not sure if I should reply individually cause that’ll create spam but I also wanna be polite so uh

Fair point, I realized that mid-page and will divide by sentences from now on:) Also huge thanks for the breakdown

You helped a lot! Thanks or taking the time:) Also you made me finally give up and try Bunpro xDD

offtopic

Was just reluctant to add one more daily Japanese thing to do, but Bunpro seems far better than I thought^^"

You’re absolutely right. I’ll do my best to avoid repetition, it’s just so easy not to notice new posts when note-taking like this xD And thanks or further explaining things - that must’ve taken quite some time.

more offtopic

Reading the book makes me feel like a child learning to speak. Nothing makes any sense, but the pattern is there. The community help is what gets me through, thanks a lot. I hope I’ll be able to help back one day:)

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42

You will get there :slightly_smiling_face: honestly, it’s just very different encountering ‘real’ sentences as opposed to example ones, and practice is all you need. I can at least reassure you that pages 16 and 17 are shorter than 12 and 14 :wink:

re: Bunpro

I don’t use it myself but I know several users on here who caution against doing too many lessons at once. Even if they’re easy ones you already know, it will come back to bite you when they all pop back up at once! I think I remember somebody saying they limited themselves to one lesson a day.

And as somebody who burnt out doing too many SRS myself, I can certainly advise restraint in general :grin:

I enjoy it and it’s good for my Japanese learning :blush:

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43

@Radish8 is so much better at explaining things. :wink:

Yes, you might want to be careful with your workload. I’m not really studying with bunpro at the moment, but it is great to look something up fast and have more links with in-depth explanations.

Just answer with quotes like you did - the thread will be much more organised this way :slight_smile:

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44

I just happened to notice the typo :wink:

How is everyone finding the reading this week?

We haven’t had any questions about pages 16 or 17 yet, I don’t think - not sure whether that’s because they’re a bit easier or because people haven’t reached them yet :sweat_smile:

Please comment on how you’re finding the reading and/or the story, especially if you’re otherwise lurking :wink: oh, and…

don’t forget to vote in the participation poll up the top, if you haven’t already!

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45

I’m enjoying it so far! I haven’t yet had any questions for the pages so far, but will ask if I get stuck. I don’t feel qualified to answer questions, so I mostly lurk and like :wink:

I finished the first にゃんにゃん book a few days ago, so reading this book feels easier than when I started on that one a couple of months ago - the language is similar and I know how the stories are structured. (Also two months has passed and I know more kanji and vocab since my first にゃんにゃん story).
And the dogs in わんわん feature sooner than the cats in にゃんにゃん!

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46

Still enjoying it, I didn’t have too many issues this week, most were minor. They were also mentioned in explanation posts by others so I didn’t need to ask a question on it myself :blush:

There is a grammar point on page 17 no-one has mentioned yet. I hadn’t come across it before, either that or I’d just forgotten about it. Just thought I’d share in case anyone else was struggling with it. Or in the event that I’m wrong someone will correct me.

In the last sentence of the page Spitz says:

へえー、ふつうのデメキンぬすんでどうするんだろ？

I struggled with the ぬすんでどうする part, I couldn’t understand what the する was doing there.

I took a look through Google and came across a similar question on the Japanese Stack Exchange which explained it as follows.

verb in て-form + どうする is a set phrase and means along the lines of ‘there is no use (verb + ing) or ‘what’s the use of (verb + ing)?’

Applying that to the above sentence with ぬすんで it gives ‘what’s the use of stealing…’

For the complete sentence I then understood it as ‘Huh, what’s the use of stealing an ordinary goldfish?’

Link to the stack exchange question

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47

Enjoying the book so far. Thanks to those asking questions - without the questions the book club doesn’t really work!

It’s been interesting that some kanji like 軒 and 滴 have been used, which Jisho lists as being taught in junior high, and are quite high Wanikani levels (47 and 51). I’d figured the book was aimed at quite a bit lower level than junior high school.

Out of interest how did people translate the phrase in the picture on page 13: どういう事件かというとだな…

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48

I roughly translated it as ‘Well, if I had to say what kind of case this is…’

Don’t know if that’s right or not

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49

I’m a little confused about two grammar points on page 17. The sentence is: 「ぬすまれるなんて、よっぽど、めずらしい金魚なんですか？」

I think this sentence roughly says,

About the stolen thing, was the goldfish very rare?

I’m a little unsure of the first phrase, ぬすまれるなんて. I think its function is to essentially bring up the topic–the thing that was stolen. However, I’m unsure.

I’m a bit confused about 金魚なん. What purpose does なん serve after this? I’m a bit confused on the grammatical structure of the question I guess. Intuitively I would think that you would be trying to ask if the adjective (rare) applies to the fish which would yield: 金魚はめずらしいですか。

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50

I’ll try to explain, but this is one of my least favourite areas of Japanese, so if anybody else can confirm or debunk my explanation that would be great :sweat_smile:

The tl;dr is that んですか is short for のですか, and adds a questioning tone to the sentence. You have to add a な in there to make the modification of ん / の by 金魚 (a noun) grammatically correct.

this got long - page 17 question

の can be used at the end of a sentence to add an explanatory tone, or a questioning tone if it’s a question. So のです would be used at the end of an expanatory sentence, and のですか would be used at the end of a sentence seeking an explanation (of course tone can also be used to convey this without か).

ん is just short for の - so instead you can have んです or んですか.

This の (ん) is the nominaliser - in this case it is acting as a generic noun. Effectively you are putting forward this hypothetical の (that you describe) as a possible explanation. This means that you have to inflect whatever comes before properly as you would if it were any other noun. If you want to describe の with a noun (金魚) you have to use な*.

He’s asking whether it - the thing that was stolen - is a rare goldfish (because he’s seeking to understand why it was stolen), so what he wants to know is whether ‘it’ is a めずらしい金魚.

Thus we end up with めずらしい金魚・な・の・ですか, which is shortened here to 金魚なんですか.

[rare goldfish] な [thing] [is it?]

You could indeed introduce the topic as the goldfish, and then ask whether it is rare. めずらしい is an い-adjective, so it can be used directly in front of nouns. Thus a straight question would be 金魚は、めずらしいですか as you suggested, but adding in that questioning tone gives you 金魚は、めずらしいのですか.

Here the topic is ‘the thing that was stolen’ and he asks whether it was ‘a rare goldfish’. It’s just a different way of phrasing the sentence / adds a slightly different nuance.

*I think this explanation is long-winded enough without getting into why?

I’ll leave your other question to somebody else :sweat_smile: they’re good questions.

That’s awesome to hear :grin:

SO TRUE. They seem (so far) to be much more important to the story.

That’s absolutely fine - I’m not trying to shame the lurkers, haha, just provide an opportunity to join in the conversation :blush:

Thank you so much for doing so! I’m not sure I really knew that specifically. It’s one of those sentences where I get the gist so just gloss over it, which is exactly what I need to not do :sweat_smile:

Yep, I agree with DollyDaydream - どういう means “what kind of”, and かというと is that grammar point we discussed last week which means “if I had to say”.

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51

I have to be honest, I’m exactly the same. So far I haven’t had any major issues with understanding, because I’ve been able to get the overall gist of the sentence.

However since we’re all trying to learn and help each other out I thought I’d go back over this weeks pages and try to work out at least a few of the bits that I didn’t understand fully.

And share the information of course :blush:

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52

Ah! For some reason my mind went straight to 何. Makes perfect sense now!

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53

Good timing, I was busy trying to get my head around なんて this morning!

I found this Maggie Sensei article really helpful.

The main point I took away was that なんて can be used where you might normally expect は, and it emphasises the word before to express surprise, disgust, admiration, happiness, disbelief, etc.

So I’d agree with your translation of the first half of the sentence being - “about the stolen thing.“ And using なんて adds emotion to the sentence - he’s surprised that a goldfish would the single thing stolen from the house, and trying to make sense of it - was it very rare?

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54

Enjoying the book so far uwu! Caught up on all the pages for this week and the thread today. Ngl I was slightly intimidated by page 12, but I was surprised by how much I was able to understand on my own. Thanks again to the people filling up the vocab sheet :)) Anyways, don’t mind me as I go back into lurking :3

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55

ありがとう(thanks for this)

This is why it is important for everyone to include the page # when both asking and answering questions - if you put 14 in the search at the top and mark Search this topic you will get a list of all comments related to that page.

Speaking of page 14, I’ve just finished studying it and going over the comments here concerning it; I pretty much understood everything (I can’t believe how much better I am with clauses compared to at the beginning of にゃんにゃん探偵団), but thanks for all the detailed explanation to help solidify everything.

I may be wholly premature, but looking at the picture on p15, here’s my current guess at a solution to the case (SERIOUS POTENTIAL SPOILER TO PLOT):

I think 山形さん managed to hook a golfball through the open? window of the reception room and broke the bowl, and the poor 金魚 has flopped its way under the covered table or other furniture and is gasping away or worse :skull:.

I’ll get to the next 2 pages tonight.

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56

I mean, regardless of what we think the solution is… I am very concerned for the health of a goldfish whose bowl has been smashed :sweat_smile: it’s not like somebody has come along and scooped him out… unless the bowl breaking was an unfortunate accident.

Actually, given that in the picture on pages 16/17 we can see a police officer dusting the sofa for fingerprints (??), I think it’s unlikely the goldfish is hidden somewhere in the room :grin:

Nice to hear from you :blush: glad to hear it’s going well :+1:

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57

I didn’t bother waiting for tonight; with the questions and answers above I was able to understand the tougher bits on the last two pages for this week, thanks. All caught up now :grin:.

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58

That summary really helpful, especially the bit about considering it a は. Thanks, なんて is always giving me grief!

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