First manga attempt (夏子の酒), would love a little translation help!

帰る

Wait, is that how it shows up in the manga?

Yup, exactly! :person_shrugging:

Blah sorry for the bad quality:

1 Like

Ah, it looks like you’re confusing the ら for a え—he says 帰らねえで. It’s the negative form 帰らない with the ない colloquially morphed into ねえ (you’ll often see it as ねえ, ねぇ, or ねー in casual/informal situations, particularly spoken by boys and men—you’ll see this pattern with other い-adjectives as well). で is a sentence-ending particle here, similar to よ (at least it is in Kansaiben, and it feels the same here), so it just provides emphasis

3 Likes

Whooops, yes I see, I was getting confused by the え at the end when transcribing. This make total sense now, thanks!

1 Like

Continuing to work through this… later on in the same frame:

じっちゃん: 夏子は親兄弟が倒れなきゃ帰ってこんのか
My guess: “Your family will fall over when they see you’ve come home”
… but I’m just gluing “fall over” and “come home” together in a way that makes sense in context. Here’s my stab at this:

倒れる → 倒れない (negative) → 倒れなき- (guess: has to do with this archaic form?)
But then I’m not sure what happens to the small や… more old man speech? Also, this seems like a weird use of negative that turns my guess of “will fall over” upside down.

Then is this an adjective describing 帰って?

Regarding 帰って… I’m not sure which use of ‐て would apply here. It doesn’t seem connective, or like a command/request…

Finally (whew), the end seems like a soup of particles to me. こん could be “this”, or maybe it has to do with the preceding ‐て in a way I don’t understand yet. I’m guessing の is either an “explaining の” or possibly a “noun-making の” depending on what the preceding word means. And the か… this doesn’t seem like a question to me unless this is something like “Won’t your family fall over…”, but I’m not familiar with other uses of か. Looking at this list gives me some ideas, maybe expressing annoyance?

TL;DR I’m totally lost on this one but I’m trying and appreciate the help :]

I ordered a copy of DoBJG and will dig into it as soon as it arrives!

I’m afraid I can’t help with the meaning, but I can with the contractions!

Update: Oh! Actually, I think I do know what it means, now that I looked more into なきゃ! “Unless your relatives collapse, you won’t come home?”

This is the contracted form of 倒れなければ. 倒れなければ > 倒れなきゃ. So this would be an “if… then.” (If your relatives don’t collapse, then…)

This is the contracted form of 帰ってこないのか. The て form will only be a request/command if there’s nothing after it (and even then, it could just be a hanging て form to soften it, rather than a command) because it’s a shortening of てください. Here, 帰る is in the て form to attach the auxiliary verb くる (来る), in this case in the negative こない, which gets contracted into こん. The の (also sometimes ん, but you can’t have two んs in a row, so either it’ll remain uncontracted as here or the second will get dropped) will often go after the plain form before か because using か directly with the plain form can be rather rude. Just の will also be used to form questions with the plain form and is softer than のか or んか and thus is probably used more often by women (though men will definitely use it too)

As you continue reading, you’ll get a feel for the contractions better! Until then, we’re always happy to help. Here, also, is a quick contraction reference that someone else compiled on the forum.

5 Likes

In case the expansion of the contractions doesn’t help enough, here’s the meaning:

Do you not come home unless your family falls ill?

I don’t know the manga; this could be a literal reference to why she’s come back to her hometown, or just a “you don’t come back just because you want to see us, only if you really have to” hypothetical/hyperbole.

2 Likes

That’s totally it! The setup for the Manga is that her brother falls ill so she comes home. Super helpful, thanks y’all.

This is amazing. Thanks for your help and for this link, I’ll be sure to keep this handy. I never would’ve gotten こん came from 来ない on my own…

2 Likes

Some other resources you might find helpful if you haven’t yet discovered:

  • Jisho online Japanese-English dictionary.
  • ichi.moe is a tool for parsing out sentences. You can type/paste in a whole sentence and it will try and break the sentence down into its individual parts. As Japanese doesn’t use spaces between words this can be really helpful when you are first starting out. It’s also useful when you don’t recognise the conjugation of a word, or when a group of words form a set expression.
  • Deepl will translate a sentence from Japanese to English. It’s obviously not going to be right all the time, but it’s pretty good. If you’ve figured out all the parts of the sentence but struggling to bring them together as a whole, it can often point you in the right direction.
  • Jaded network this site is a resource for looking up onomatopoeia. It can be really helpful for all the little sound effects that come up in manga. You won’t want to look them all up but sometimes they help with understanding a panel.
3 Likes

To this I would add that since DeepL prioritizes naturally sounding sentences over accuracy, you can try English → Japanese to get a good sounding Japanese sentence :slight_smile: .

4 Likes

These resources are all great, thank you for sharing. It definitely nudges me in the right direction but sometimes I still don’t quite get the reason why or there’s some specific thing I don’t understand.

For example Natsuko is waiting in the doorway of her father’s room and she says to him…

一人前になるまでうちの敷居をまたぐなって

I’m good on this one until the end. My take is something like “Until I’ve become an adult, <??? Some verb> this threshold”. I would guess at a translation like like “I will not cross this threshold until I become an adult”, which is close to what deepl says given that it doesn’t “know” the subject:

It translates it as “Don’t cross my threshold until you’re on your own.”

… but Ichi.moe parses the なって at the end as the て-form of なる, but it seems like deepl maybe thinks it’s a negative of またぐ?

Any ideas on what またぐなって means at the end of this sentence? The other thing I’m struggling to get used to is the “unspoken” content that seems fairly common to leave out of a Japanese sentence. Could this be one of those cases?

Thanks as always!

一人前になる is a set phrase meaning “to become an adult”, like you said.
うち can only refer to you or yours as far as I know, so the threshold is the speaker’s.
またぐ means “to step over”
Now I’m not 100% certain, but I believe the ending って may be the quoting って, which would translate to something like “I told you”, without knowing the context.
Which makes またぐな the negative imperative, “don’t cross”.
So putting it all together, “I told you not to cross my threshold until you’re of age!” Does that fit?
Or it might be “you told me not to cross your threshold until I’m of age” with うち being okay here to mean “your” as it’s being quoted with って? Context would tell us.

3 Likes

うち = 家 :slight_smile:

3 Likes

RIght, maybe. In which case, it can be anyone’s 家, not just the speaker’s, right? Although I thought it was a little childish to say うち instead of いえ? So many nuances I’m unsure of. :sweat_smile:

2 Likes

Ah OK, I was reading うち as “inside” but I think “house” makes more sense. I just went on a journey re-reading about sentences ending in って and it could be that she’s saying her father said all of this in the past because his response is:

なったのか一人前に

Which might be something like a doubtful question (because of “のか”) with something understood left off at the end? “I wonder if you’ve become an adult…” or something?

Colloquial Japanese is tough! Any general tips on how to approach the transition from “formal” Japanese (Genki, NHK Easy) to something like this would be very much appreciated :]

1 Like

This is sort of an inverted sentence, a common pattern in speech. He starts by asking なったのか, then fills in what he omitted before: 一人前に. The proper, complete sentence would have been 一人前になったのか. “So, have you become an adult?” or, to better mimic his style of speaking, “So, have you? Become an adult?”

Colloquial Japanese is tough for me too. I can’t offer any concrete tips other that repeated exposure and practice. It does get easier with time! :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I thought rather than create a new one I’d hijack this one as I’m in the exact same boat as vthomas2007, reading this as my first manga having been charmed by it in Japanese the Manga Way!
I’ve been going fairly well but I’ve got rather confused about one sentence and I was hoping for some insight:
Natsuko and the head brewer (the old man) are sitting together and he says to her:

そんなもんのむこたァねえ

Referring to the “fake sake” you get in Tokyo. It seems to be something along the lines of “don’t drink that sort of thing”, but I don’t understand what こた means here, whether it’s a verb conjugation, i.e. のむこた, or whether it’s its own word, and I definitely don’t get what that little ァ is doing there…

If anyone can shed any light on this I’d really appreciate it

1 Like

I think it’s そんなもの、飲むことねえ in dialectal speech

The small ァ just shows that it’s an extension of the previous sound, without actually being a part of the word

Oh! After pm215 commented, I realized the こたァ might be こと + は elided together. You see は elided to the previous sound a lot, but I’m used to seeing it turn into ゃ, like それは into そりゃ

Which would make it more along the lines of “That sort of thing isn’t something that you drink,” but your translation is perfectly fine. (For some reason, I was thinking the ねえ was ね but drawn out, and the feeling was more like “So people really drink that stuff, huh,” but yeah, that probably wouldn’t really fit the context and it’s a colloquial pronunciation of ない.)

3 Likes

I’d say 飲むことはない , but same difference.

4 Likes

Ah amazing, that makes so much more sense! I wonder if it’s been elided differently to show that it’s because he’s a bit drunk rather than just his accent? I’m finding the colloquialisms and accents etc in this book really fascinating but my goodness they do make it more confusing at times.

I don’t suppose anyone knows of any good resources to learn more about these types of “non-standard” speech? I guess my main issue is that when coming across something like こたァ being used instead of ことは the dictionaries and textbooks I use become useless!