Kitty Detectives! Week 1 Discussion 🐱

[Radish8]

Pages 6 - 13

Story 1: 赤いとびらの家事件

Start Date: 21st October
Next Week: Case Part 2

にゃんにゃん探偵団 Home Thread

Last sentence of page 13 for eBook readers:
七時三十分 のことだ。

Story 1 Schedule

Week	Start Date	Part	Page Numbers
Week 1	October 21st	Case Part 1	6 - 13
Week 2	October 28th	Case Part 2	14 - 20
Week 3	November 4th	Case Part 3	21 - 31
Week 4	November 11th	Case Part 4	32 - 42
Week 5	November 18th	Solution Part 1	44 - 56
Week 6	November 25th	Solution Part 2	58 - 67

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Vocabulary List

Kitty Detectives Volume 2

Please read the editing guidelines in the first sheet before adding any words!

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Discussion Guidelines

• Please blur / hide major events in the current week’s pages (however early they occur) and any later content, like so: [spoiler]texthere[/spoiler]
  Err on the side of caution!

• When asking for help, please mention the page number (or % for eBooks).

• Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn and someone else will probably be grateful you asked!

• People usually find that they engage with and enjoy the discussion much more if they don’t read ahead, though of course it’s up to you

• To you lurkers out there: join the conversation, it’s fun!
  
  

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Participants

Mark your participation status by voting in this poll:

• I’m reading along
• I’m planning to catch up later
• I’m skipping this book

If you’ve read it before but will join in the discussion (or have read ahead), please select “I’m reading along”!

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[Radish8]

We have begun! Welcome to Kitty Detectives volume 2

Please don’t feel shy about asking any questions, however silly you feel - someone else definitely has the same question as you and will be very grateful you asked. Even if you’re normally a lurker, it’s much more fun to get commenting

Remember that you only have to read one page a day to keep up this week. がんばって！

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Some discussion on this week’s reading has already happened in the home thread: you can follow that discussion from this link - please reply by cross-posting to this thread!

[Rowena]

Here are my notes for this week’s readings:

p6

p8

p9

p10

p11

p12

p13

[Radish8]

And as a first comment…

Books, especially for children, will often jump right into the action. It’s always easier to get going if you understand a bit of the context of what you’re reading, so…

If you remember from our character breakdown, the protagonist of our tale is called Hanae (はなえ). She works in a picture book store called トムソーヤー, and has a cat called カポネ.

Next door to her book store is a dog behavior school run by a man called Spitz. He’s the protagonist of the わんわん探偵団 books, in which he gets tangled up in police cases by Police Inspector Kuroboshi (黒星ーけいぶ, where けいぶ is the title ‘Police Inspector’). In the first of the kitty detective books, the Police Inspector comes to Hanae’s store to ask where Spitz is, as he has a confusing case and wants to ask for help. Hanae says that Spitz is late, but that she also likes detecting… and the rest is history!

[Kazzeon]

p8

Surely a typo, but it’s ひがいしゃ.

[Rowena]

Cheers! Fixed now

[Rowena]

p6

I better understand the meaning of かかわっちゃって thanks to marcusp’s question and ChristopherFritz’s replies with links (in home thread) and I realise it’s essentially a contraction used in casual speach, but I’m having trouble filling in the missing bits - how would it be said/written more formally, please?

Edit: I’m on my 2nd lap of the Japanese Ammo video (lots of new info here )…

Is it かかわってしまって ??

[Belerith]

I believe in this case it would be かかわってしまって

てform + しまう
てしまう gets shortened to ちゃう.
It then conjugates as usual. (godan/u-verb style(?))
かかわってしまってーかかわっちゃって
かかわってしましたーかかわっちゃいました

Where the て form ends in で, でしまう becomes じゃう, as in のんじゃう.

[fray]

Can’t wait to start reading after getting home from work!

EDIT: Oh nice, @aiju is on board, too! Your comments in the thread for volume 1 were always helpful!

[Rowena]

I’ve just had an epiphany! I heard my students say「忘れっちゃった。」many, many times and have even used it myself (thinking it was a “going to” / “gonna” type contraction), but after today I now know they were saying that they had forgotten and regretted having forgotten.

Thanks everyone!

[_Marcus]

Page 8

いや, まだ 事件かどうかも わからない

I was getting into a right two and eight over this, thinking that the か was an embedded question and that かも was ‘perhaps’ etc etc… but then @Rowena’s vocab sheet sorted me out! Thank you!

いや, - no
まだ - yet
事件 - case
かどうか - whether or not
も - even
わからない - don’t know

“no, I don’t even know whether or not it is a case yet”

[Rowena]

“no, I don’t even know whether or not is is a case yet”

Thank you - I was going to double-check when this thread became more active if this was the meaning of that sentence.

It really is about the parsing and the conjugations, isn’t it?

[_Marcus]

Page 8

「xyz」といっている.

I’m not sure how you’d translate this… I think it literally means “is saying” (is that right?). How about just…

“[Inspector 黒星] said {xyz}”

Okay, it looks like the next sentence is a tough one. Shall I have a crack at it, or step back and let someone else have a go?

[Rowena]

If I’ve got the right place, it is actually the inspector quoting the jeweller (I’ve only just noticed now that there are Japanese equivalents for single and double quote marks!), so it might be more along the lines of “xyz”, (he)'s saying. Or maybe I’m taking transliteration too far??

[_Marcus]

Ah ha! Yes! You’re right! Well spotted! Thank you!

[Rowena]

Bedtime for me… また明日。

[_Marcus]

Page 8

Inspector 黒星 speaking:

でも, 犯人といわれた男は, 「なんのことだか わからない. その時間は, 家の絵画教室で生徒に絵をおしえていた.」といってる

でも, - but
犯人 - criminal
といわれた - quotation particle, plus 言う in past passive form, modifying the next word…
男は, - man + topic particle

「なん - what
の - possessive particle
こと - thing
だ - copula
か - embedded question
わからない. - don’t know
その時間は, - [at] that time
家の絵画教室で - at a painting class at home
生徒に - to students
絵を - painting + を
おしえていた.」- was teaching
といってる - is saying

“But the man said to be the criminal is saying “I don’t know what this thing is. I was at home teaching a painting class to students at that time”.”

“But our main suspect is saying he knows nothing about it, that he was at home teaching a painting class at the time”.

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Also off to bed… happy that the club is up and running! G’night all!

[Athakaspen]

Hi everyone! This is my first time reading a Japanese book, and I think my grammar knowledge isn’t what it should be, so I’m sure I’ll have lots of questions as I read along. Here’s two to start of with:

「やあ、へんな事件にかかわっちゃって、いそがしくてさ。」

In this sentence, why is the last verb in -te form? I know that you use -te form to make compound sentences with multiple verbs, but I thought the final verb was always conjugated.

「おしえてくださいな。」

What does the な at the end mean? I haven’t seen that sentence ender before.

[2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz]

「やあ、へんな事件にかかわっちゃって、いそがしくてさ。」

In this sentence, why is the last verb in -te form?

There was a debate about this in the main thread; my own interpretation is that it is often common in casual conversation to have a verb or adjective in its て-form at the end of a sentence to simply mean that there are more things that will go unmentioned. In this case, it is something like “I was involved in a strange case, and was very busy, and stuff”

「おしえてくださいな。」

What does the な at the end mean? I haven’t seen that sentence ender before.

な is a casual version of ね (Tae-Kim link). It is a bit softer than ね, but basically conveys the same meaning.

[Athakaspen]

Thanks, those explanations are really helpful! I really like the first grammar point, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it like that.