All my “reading” of Japanese, for two years now, is 99% looking stuff up in the dictionary! For this next sentence I understood nothing at all until I did that! Oh well, perseverance is the key!
どちらのいいぶんが ほんとかわからい. どちらかが おおうそつきだ.
どちら - which way / which one / who
の - possessive particle
いいぶん - one’s say, one’s point / complaint
が - identifier particle
ほんと - truth, fact, reality
か - embedded question (??)
わからい - negative of 分かる, ie to not understand
どちらか - either, one of the two
が - identifier particle
おお - big うそつき - liar, fibber
だ - copula
“I don’t know which one of them is telling the truth. One of them is a big liar”
can anyone tell me what the か is in the first sentence?
where did the police find their suspect? I guess we’re already in the thick of the story!
My understanding is that it is indeed the embedded question marker. The embedded question would be, as you guessed “which of the (things they are saying) is the truth?”. This embedded question becomes what the speaker doesn’t know (わからない)
If the sentence didn’t have that か it would looks strange because the use of どちら is clearly expecting a question to be made, and also because without the か the connection between ほんと and わからない would look unnatural, in my opinion.
Are the two forms fully interchangeable though, or are there specific situations where each is used? Is the shorter version always written as kana ('cause I know from experience WK won’t take that reading for the kanji version )?
Sometimes WaniKani is a bit strict like that. A couple years ago I asked them to accept めんどくさい for 面倒臭い and they said no. I guess they don’t like the shortened versions for the readings on WaniKani.
I doubt the shortened readings are used much in the kanji form though, because then you’d have to add furigana to make it clear that it should be read that way. It’s probably easier at that point to just write it in kana when you want a non-standard reading.
I love the fact that this book club is so active, but I am having some trouble following the conversation in this thread. Different pages are being discussed concurrently and it’s not always clear what page a post is referring to. I think it would be helpful if we could all preface our comments with the page number we’re referring to. That way it’s easier to find all relevant comments and easier to avoid reading about pages you’ve not tried yourself yet.
Page 6
Am I correct in thinking Hanae is the narrator? Because あたし is after Hanae’s direct speech has already ended.
Page 9
How am I to interpret どちらのいいぶんがほんとかわからない? Does どちら refer to いいぶん or to the men? So is it The story of which (man) is true or Which story is true?
For a moment I thought you’d dug up some horrible new contraction I’d have to learn (and right after we got hit out of the gate on page six with かかわっちゃって!!), but on checking the book again, the inspector actually says わからない. Thanks for asking the question about ほんとか, I was wondering too!
Yes, that’s always been pretty standard practice in every club I’ve been involved in, and something (as you can see) I always strive to do. It also makes searching the thread a whole lot easier using the search bar at the top right. Of course it is natural to sometimes forget.
事件が, - case + identifier particle
おきたのは - what happened (thanks again to Rowena, or else I would never have got this one)
きのうの晩 - last night
だ - copula
“this case took place last night”
“the events of this case took place last night”
“what happened in this case happened last night”
Or something like that.
But why だ and not だった?
Page 10
宝石商の秋田さんのところに, 泥畑という男から 電話がかかってきた
宝石商の秋田さん - Mr Akita the jeweler
の - possessive particle
ところ - place
に - direction particle
泥畑 - isn’t this is the name of the guy whose picture is on page 8. The jeweler who was robbed? This is someone’s name. First mentioned on page 8.
という - called
男 - man
から - from
電話がかかってきた - got a call
my nonsense translation about someone getting a call from someone
Edit: Belerith, in his very clear post below, kindly cleared up all my confusion! Thank you Belerith!
Literally: ‘the case, with regards to what happened, happened last night’. Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind having both 事件が and おきたのは? Seems a bit superfluous, unless there’s a nuance I’m not getting?
EDIT: maybe there’s a distinction between ‘the case’ as a whole, like the whole investigation (which is still ongoing) and the events that started the case (which happened last night), and that’s why they’re both mentioned? So it’s more like ‘The case started last night, as to what happened’.
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