Kitty Detectives! Week 10 Discussion 🐱

The first page of this week was going so smoothly, now page 102 bringing me back to the ground, haha. Helps reading everyone’s thoughts on it. I don’t have any other ideas to add, though.

A qbit of trouble with the last two sentences on

page 102

ねこをぬすんで どうするっていうの?

ねこをぬすんで - the stolen cats
どう - how/in what way
する - to do or one of the other dozen meanings
っていうの?(he) said?

Not really sure how to put this in order. “Did he say how the cats were stolen” maybe? Why do I have so much trouble parsing this short sentence

The following sentence… “Capone was just saved by missing out, right?”

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On first glace on page 108, the person in the bunny costume looked suspicious to me. Maybe it’s a bunny sticker :thinking: :laughing:
Yeah no, probably a @Micki ミミッチーマウス sticker.

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Trying to make sense of page 101…

それが [ ぜんぶコンテナトラックの うしろのステージにのぼった ] ところで、いきなり、ふたがしめられ、つれさられたのだという。

Then, at the spot where [ everyone got up on the stage on the back of the container truck ] all of a sudden the cover was closed and they were kidnapped, she said.

Not sure who or what the subject is! I imagine the cats…? How does ところで work, does it actually mean ‘place’ here? Does ぜんぶ mean ‘all’ (as in ‘everyone’) here, or does it pertain to the コンテナトラック?

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Hang on, are those quotation marks in the book, or are they square brackets for your emphasis? I don’t have the book on me :sweat_smile:

Square brackets to mark (what I think is) a relative clause. I get so lost in them otherwise :sweat_smile:

Ah, okay! That confused me initially, sorry.

In that case, I believe it’s one of the following two uses of ところ, which are kind of similar in context:

  1. “whereupon”
  2. “just finished doing”

I was also confused by ぜんぶ, but I believe this first clause is something like “just as everyone had finished getting up onto the stage…” or “everyone got up onto the stage, whereupon…” (minus the excruciating stage detail).

Not sure what role それが is playing because I can’t see the surrounding context right now.


I have to say this week had quite a lot of text that I felt was less friendly to foreign learners.

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I reckon it’s “The cats have been stolen, how can he say that?” (i.e. because he just said “we can’t worry about them now, we need to focus on tonight”)

But yeah, that’s basically it for the second sentence.

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Wait - I’ve just checked my copy again and realised mine looks different to yours…

Summary

Truckcat2

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Thank you. That makes much more sense and is a lot funnier. :smiley: Yet another example of not taking the prior sentence(s) into account.

A bit offtopic

I actually had the reverse happen today with an NHK News Easy article though. It was about posters for the Olympics. One sentence was about how people from different countries worked on them. The next sentence stated how many different posters there are, but I read it as how many people were working on them. I got it sorted out thanks to the nice people who translate the articles on reddit. :smiley:

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近所のおばさん:集まった猫がみんな、どこかに連れて行かれちゃったのよ。
俺:集まった猫?えと、そんな物はアプリストアで探して見たのか?neko

I can’t believe I’m finally caught up. dies

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giphy

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This week is really doing my head in! I think reading so much Yotsuba wrecked my ability to deal with longer sentences :sweat_smile:

Can you explain how that works in terms of grammar? Does っていう not mark indirect speech in this case?

Page 106

ぴかぴかのロングドレスがまぶしい サファイヤ高松さん。
What does が do here? Is the glittery dress the subject? What’s the verb?

Page 107

ねずみひげで、よくふとったまつやまさん。
What does よく add to ふとった? Does it amplify it (‘quite fat’)?

The が-marked subject in a sentence will either be doing an action (verb) or having an attribute (adjective). An adjective couples with a sentence with a coupler, such as だ or い. In this case, まぶしい is an “い adjective”, with the い coupling it to the subject as an attribute of the subject.

And then from there, ぴかぴかのロングドレスがまぶしい is simply an adjective/modifier/not-sure-the-right-term for サファイヤ高松さん.

That’s essentially what I take from it.

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I got the sense that サファイヤ高松さん is the full name of the character, so that’s why I am confused. If it’s an ‘A is B’ sentence (‘the glittery dress is radiant’), where does the name of the character come in…? I get the sense this sentence needs a verb…?

Consider the following. Let’s say you are talking about an apple. You would say:

「赤いリンゴ」

Here, 赤い is describing リンゴ.

For サファイヤ高松さん, they are being described with 「ぴかぴかのロングドレスがまぶしい」.

Just as “red apple” can be said as “the apple which is red”, this can be thought of as “The サファイヤ高松さん whose long sparkling dress is dazzling.”

At its core, this is a difference in how English and Japanese describe things.

I feel like this is an area my explanation is lacking, so if anyone can provide a better explanation (or point out areas my explanation is insufficient/off), don’t hesitate to point it out! I think this is mostly because I’ve gotten used to seeing how Japanese uses descriptions, without having formally read anything explaining it.

Edit: Consider the “A is B” a sub-sentence, a clause on its own, being used as a description:

(ぴかぴかのロングドレスがまぶしい)サファイヤ高松さん。

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Wow, mind blown. Thanks, that makes total sense now.

No, not really. It’s more of a gut feeling thing…