Yessssss thank you for the pic I was literally just wishing I could see the page - if we’re going to do this, let’s do it properly!
You can vote for up to three cats. Sorry if I missed your favourite, and apologies that I can’t hide this beneath a details tag.
Chatty Cats
Wide-Eyed Cat
Happy Tiger Cat
Flat Cap Cat
Pearly Cat
Head Pat Cat
Fish Cat
Magic Cat
Dressy Cat
Hungry Kitten
Ribbon Cat
Snooty Cat
Serene Cat
Acrobatic Cat
Determined Cat and Booped Cat
Worried Cats
Neckerchief Cat
Amused Cat
Smart Cat
Lounging Cat
0voters
Also, what on earth was Hanae doing while this was going on?! I can understand Kuroboshi panicking, but she has a cool head. I’m also somewhat unimpressed by the police officer confidently saying they have the guy surrounded like a rat in a trap, when apparently nobody has been stationed round the back of the property.
Presumably keeping some kind of promise to our gallant phantom thief not to out him to Kuroboshi. I presume - I didn’t read the first book. Or else she’s just speechless that Kuroboshi would take the entire guard squad and leave purely on the word of Generic Passer-by A.
I particularly liked this sentence (which I have kanjified):
一流の泥棒は、最初から逃げ道を考えておくものさ。
For the best thieves, an escape route is something you have to think about from the beginning.
おく・置く is a particularly interesting verb, and it shows up a few times on these last few pages in what Jisho.org calls sense 9, “to do something in advance, usually written using kana alone, after the -te form of a verb”. This is apparently considered (by Jisho) to be JLPT5 level grammar although I can’t recall ever consciously seeing it before - it turns up in Bunpro at N4, as grammar point 162.
Now that you’ve clocked it though, you’ll find you see it all the time
Btw, I would probably drop the “have to” from your translation - I think the nuance is more that this is something first-rate thieves do.
I… that image is beautiful
I would like to announce the winner of the カワイイねこ contest tomorrow, so please get your votes in now if you haven’t already! I think, of our active readers, that only @nienque and @guillepolito haven’t voted yet?
Everybody has cast their votes, and it’s time to announce…
Winners of the 2020 カワイイねこ Contest!
There was some fierce competition at the top, but the one who rose above them all to be crowned the 2020 champion and most かわいい, with over 50% of the votes was… Flat Cap Cat!
Hot on their heels in second place we have: Head Pat Cat!
And in a very respectable third place: Magic Cat!
Congratulations to all of our winners, and indeed to everybody who participated, whether cat or judge. Every cat is, of course, extremely かわいい, and I know we all had a lot of difficulty deciding between such distinguished individuals as these. Each cat present should be exceptionally proud of their performance today, and I’m sure we hope to see you all again at the 2021 カワイイねこ Contest.
I was just thinking, we’ve criticised Hanae and Kuroboshi for letting the bad guy get away, but if Hanae hadn’t spent 6 pages explaining how he stole the diamond, they might have caught him before he escaped through his tunnel!
(I have just learned that the Adobe PDF image-to-Japanese-text-recognition doesn’t work when it is white lettering on a black background - a quick flip through the わんわん books shows there is only one such page in all three books, so I’ll be sorted from now on!)
If you could invert the colours on the pdf you could solve this problem! On my iPhone I can invert the colours within the accessibility settings for the phone. When I go onto Bookwalker the black pages with white writing magically become white pages with black writing. Only problem is when I screen shot the page it reverts back to the original - not what I’m seeing on the screen - so I can’t show you an example!
Had a quick google search and I couldn’t find an easy way to do this with a pdf or photo file but it must be possible. (But don’t let it distract you too much from actually studying Japanese!)
Software still sees the original color (as you found with the screenshot), so this accessibility option wouldn’t help for Adobe (I wanted to be able to suggest it myself, though!) Screenshotting then inverting in an image editor works to get something that appears inverted to software, but at this point it’s no longer in the PDF…
I’m surprised (if) Adobe doesn’t have an option to handle light text on a dark background.
I had hoped there would be a way to modify the page to get text recognition to work and did look around to see if there was a way to invert the colours, but I am now determined to spend far less time than I was doing before in the faffing-around-getting-ready-to-make-notes stage of this reading/studying business.
Instead of being able to highlight and sticky-note the text in one fell swoop as on the normal pages, I ended up doing a quick two-step of drawing a coloured box around new words then adding the sticky note. It works, and I will only have to worry about this senario when I go back to properly read the first にゃんにゃん book.
Chatty Cats
Wide-Eyed Cat
Happy Tiger Cat
Flat Cap Cat
Pearly Cat
Head Pat Cat
Fish Cat
Magic Cat
Dressy Cat
Hungry Kitten
Ribbon Cat
Snooty Cat
Serene Cat
Acrobatic Cat
Determined Cat and Booped Cat
Worried Cats
Neckerchief Cat
Amused Cat
Smart Cat
Lounging Cat
Honestly I think trying to write out a translation rather than reading sometimes holds me back more than it helps me 
- a quick flip through the わんわん books shows there is only one such page in all three books, so I’ll be sorted from now on!)
