Kitty Detectives! Week 8 Discussion 🐱

Page 87

戸をあかないようにするのに
バットをつかってたのよ。

I actually worked this one out through writing, but thought I might as well post to share anyway.

するのに is ‘in order to do’ - he used the bat (in order) to make it so that the door couldn’t open

I got a bit confused by ように, because it can be used to express a simile, or can also mean “in order to”… neither of which seemed to make sense, or were oddly redundant.

But then I remembered that ようにする is a particular grammar point of its own. It is used to mean “to try to; to make sure that”.

So altogether we have, in clunky direct translation land, “he used the bat in order to make sure the door wouldn’t open”.

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Wow, such great discussions already! Thank you everyone! Just a few questions from me, if that’s okay?

Page 84

Just to finish off the sentence, I wonder if you can help me with the でしょ, do you think that means “it seems”, or “right?” - the two definitions in jisho. I have never really understood でしょ at all.

Okay, next question from page 84….

やったのは, おにいちゃんのほうね, そのへんにかくれてるんでしょ. でてらっしゃい
やったのは - やる, to do, in past, did, with the nominalisation particle, and topic marker….
おにいちゃん - older brother
のほう - one of two or more choices (thank you Rowena!)
ね - is this the sentence ending particle, in the middle of the sentence?
そのへんに - around there + に
かくれてる - hiding
ん - explanation particle
でしょ - it seems
“It seems that what the brother (not the younger) brother did was to hide around there”

でてらっしゃい - no idea! Probably comes from 出る, but I can say no more than that.

Page 85

Total confusion reigns in Marcus’ brain right now….

あたしが そういうと, 戸をあけて おにいちゃんが, 下をむいたまま でてきた

あたしが - I + subject particle
そういうと - I’ve seen this many, many times before, but can’t for the life of me remember what it means… “said”???
戸を - door + object particle
あけて - opened, and…
おにいちゃんが - older brother + subject particle
下を - below + object particle
むいた - looked
まま - state
でてきた - 出て来た - turned up, appeared

“The door opened and the older brother turned up looking down, I said”

Help me please, I am really out of my depth here!

Page 86

Can anyone tell me what とりにきた means in the first sentence? ”Come and take” perhaps?

Thank you for the discussion on this sentence. My head is truly spinning. I’ll try to see if I can make it stop…
あなた、- you (I thought this was supposed to be impolite???!!!
どうして - how
犯人は - culprit + は
おにいちゃん - older brother
のほう - one of two or more choices
って - a second topic marker, this time informal and suggesting judgement or evaluation
わかった - understood
の? - informal question marker

“how did you know that the older brother was the culprit?”

But hang on a minute…. Didn’t Hanae just say she saw him come in, looking down? I’m really lost here.

Page 87

Eh? So the kid wedged the door closed? Why? When? Not open? Isn’t this what he’s doing in the picture on page 72? And if not, what was Hanae doing, just standing there watching him wedge the door and eat the cake? I have to be honest, this is the most confusing thing I’ve ever read!

Page 88

I’ve given up now, I can’t face another wall of text… I’ll see if I can tackle it in the morining, but, just one last thing before I go……

Erm, what does the continuative い form of する mean?
I thought the continuative form is して? And the plain masu form is し?
But I seriously don’t know and would really appreciate some help here!

Phew, a monster post! Thanks for any help anyone can offer with any of this!

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PS - let me tell you how my brain works… (the horror!)… trying to make a start on page 88 I thought I’d look up a few words and start with the kanji, as it’s usually easier to start there. So I looked… 野球の練習, great, I know that… 思, er, yeah, I think so… 戸, no problem…

探偵… blimey, never seen that before, what the heck could that be… copies it into Jisho.

What an idiot I am! :crazy_face:

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cracks knuckles


Page 84

I would translate this as something like “don’t you agree?”

After all, a fork has appeared on top of the table, don’t you agree (with the implication that it’s not Capone)?

I took やったのは not to be a nominalisation, but to mean “the one who did it”. やった is a relative clause modifying の - a placeholder for the unknown perpertrator.

I read this as essentially two sentences strung together, as you might in dialogue. So yes, I thought she was effectively saying:

The one who did it was the older brother… I guess he’s hiding in that area.

It does indeed come from 出る, more specifically 出て来る. This is an honorific onjugation being used to make a request. So…

You have 出て来る, “to come out”.
The honorific form of 来る is いらっしゃる, or more likely いっらしゃいます, as we’re being polite.
To turn it into a request, you replace す with せ, giving you いらっしゃいませ (which you’ll recognise from people greeting you when you enter a store…).
Finally, a more casual form of this is to drop ませ altogether, giving you いらっしゃい.

Putting this back onto 出て来る and dropping the い which so often disappears in て-form structures, you end up with でてらっしゃい.

Phew! Basically, she’s telling him to come out from where he’s hiding.


Page 85

Ah, you often see things like そういうこと, but this is (I think) more simple than that.

It’s just そう言う - “saying so” or “saying such”, followed by と - which is being being used as the conditional - “on saying that”. “That” being the command to come out.

The rest of it you mostly have / I can’t add much because I hate the word まま, but it’s basically “the door opened and the older brother, [in the state of] looking down, emerged”.

The looking down is him hanging his head in shame, as you can see from the picture. Looking at the floor, that sort of thing.

"On saying that, the door opened and the older brother, looking down, emerged.


Page 86

This is that grammar point where you come / go in order to to do something. It’s とる, “to take / to fetch / to pick up”. You take the ます stem of your verb, append に, then use the appropriate motion verb. In this case 来る, in past tense.

So “came in order to pick up (his bat)”.

Not exactly. It’s more like its many nuances are too hard for a foreigner to understand and it’s extremely likely to be rude, so don’t use it as a foreigner.

I think you’re a little lost in the narrative here. Hanae deduces that the older child is the culprit on page 84 and tells him to show himself, and he comes out of the cupboard on page 85 looking dejected. Then on page 86 it explains that, just as Hanae thought, the older child had come back to pick up his bat and got tempted, etc. etc. It then explains that the child gets scolded by Emi, before finally returning to his baseball practice.

We then switch to Hanae and Emi discussing this whole situation after the fact, and Emi is asking how Hanae knew that the culprit was the older brother.


Page 87

Again, same issue. Hanae and Emi are discussing the case afterwards. Hanae is explaining to Emi what happened (on page 72).


Page 88

Dunno, never heard of it but ChristopherFritz sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so it’s probably correct! Personally I’d just describe this as the ます stem.

Either way, the point is that it’s the verb する, in that form (し), combined with ながら - a grammatical construct that means ‘while doing’.

So in this case something like “…while feeling elated, we took our goodbyes”.
Or even just “…feeling elated, we took our goodbyes”.


RAAAAAAAR :triumph:

it’s probably all wrong :joy:

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Okay, that helps a lot! Thanks!

Eh… what? :dizzy_face: Can you maybe give more detailed information on this? Never heard of だ being called an assertion marker.

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There are a few names for it, but it’s using the masu stem the same way as the te form. I tend to go with “continuative”, which I think I first saw on ichi.more, as that is most clear to me what is happening.

Edit: I’ve seen it said that the masu stem is more literary than the te form, so it makes sense to see in narration.

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I found this article:

http://www.epochrypha.com/japanese/materials/verbs/Verb.aspx?rule=renyoukei

In terms of this, my experience is that it is used as, er, a continuative in a more literary sense than て-form. By which I mean it’s sometimes used to connect clauses the way て-form is, but it’s fancier. Like, um, 昨日、本を読み、友達と会いに行きました。

In this case it’s just being used for a particular grammatical construction which requires it, so I don’t think it particularly influences the fanciness.

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Ah, that’s true, calling it continuative may be inappropriate here. Calling it some variant if “masu stem”/“i stem” would have been a safer bet.

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Well, from that article it sounds like continuative is the most appropriate term (if we trust the article!) - it’s just that confusingly it can be used plainly as a continuative, or is also used to form other structures.

Sounds like it gets called the masu-stem most commonly just because it’s well known for being the foundation of the masu form.

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thoughts...

Well… I don’t think he had much time to think about the best hiding place or where to run away to. If the boy was in shock and already feeling ashamed, plus maybe Capone blocking one of the possible escape routes, his only option (he could think of at that moment) was to hide in the cupboard? He could have been seen running away otherwise maybe? Wheras the cupboard was very close to the table, maybe just one step away…?

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page 88

「まあ、あなた、よくみてるわね。探偵になれるわよ。」で、ほめられたうえに花をたくさんもらってルンルンながら、さよならをした。

Uff… That’s a difficult one for me…

Emi (was that her name?) is saying: It would seem you are observing skillfully / quite well. You can become a detective. …by (で) saying that, I (Hanae) was praised, on top of that I received a lot of flowers and was happy while I said goodbye.
Kind of like that?

breakdown

まあ - it would seem
あなた - you
よく - skillfully
みてる = みている? - observing (te-iru form of みる - to see)
わね - isn’t it / it really is

探偵 - detective
に+なれる - can become (potential form of なる)
わよ - emphatic sentence-ending particle

で - with/by (saying what’s in the quotes)
ほめられた - is the past of some kind of passive? form of ほめる? (to praise)
うえに - on top of
花をたくさん - a lot of flowers
もらって - to receive (もらう + て-form acting as conjunction)
ルンルン - happy
ながら - while
さよならをした - past form of do/say goodbye

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Page 88

もたずに – ichi.moe says it’s a non-past negative… but how?!

I guess they meant the verb form, not how it can be applied. From Tae Kim’s examples it seems that it can be used with any tenses - past, future, present.

But the form of the stem is (I guess) nonpast negative もつ → もたない

DBJG explains 〜ずに’s meaning simply as “without doing” (and the verb form as “negative”)

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Yes, to add a little confirmation to zuzu’s answer…

~ずに is indeed a kind of negation, that means “without doing”. The base verb is もつ, “to take; to carry”, so this phrase is “without taking his bat

Again as zuzu explained, in order to form the construction you conjugate the verb as for ない-form, but then use ずに instead of ない. So instead of もたない we have もたずに.


By the way, they let Capone finish all the rest of the cake?! That cannot be good for a cat!


The 探偵になれる part is in the potential form, so she’s saying “you could become a detective”.

You’ve basically got it. It’s hard to parse into English because we wouldn’t say “the me who was praised”. There’s not really an explicit “on top of that” aspect though. It’s more like “"the me who was praised with [insert speech here] received lots of flowers and, feeling elated, said goodbye”. Edit: see Myria’s response!

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Sorry, I mixed up assertions and declarations, however「だ」is used when stating facts, so cannot be used in conjunction with question words such as 「どうして」.

From Tae Kim 4.1.5:
…the 「だ」is used to declare what one believes to be a fact. Therefore, 「そうだか?」 is not a valid way to ask a question because it is declaring a fact and asking a question at the same time.

(I see I managed to reply to myself instead of @frayderike:woman_facepalming:)

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Thank you so much! What a magnificent reply! You are amazing!
I’m opening up my book and grabbing my glasses and my pens right now!
Thank you Radish8! :+1:

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I would say the ほめられたうえに translates pretty nicely to „on top of that“, literally/intuitively, and also here is a link explaining more about うえに, listing the translation as „in addition to; not only, but also“: https://japanesetest4you.com/flashcard/learn-jlpt-n2-grammar-うえに-ue-ni/

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Oooof, thank you for that catch! I was misreading it as うちに.

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So, if you’ve finished this week’s reading… What did you think of the story? Is there anything you’re hoping for from the final story?

This was obviously a much shorter and more simple story than the first, but I think it was kind of a nice little interlude. I also can’t express just how much I adore Capone’s face on the final page (89). That’s me after I finish my pizza and then eat up everyone else’s pizzas too because they’re all full.

I was disappointed in the actual mystery aspect of this one - or at least the resolution. There were only two real suspects (it obviously wasn’t a burglar - the inclusion of the whole “zomg maybe it was that burglar who’s been terrorising the neighbourhood” angle felt so pointless). Mostly though, Hanae’s analysis felt odd - instead of noting that the boy didn’t have his bat when they said goodbye outside, she focused on the game they’d been playing and how he must have left his bat behind, which is not something she actually saw or could have known for certain, and then - as I mentioned before - was oddly confident that the boy was hiding in the cupboard, when he could just as easily have run off*. It was such a simple story that it’s annoying they didn’t make sure it made total sense.

I’m looking forward to reading a more substantial mystery again next time - it’s more fun speculating when there’s actually something to get your teeth into. I hope there are more cats, though I appreciated Capone’s starring role here.

*@frayderike - I don’t disagree! I can see why the boy might have hidden in the cupboard. It’s just that Hanae has complete confidence he’s in there, which seems strange, or at least they don’t give you enough context to expect or understand it.

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This post helped me so much! I definitely had a harder time this week. There were some grammar points that I had to look up that while I remember studying in the past, i couldn’t remember the meaning. It is a nice challenge though!

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