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Welcome to the Quartet Study group!
Finally!!
It’s about to be August 19th somewhere in the world (hello Australian friends) so posting the thread now!
I’m super excited about starting on the book, and very curious to see how it will be to do it with other people
This week, we focus on reading!
読む
There is a lot to go through:
読み物１ ・ 読む前に
読み物１
読み物１ ・ 読んだ後で
読み物２ ・ 読む前に
読み物２
読み物２ ・ 読んだ後で
読みのストラテジー１
読みのストラテジー２
文型・表現ノート
Workbook page 9 読み物１
Workbook page 11 読み物２
You can use the poll in the first thread to mark your progress.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts about how it goes
I’ve studied this, but a little refresher is nice. It’s probably worth reviewing the audio content, and TokiniAndy’s presentation (which I personally don’t love, but I do find some moments helpful).
I’ve already completed chapter one, but fell off hard during chapter two, so I’ll be reading along as a refresher. Some of my first impression from this chapter were:
It’s so much more information-dense than Genki was.
らしい、そうだ、みたい、ようだ are all really similar, I needed a lot of practice to get the nuances down.
The readings are a lot more interesting than Genki. I actually enjoyed answering the before/after reading questions.
I confused ようになる and ようにする a lot, until I read that なる is just the intransitive version of する.
Good luck everyone, I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
This is more of just a general comment but it’s really throwing me off that furigana are either below (in horizonatal) or on the left side (in vertical) writing I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in any of my readings.
I read through all of the main textbook week 1 stuff. The grammer section was pretty nice, and the reading difficulty wasn’t too hard. It’s definitely a bit easier than the reading passages in the 新完全マスター N3 reading book I was using. I think I’ll probably read them again with their particular grammar explanations in mind. But even on a first pass I felt pretty confident about most of what was written
Just read the texts, 読み物１and 読み物２ and wow that was tough. I didn’t understand everything in 読み物２. It’s intimidating, but at the same time, I remember that it’s exactly how it felt when I was reading the texts in Genki 1 for the first time. Then after going through the grammar explanations and the translations and the vocab I could understand it, and now they feel easy to me.
So hopefully this will be the same!
Also the font is pretty but it took me a while to figure out which kanji this was: 決心
Something I remember yesterday from the first time I looked through Quartet: I really wish the vocab booklet in the back came separate from the main textbook.
It’s such a useful resource to have on hand but a nightmare flicking back and forwards though the whole textbook to use
Hehe happy that you have it now! I was also confused when the books arrived, I knew the vocab book would be separate from TokiniAndy’s review but I couldn’t find it, so at first I thought that they must have forgotten to ship it to me
So I think I’d like to type up my translations of the reading bits with full permission to critique all of it.
読み物1
Translation
Paragraph 1
Speaking of (Japanese) anime, one has to talk about 宮崎駿 (Miyazaki Hayao). Spirited Away is one his most popular works. It won the Academy Award in 2003. If you have an interest in anime, you may have also seen Princess Monoke and My Neighbour Totoro. The stories in his anime have environmental messages that also make many adults think.
I think the last line sounds a bit clunky, I don’t think I fully parsed it all properly
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah yes the squished 心
you will see many horrible horrible things happen to this kanji and radical in handwriting and handwriting-y fonts to the point where if you see anything that even vaguely resembles it you’ll just know
I don’t think this is a wrong way to translate or understand it, but since this grammar section includes a focus on using relative clauses to modify nouns it might be a good idea to think specifically about that. The clause 「アニメに興味がある」is specifically modifying the following「人」here, so maybe “People who have an interest in anime may have also seen [films such as] ‘Princess Mononoke’ or ‘My Neighbor Totoro’” Trying to find a way to fit the implication of や as a non-exhaustive list is a little tricky directly
For the last sentence in this paragraph, I think it might be best translated using the connective -て form to mean “so” or “because”, since the two clauses share the same subject and are causally related. “Because his animated films have environmental messages, even adults are made to think a lot about them” getting that last clause to work with the causative-passive is a kinda hard yeah
Looking closer at it, I’m not actually sure if it’s:
structure
ie, is it it “lots of adults [who have thoughts]” or “even adults have lots of thoughts” ?
The more I look at it the more I think it’s the 2nd one, but I couldn’t tell you why. It just looks more right. Is that も hiding a が or something maybe?
Miyazaki has white hair and beard and wears black rimmed glasses. The director’s smile looks friendly/kind but he becomes very strict when making movies. For example, he makes his staff fix their drawings until they are exactly as he says. He saw a staff member draw some meat and got angry saying “This meat is like rubber. Is it hard or is it soft? Think when you draw”, apparently. Also, it is said it took over a year to make only a 4 second scene.
Had to get some help on the third sentence For example, he makes his staff fix their drawings until they are exactly as he says. but I think I got the meaning out.
I think I might have missed the nuance of "考えて描くなさい”。I understand he’s commanding the poor staffer but should it be just ‘think and draw’? I feel like my translation conveys the condescension in English more than just ‘think and draw’
Paragraph 3
“I don’t want to make embarrasing works” he says. Therefore, to make good things, he works morning to night with nearly no breaks. Dinner and tea (lunch and dinner) is eaten in 5 minutes. Don’t spend important/invaluable time on TV and hobbies. When he was young, he was known to work from 9am in the morning until 5am the next day. If you are strict with yourself (like this), you can make beautiful and artistic anime.
His wonderful drawings and stories will always be loved around the world, don’t you think?
Bit of an embelishment at the end there, but I think it gets the point across.
That’s the first reading done, and 2 grammar points left with Andy.
Tomorrow leaves:
at work, revise the grammar points, get started on 読んだ後で.
after work: last 2 grammar points with Andy, finish 読んだ後で, begin work book.
A slight correction after spending too much time thinking about this: I don’t think this is the causative-passive actually, I think this is actually the causative + potential, which makes a lot more sense. 考えさせられるもの as a NP is just something like “things that can make you think” making the whole thing something like:
Even for adults, there’s lots to think about.
Ultimately, we end up in almost exactly the same general vibe for all of them, but this was driving me crazy
This is a problem I have currently with reading native stuff, where do you draw the line? So I got the gist of what was said but clearly didn’t understand the full nuance of it. I have a bad habit (in all parts of life, not just Japanese study) of focusing too much on smaller details and not looking at the bigger picture.
We could discuss at length the exact grammatical make up of the sentence, but I need to learn to draw a line and go ‘well I understood most of the meaning’ so move on to the next thing. There’s diminishing returns focusing too much on one sentence, especially one I basically understood from the beginning. Now if you’d said I completely botched the meaning of the sentence, that’s a different matter
Quartet 1 and 2 Study Group
(Quartet - 読む - Chapter 1)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in any of my readings.
you just have to take it apart. You can see the hole on textbook of where it was:
There’s a 心 on the bottom there in 隠
