Card Captor Sakura volume 9 – progress report Yesterday: Picked up Card Captor Sakura volume 9, read up to page 18. Today: Read up to page 50, finished chapter 35.
So much for the White day chapter – I couldn’t help but chuckle when Sakura unknowingly kept rubbing salt into Shaolans wounds by telling him that he’s such a friendly and wonderful person and that she hopes that the person he likes will like him back.
Oh wow there is lots more text on today’s page then on previous ones. I’ll do my best!
We learn the name of another city: Nerobi, where a sales person (not the person manning the bar!) comes from. I was a bit lost here, I couldn’t quite parse whether it was this person that was selling tool and buying fish, or if that is something the city is known for. I’m assuming the person, because to indicate the city you would add more paricles to clarify the subject? Maybe??
Apparently no traders come here anymore because the Kiruma village is dangerous. But this particular trader wants to go there, because without competitors the price of wares will go up!
The next sentence I couldn’t parse at all, not even with ichi.moe’s help. It seperated parts strangely and put in two question particles in the middle of the sentence?
Anyway, here's my attempt at figuring out how to even segment this sentence
みんな が 何で こんなに 恐れている かわかって います か？
みんな が: subject, everyone or everything
何で: adverb, why?
こんなに: adverb, like this
恐れて: conjunctive て of fear, so probably forms a compund with いる = to be afraid
かわかって: ??? without the か infront it could be 分かって maybe?
います: that’s just formal いる
か: question particle, pretty sure it’s the only one in this sentence
I think the knight asks the trader if they know what there is that everyone is afraid of.
Aaaaa I’m done. This was a lot. It is way too late. I wanted to go to bed half an hour ago!!!
Yes; you know it’s the person because the implied subject as set by the topic-marking は doesn’t change through the sentence. In the 道具を売って part the subject of ‘to sell’ isn’t stated, and so it’s still the same as it was in the first part of the sentence: 商人. (In practice if you wanted to say the city was doing the trading you’d probably either end the sentence and start a new one about the city, or else you’d use a relative clause modifying ‘city’.)
You got the meaning right. I think the thing you’re missing here is that verbs like 分かる can take an embedded question ending in か to indicate what it is that we are understanding/knowing. To take a simpler example: なんの動物かわかる？ – the inner embedded question is なんの動物か “what animal is it?” and so the whole thing is “do you know what animal it is?”
This is a general way you can express embedded questions with か, and it works with other verbs too, like 教える or 聞く. This page has some examples.
Day 43
For a change I read more of Tsugumomo vol. 4. I was lucky there wasn’t that much text. There aren’t many manga left to read therefore I can focus more on the other things in my backlog soon.
Word of the Day:
一石二鳥「いっせきにちょう」ー killing two birds with one stone. Didn’t think this expression would be so literally incorporated There’s a variant of this expression in english that I picked up somewhere but really like: “feed two birds with one scone”. I wonder if you could render that into japanese and have it be recognizable… 一餌二鳥？一飴二鳥？
Did some reading from my graded reader and read chapter 2 of Yotsubato (40 minutes in total). Honestly thought that since it’s a kid’s book I would find it hard but boring since I’m just using it for practice before diving into the ones I really want to read. However, it is so darn funny that I may purchase book 2.
Considering that 名探偵コナン is fairly easy for me, and まじっく快斗 isn’t too difficult, I figured ＹＡＩＢＡ would be similar in difficulty. As it turns out, it’s quite a bit more effort to get through as it uses many words I don’t know. It seems there’s a vast difference between knowing about 73% of the words in a series (名探偵コナン) versus knowing only about 64% (ＹＡＩＢＡ).
🌞 夢みる太陽 Volume 5 (0% ➨ 19%)
Although I’m sure I’ve seen it earlier in this series, this is the first time I’ve taken notice of this kanji in this font in something I’m reading:
A non-impressive ~10 pages yesterday. My plan had been to finish the book, but in the end I didn’t have time to read that much. I hope I can finish it today, and continue with ユートロニカのこちら側 tomorrow, but both days are expected to be busy, so we’ll see how it goes.
That’s a sweet expression for sure, and much friendlier than the original. But surely a scone would suffice for a dozen birds at least? (or are we talking ostriches? )
I hadn’t learned about embedded question sentences, thank you! I think I kept coimg acros them in other books, so I’m gonna go back to it and try again with this knowledge.
I found a web page that suggests it’s because (a) there’s typically often lightning storms at the time when rice is ripening, so there was a folk belief that the lightning caused the grain to ripen and (b) つま used to be a word used for your lover or partner whether they were male or female, rather than being specifically ‘wife’.
(Probably worth taking with the usual grain of salt for found-on-the-internet etymologies :-))
A bit of everything: finished オレンジ Vol. 6 for the bookclub, read a little この本を盗む者は and played B$ for like 15 min. Would have been even better if I’d had more time but it was still fun.
Been listening to the audiobook for 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 and am able to do tasks around the house and keep up with the story which is kind of a first for me. I think that’s mostly credit to having read it beforehand though. So I’m gonna keep reading of course but I think I’m starting to get an idea of mixing reading and listening. However I don’t think reading with the audiobook is good unless I’m trying to just finish or something.
Well, I finished the book with time to spare. It was an okay read, but nothing spectacular. My main problem was that I ended the book knowing very little about the characters, so I didn’t really care much about what was happening. The mystery was intriguing at first, but strangely got less so as clues were gradually revealed. I did guess some parts of the (a little too neat) solution, but I didn’t feel much satisfaction. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of mystery you could put together on your own without extra information.
As for the famous “man using あたし” issue, I ended the book none the wiser. It really was a man and he really did use あたし, but unless there were subtle clues in the way he spoke that I missed, no other character commented on the fact, and no explanation was given in the narration. I read in the atokagi that the character appears in another book before this one ( 涙香迷宮), but I’m not about to go read it just in case it solves the あたし mystery.
２月１３日 
There’s a variant of this expression in english that I picked up somewhere but really like: “feed two birds with one scone”. I wonder if you could render that into japanese and have it be recognizable… 一餌二鳥？一飴二鳥？
I think this picture really encapsulates their personalities.
off to bed!
That’s a sweet expression for sure, and much friendlier than the original. But surely a scone would suffice for a dozen birds at least? (or are we talking ostriches? 
)
Now I am motivated to jump straight into book 2.
