Reading ブラックジャックによろしく manga exercises (p14-and up)

Claiming N:

Here

Transcription:
白鳥先生『には』一言も言い返さなかった……

Since a verb is so important in the meaning of a sentence, I will start with the verb this time.

返さなかった:
Again I recognise the past negative, this time of the verb 返す.

返す has a lot of meanings (well by my accounts anyway):

Godan verb with 〜su ending, transitive verb
ⓐ to return (something), to restore, to put back (esp. 返す, see also: かえす)
ⓑ to turn over, to turn upside down, to overturn
ⓒ to pay back, to retaliate, to reciprocate (esp. 返す)
ⓓ to respond (with), to retort, to reply, to say back
auxiliary verb, Godan verb with `su’ ending
ⓔ to do … back (e.g. speak back, throw back) (after the -masu stem of a verb)
ⓕ to do again, to do repeatedly (after the -masu stem of a verb)

Eureka!
I didn’t even retort one word to 白鳥先生.

Yes!! Victory dance!

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@YanagiPablo O.M.G. That “Home Post” is VERY VERY NICE! Bravo!! (Wine glass tink together)

I'm doing O p.16-17

I think nobody did?

斉藤: 患者さんの事なんて考えてなかった……

Analysis and Interpretation

With furigana:
患者かんじゃさんの事なんてかんがえてなかった……

patient (honorific) (possessiveの)(thing this is about?) think (negative) (past tense)

Umm… It doesn’t seem like any of you would need this one explaining…
I’m just gonna admit her that someone soon I’m going to have to read up this koto stuff. I will skip it for now and see how Duolingo presents it for m to “Experiment”. For now, I understand it loosely as a particle phrase that I essentially skip over with “thing that…” or “person who…”. I hope that is enough for you. And (as always) I hope I’m not wrong. Gotta go to work!! またね

@Jonapedia, re your lengthy comment yesterday about your lengthy comments (haha), I recommend that you write with your first thoughts and don’t spend time going back and trying to “tighten up the text”, editing for brevity. You can’t spare the time! The fact that you take the time to put in pronunciation or link or other commentary is time “better spent”

患者さんの事なんて考えてなかった……
I didn’t think about the patient……

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@Shannon-8 Go ahead. I certainly don’t see anything for O. I think everyone’s started translating more or less linearly, which is good, because it’s easier to keep track of things.

EDIT: Thanks for fixing the formatting! And yes, here, that sort of understanding for こと is fine. It’s more accurately ‘matters related to the patient’ and the like, including the patient himself (kinda like turning the patient into a subject of consideration, is the impression I have), but that doesn’t really translate. Finally, to be honest, I can’t remember which post you’re talking about anymore (unless it happens to be what I posted in the ‘input hypothesis’ discussion), but yes, I prefer not to have to summarise my thoughts after writing, honestly. I only did it because of a request.

@YanagiPablo Thank you very much for creating that home thread. It’s very nicely organised.

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Next two pages:

p18-19

Direct link to the pages so you can zoom in

Index of all previous sentences in Episode 3

Zizka tell us, here, that we have been requested not to create too much threads…
so we may well continue here until the end of the episode (that is some ~10 more pages I think)

Hi guys, here’s an update: please read this post from one of the mods. She (I think) says we can learn what other clubs are doing, and that we just need to have roughly the same thread creation frequency as the rest. Radish8 has given us a few examples a few posts above the mod’s post. In short, weekly threads are perfectly fine, so we could actually do one thread per episode (and as a challenge, perhaps, try to finish one episode per week, though that’s probably not going to be easy).

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Claiming P

斉藤:. “これは試練しれんだ”……
“この人をすくえば自分じぶんは一人前の医者だ”……
僕がこうていたのは自分の事ばかりだ……

P Analysis

“これは試練だ”……

  • 試練(しれん) test, trial, ordeal

“This a test”……

この人を救えば自分は一人前の医者だ"……
This person(をdirect object)save(Hypothetical conditional) (reflexive pronoun) matureのdoctor is

  • この人を救(すく)えば; transitive verb 救う(すくう) to save; (五段verb; Hypothetical, conditional ,えform +ば)
  • 自分(じぶん)は pronoun “myself” it “oneself”
  • 一人前(いちにんまえ) Nb. This reading apparently was not hitori (!). It seems that this phrase altogether means “adult”, or “full grown man”.
  • の It send to that there is a の usage (I think Zizka calls it “attributive”?) which is (in my mind) a classのsubclass relation; for example “French class” is “classのFrench”.
  • 医者 (いしゃ) doctor

If you save this person, then you are a full-fledged doctor

僕が考ていたのは自分の事ばかりだ……

  • 考(こう)ていたのは Verb 考える (kangaeru) “to think”, past tense progressive (“was verb-ing”); のはmakes this verb the sentence’s subject.
  • 自分の事ばかりだ Myself (reflexive pronoun) is “the thing/person” (koto); ばかりis “just, only, merely”.
    I was thinking only of myself
P Interpretation

Saitou: “This is a test”……
“If you save this person, then you are a full-fledged doctor”……
I was thinking only of myself

The translation looks good! Just a few comments on the transcription and analysis:

You missed an え. It really is 考える (well done for finding the verb nonetheless), which means the て-form should be 考えて. There are some irregular て-forms out there, but not quite as irregular as 「こうて」. Also, you’re right about のは turning the verb – that is, the action it represents – into the subject or topic of the sentence, and your translation is perfectly valid. Still, I’d like to suggest another translation: technically, 僕が考えていたの=what I was thinking of, so if ‘what I was thinking of was myself only’, then I guess ‘all I was thinking of was myself’. Again, your translation is correct, but I think this version preserves the original grammatical structure of the sentence.

My dictionary says that ひとり is a possible reading with the same meaning, but yes, the main entry is いちにんまえ. Separately, I think you’ve got the right idea for the の: it is attributive, to use Zizka’s term, but I think it’s more ‘subclassのclass’ or ‘characteristicのmain noun’. Your ‘French class’ example should in fact be ‘Frenchのclass’ (and if you meant that in the sense of ‘French lesson’, you’d get フランス語の授業)

EDIT: AH, I see… after reading @YanagiPablo’s elaboration below, I understand what you meant by ‘classのsubclass’. My mistake. I was handling your example specifically, since ‘French class’ is a type of ‘class’. Honestly though, since we each have a structure that works similarly, but in reverse, in each of our native languages (English or French), I really think it’s better to just think of it as ‘of’ or '~‘s’ and work from there. It’s gonna be a slightly bigger leap for an English speaker since there are cases where ‘of’ can’t be used while '~‘s’ can, and the attributive/appositional use (i.e. when the first noun functions like an adjective, as in ‘French class’ or ‘steel bars’) doesn’t always work with ‘of’, but if you just treat it as a reversed ‘of’, things should start to click eventually. I’m pretty sure that’s how I started thinking of 的 in Mandarin as a child, and 的 works almost exactly the same as の in Japanese.

PS: the reason I’m suggesting avoiding the ‘classのsubclass’ logic is not that it’s wrong, but that’s it’s not always true, so it might lead to confusion. Let’s say we have two men surnamed 長野ながの, one in the US, and one in Japan. 日本の長野さん would help differentiate the two, and you could argue that a person is a ‘subclass’ of a country because people are what makes up a country. However, I can just as easily say 長野さんの日本. The difference is though, that would be ‘Nagano-san’s Japan’, or in other words, how he sees Japan. It’s much easier to understand this organically than to expect a particular order of things.

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Indeed, sometimes that is the relation too (that is, in AのB, A is a quality of B, A can be a greater group of which B is a member).

It seems every time that classes and subclasses (and subsubclasses etc) are given, they use that order in Japanese; from broader to narrower.
You can see that in addresses (country->province->town->group of houses->number), people’s names (family name->personal name; there used to be also clan name in old times, but I don’t know how it works).

But, as Jonapedia points out, that classのsubclass only works when the relationship is indeed one of class and sublclass (AのB = B which is a member of A)
Eg: フランス語はインド・ヨーロッパ語族のイタリック語派である
French-language [topic] indo-european-language-family の italic-language-group is
=> French is an italic language of the (belonging to) the indo-european family of languages.

But even that case ( classのsubclass ) is a case of the general rule AのB : A is some information about B.
It can also be viewed as the “of” or " 's " ( B of A; A’s B ).

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Claiming R:

この人の家族『は』一体どんな気持ち『で』100万円出したんだ...?

Interpretation
この this → 人(person)の(possessive marker)家族(family)『は』(topic marker):
This person’s family is the topic of the sentence, what the sentence is about.

一体(what the hell)どんな(what kind of)気持ち(feeling)『で』(manner of action):
How the heck do they feel (the family of the person)

100万円(100x10,000 yen) 出した(to take out) んだ (casual of のだ, used for emphasis):
*to have paid 100万円.

P.S.: Is there a difference between 気持 and 気持? I have two separate entries in my dictionary but as far from I can tell they are identical.

Full sentence: “How the hell does that person’s family feel about having paid 1000000 yen?”

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Claiming T:

《あなた『は』生きたいですか?》
At a glance, I think it means: “And you, do you want to live?” I’ll follow my gut feeling on this one.

☆I’ve added all the pictures in my first reply topic so that they’re easier to find as well. I’ve also put the currently available letters.

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Claiming Q: Part 1

当直『の』時だって自分『の』失敗ばかりこだわって

I’ve subdivided Q into two, ① and ②:

Picture subdivided

I’ll deal with them in two different replies.

Transcription ①:

With readings:
《当直【とうちょく】『の』時【とき】だって自分【じぶん】『の』失敗【しっぱい】ばかりこだわって》

Without readings:
《当直『の』時だって自分『の』失敗ばかりこだわって》

問題①:

You guessed it, my question is about the 〜て form here as there are two of them.

The first one is だって which I suppose is the sequential 〜て. However, I googled it and I found various answers. 当直の時 means the time for the hospital job and I think だって is the casual 〜て form of the copula です. So it could mean:
its the time for the hospital job and

Another interpretation for だって from Japanese stack exchange:

Several answers above attempt to make the distinction between だって as a contraction of the copula だ and the quotation particle と, and だって as meaning “because” or “even” or “but”.However, ALL of the various uses of だって can be traced to a simple contraction of the copula だ and the quotation particle と.

So which one is it?

ⓐ sequential 〜て form of copula です in casual form
or
ⓑ だ+quotation particle と?

The rest of the sentence:
自分の失敗: my own failure…

The rest I wasn’t familiar with. I pasted 失敗ばかりこだわって in my dictionary to see how it would end up being parsed:
『ばかり』is actually a particle meaning: merely, only, nothing but…
こだわる is a verb, “to fuss over”;

Is こだわって also a sequential here?

Edit: I’ve added U-Y at the beginning of the thread.

I don’t think 一体 is really ‘the hell’ all the time, although that might work in this case. It’s just that I think, while he’s angry, he probably also feels sad for the family, so he might use slightly more respectful words to refer to their feelings. Generally, it’s just a way to strengthen a question, like ‘just how’ or ‘how exactly’ or even ‘however’.

Also, で is a sort of て-form (as much as it’s also a particle), so what comes before で happens at the same time or before what comes after で. So the sentence is closer to ‘How the hell/just how did that person’s family feel as they paid/about paying 1000 000 yen?’

For 気持ち vs 気持… check whether the definitions in your dictionary are in any way different. Most likely they aren’t. The kana that come after a kanji character in a word (that is, both the kana and the kanji are part of the same word) are called 送り仮名(okurigana) – ‘escort kana’, if you like. They’re there to give a clearer idea of what word the kanji is part of (for instance, they let us know if it’s a verb form, like 持ち in 気持ち). They’re optional, and I have a feeling that conventions about them have probably changed throughout history. However, I see that they’re quite common in written Japanese today, so I think it’s good practice to write them, because it helps avoid confusion (and this is in spite of the fact that I was against them when I started because I wanted to save time, and hey, Chinese has no okurigana).

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Q part ②:

ハガキ『が』来る『まで』患者さん『の』事なんてすっかり忘れてた

analysis

@Jonapedia:
Have you ever consider participating at Japanese.stack.exchange? I feel like you’d be an asset there. I can’t imagine a person more fitting. Also, your input would be archived there and referenced.

Development incoming:

ハガキ『が』: memo + subject particle;
来る『まで』v. to come + まで(until). Would it be wrong to interpret 来る here as an infinitive? I’m not sure because in English we’d word it as:

“Until the memo came…” I’m not sure how to interpret a non-inflected dictionary form verb in a sentence like this one. For some reason I currently believe: dictionary form = infinitive but I’d want to make sure my belief is grounded.

患者さん『の』事: last time @Jonapedia said that when a “function word” is written in kanji as opposed to kana, it has its first meaning, so “thing” here and not a nominaliser. So a patient’s thing.

なんてmeans “such as”, “like”;
すっかり: all, completely;
忘れてた: @Jonapedia, is this an instance where the い is omitted like what you talked about last time? 忘れて[い]た as in the past progressive?

☆Interpretation:
Until that note came, I had completely forgotten that thing about the patient

I think 〜ていた here refers to the past perfect, not the past progressive, this is also something we talked about together.

Claiming S:

おじさん…
old man…

Nothing to explain here.

Claiming U:

夜中『の』病院『には』死神『が』歩く

Japanese English
死神【しにがみ】 God of death
歩く【あるく】 to walk
:speech_balloon:In the middle of the night, the god of death walks at the hospital

Again here there a dictionary form 歩く which I didn’t translate as a progressive but rather as a statement of fact, much like we sometimes use the simple present in English.


Claiming X:

先生大変です‼︎

:speech_balloon:Doctor, it’s terrible!!
Not much to say here, a pretty typical descriptive sentence. 大変【たいへん】means “very, greatly, terribly” with a negative connotation as far as I can tell.

起きて下さい先生‼︎

:speech_balloon:Wake up please doctor!!


Claiming Y:

I’ll get the second part out of the way:

起きて下さい‼︎

:speech_balloon:Wake up please!

As for the other one:

金子さん『の』容体『が』急変しました‼︎

金子【きんす】funds; but since it’s followed by さん it’s probably the name of the old man;
容体【ようだい】condition;
急変しました【きゅうへん】sudden change, suru verb past;
:speech_balloon:There was a sudden change in mister Kinsu’s condition!


Claiming W:

平均して一晩『で』二人『の』人『が』亡くなる

:thought_balloon:平均して I’m having a bit of trouble with this one. So this is a 〜する verb and 平均 means average. Is it a sequential here as in the “the average is made” and then “in one night”, out if two people, one will die.

So:
:speech_balloon:On average, in one night, out of two people, one person will die.


Claiming V:

永禄大学付属病院病床数1千100…
:speech_balloon:At Eiroku university affiliated hospital, there are 1,100 beds…
:writing_hand: This ties in nicely with what follows: there are 1,100 beds and one out of two will die;


Claiming Z:

脈『が』ない

:speech_balloon:There is no pulse
This is a simple negative sentence. So the old man is presumably deceased for the moment.

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@Zizka Hm… it’s true that Stack Exchange is a little more of a Q&A forum where people attempt to compile knowledge without repeating threads on the same topic. Still though, no, I’ve never thought about it. I usually go there to look for answers as a guest reader. Also, a lot of my knowledge comes from dictionary trawling right after I receive a question, so I don’t know as much as I seem to know. Most of the stuff I say is a combination of my understanding of Japanese and what I read in a Japanese reference source that I stumbled through five minutes earlier. In fact, here’s an example right now: I’m gonna try to answer your question on だって with the etymology. (I sometimes wonder why I get myself into this when I could just give the most common uses and translations.)

スーパー大辞林 says this: だって is a combination of だ and とて, which itself is a combination of と and て. So, first of all, what is とて? It can be a case particle (indicates grammatical function), a linking particle (something that changes the nuance of a sentence ‘topic’, like は or も) or a conjunction. However, that’s all very technical, and I myself don’t understand all the implications of those terms… but in essence, all the meanings I could find for とて are essentially quite similar to と言って(も) or でも. What happens when we add だ? Well, mostly, it’s still basically でも, except for three other uses:

  1. Listing similar nouns, in which case it’s a bit more like も e.g. 私だって、あなただって、みんな日本語を勉強しています。
  2. Quoting what someone else said, usually because it’s surprising e.g. 何だって? (‘What did you say?’) 「六」だって? (You said ‘six’?)
  3. Justification (usually when it’s at the beginning of a sentence) e.g. だって今日はデートだから。(‘Because [I] have a date today.’)

In your sentence, it’s more like ‘even’ or でも. ‘Even about what happened during the time I was on duty,…’.

As for こだわって, yes, you can see it as sequential, since he was stuck on/fussing over his ‘failure’ first, and was only reminded of the patient when the postcard came.

EDIT: I think it might be easier for you to understand the link between と(いって) and all the functions listed above by remembering that 言う can also have a hypothetical sense in other languages, and its function is something like bringing something up for consideration (e.g. ‘Let’s say’ in English and “Disons” in French). In short, the Stack Exchange answer is more historically correct. However, your interpretation isn’t too far off either, since one of the equivalent structures for だって in my dictionary is 「…であっても…だ」, and if you remember that だ comes from a verbal simplification of である, you’ll see that it’s not too different from だって.

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Before I proceed any further,
am I right to say that だって doesn’t have anything to do with the sequential 〜て as in こだわって?

Also,

So it’s sequential in what sense in that case though? What is happening first and then second? I’m fuzzy about that.

Also, episode 3 is now finished.


Since it hasn’t been a week since we’ve created the thread I surmise we’ll continue episode 4 here until the week has gone when we can create the official thread.

Episode 4 夏雲: Summer Clouds

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I’m starting to worry that I tried too hard to break down the different uses of て and that it’s confusing you now… or that conversely, I didn’t break them down enough, and so that’s giving you a hard time… :sweat_smile: If you want to try someone else’s explanation, you can look at this: Home (There are some cutesy dinosaurs on the page, about 4 pictures, but you can just ignore then if they bother you.)

The problem is that I can’t give you a straight answer while being honest. If you look at its origin and literal meaning as basically a form of だと(いっ)て, it definitely can be seen as a sequential thing in terms of argumentation, because you affirm something and then consider the rest of the sentence. But if I take its actual meaning in this sentence… I’d say no, it’s not sequential, it’s more like は or でも.

As for こだわって, as I said,

  1. He was focused on his failure, and kept thinking about it
  2. Then he got the postcard/letter and remembered the patient

Honestly though, let me try to simplify the meaning of the て-form for you. You can tell me if it doesn’t work for you, it’s fine. I’m just not sure how else to make it easier to grasp.

  1. Like I said the first time I attempted to explain this structure, you can think of て as something like ‘and’ for verbs. I think that’s also what’s suggested in the example on the Kawa Kawa page. Another way of looking at it is as ‘-ing’ in the middle of a sentence. If you understand how these things work in English, you should find that て is quite similar.
  2. The other way to look at is, which is very concise but perhaps a bit abstract, is that 〜て just means you assume 〜 is a given action, that it’s already happening… and then you determine what that means by looking at the rest of the sentence.

That’s all I can think of for now. If you explain exactly what you don’t understand or what is confusing, maybe using examples, I will try to think of another explanation. To be very honest though, even though I really like breaking things down and analysing them in languages, along with learning all the different uses of one word/structure, when I look at て, I don’t really break it down. I just take it as a connector with a meaning similar to ‘and’ or ‘-ing’, remember vaguely what the different uses are, then try to place it somewhere along that spectrum. It’s very rarely perfectly precise. It just means that both actions happen, with the て action happening at the same time or slightly before, and it’s up to you to figure out what that means based on the context.

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Oh I understand that, that’s clear. Although I don’t see where you get that he “kept thinking about it” from but I guess I shouldn’t start investigating everything as I’d end up overwhelmed. I mean, you probably get it from ばかり, absolutely. To absolutely “fuss over” something. But, to me, there’s no indication that he was obsessed with his failure over time. I don’t get this idea from the structure of the sentence. So I might be missing something grammatically or this could be related to personal interpretation.

That 〜て meaning “and” is self-explanatory and understood at a glance. The -ing in the middle of a sentence, I don’t understand. You could mean a progressive tense or a gerund. It’s not a gerund as it’s not something we e touched upon but a -ing suffix in English could be a number of things so I can’t anchor it to anything in my head if I’m being sincere. In our context you probably mean a combination of a progressive and “and”. So: I was fussing(past progressive) over my failure then I realised I had forgotten about that patient.

Now I fully comprehend that Japanese and English aren’t 1:1 but I can’t relate on my target language as I don’t have the foundations to relate in the target language. In order to understand, I can only rely to my existing my knowledge in French and English. Or I could let this go for now and have faith that with sufficient input I’ll understand this without being able to formulate what it means.

To give you an idea: です expresses that something is. What that English explanation, I can interpret that structure with little risk of making a mistake and misunderstanding. I want to find a way to have a comprehensible L1 reference to systematically interpret 〜て somewhat accurately.

So it’s a progressive tense then? Past or present?

…but that fairly understandable to me if I can apply it when it comes up.

I’d really like to read how the other conceptualise this. The resounding silence makes me wonder whether it clear for everyone or if they’re not comfortable saying it’s not clear and ask for more information. I honestly don’t know.

It’s difficult to admit I don’t understand something as I could say: a vaguely get it but I’d rather say the truth. I’ll check that link, maybe it’ll clear things up.

In the article you’ve linked there are a total of 12 functions for the 〜て form and from what I can tell they are mutually exclusive. They might be written the same but their uses vary considerably from one context to another.

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