Short Grammar Questions (Part 1)

I’ve been staring at this for an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out what’s going on around 「同」 in these two sentences. I can make sense of the second sentence if 「同き」 is supposed to be 同期, because then you get a compound that could mean something like like “part synchronization” or “part alignment,” but I don’t know why they’d drop that particular kanji. And I have no idea how to interpret 「同かって」.

Ouch! 同 should have been 向. Sorry for missing that error.

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Beautiful; it all makes sense now. Identifying kanji typos is a skill they need to drill more in grammar school.

So applying a dictionary attack to that and assuming I’m correctly interpreting the ~て form of 向かう, I’m reading it as “This part faces upwards and has a diagonal angle applied. Please be mindful of part orientation during assembly.”

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Thanks for that!

Now I’ll remember to imagine someone randomly waving her legs around until she happens to find a train station in front of her, and I’ll never forget this distinction. Many thanks!

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彼氏がいつも鍋奉行をしてくれます。
I always let my boyfriend be in charge of the nabe.

This is the example sentence for 奉行. Wouldn’t the use of くれます means the speaker is receiving the act of being allowed to be the nabe-master? I read this sentence as “My boyfriend always lets me be in charge of the hotpot”. Am I wrong?

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No, they’re receiving the favor of having someone else be in charge. Though, the “let” doesn’t really come into play in the Japanese. Seems like a bit of freestyling in the English translation.

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Ah, that makes sense. I read it as if being in charge of the hotpot was fun rather than a chore. Thanks!

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Well, I mean, regardless of what would make sense for who likes to do what, grammatically the boyfriend is doing the action, because he’s the subject and therefore when the verb comes, he’s doing it. Sometimes it’s difficult to ignore what it feels like you think they’d want to say or something like that.

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彼女のことだから、30分前には来ているはずだ。

Another question, I think I may have a brain glitch because I should know this, but is this sentence saying that she should be here 30min early, or that she must have arrived 30 minutes ago? Whichever it is, how would you say the other thing?

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I think it’s a confusing translation because it tries to make “I” the subject and “boyfriend” the object, when 彼氏 is the actual subject in the original. More like “My boyfriend always gets to be the cooking-person,” right? The “I” just comes from the fact that it’s implied that someone (the speaker) is the source of that favor.

“Gets to” is also misleading. It’s more like “my boyfriend always takes care of the nabe for me”

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Mmm, you’re right; the boyfriend would be doing both the pot-mastering and the giving. Doesn’t that make the official translation just plain wrong, then?

I wouldn’t say that. There’s just some license taken and the English sentence could be interpretted a couple of ways, but it’s clear which way to interpret the English sentence due to having the Japanese one to compare it to.

Which is the trick with translation in general, as a tangent. You could take the English sentence to mean that the boyfriend really enjoys doing this cooking, so you allow him to do it. Or you could take it to mean that you don’t want to do it, so you “let” him do it instead. It’s a little ambiguous, but not in a way that would annoy any English speaker.
But you translate it, and you have to choose, and then you can be wrong. Which is why songs in particular are so hard (not enough context) and also why when you look at all those illegal manga in English online that have been translated to Mandarin and then to English things get really weird, because sometimes you take the wrong meaning twice

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If I’m wrong someone else will correct me, but I’m pretty sure this is right:

That sentence says “She should have arrived 30 mins ago”. One hint for this is the use of 前に as opposed to 早い, but 前に can still be used for early technically. Secondly, they’re saying いるはず which means that she is expected to be there now after arriving 30 mins ago. This isn’t just some plan or arrangement for the future.

Now with that being said, she could have also been expected to arrive 30 mins early depending on when this was said. If this was said at the designated time of meeting and is was prearranged that she would get there early for something, then it means both “she should have been here 30 mins ago” and “she shoulda came 30 mins early” if that makes sense.

How I would personally explicitly say “she should come 30 mins early” would be 彼女のことだから、30分早く来るはずだ。But again, thats sorta like a future expectation.

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Sure… but both of those interpretations hinge on the cooking being a favor being directed speaker → boyfriend, yes? While the “for me” in your previous (correct?) translation implies that the favor is directed boyfriend → speaker. Surely the direction of the favor is fairly unambiguous here?

The second interpretation is that the speaker is receiving the benefit of the boyfriend taking charge of the pot.
This isn’t unambiguous in English because we don’t have the equivalent of くれる/あげる/もらう. The sentence really just says that the boyfriend cooks and the speaker permits this to happen. Everything else is - in English - an inference.

I’ve been wondering about something for some time and guess this is the best place to ask.
I’m playing a VN with central theme a guy getting into the hooligan/delinquent world. Of course, the regularly used word here is 不良. One of the protagonist’s friends uses this word as well, this vocab being in the subtitles, but he doesn’t say ふりょう, but よからず (as in, the actual soundfile). I should note that in my perception that friend regularly uses less common idiom than other people.

よからず seems to be the zu-form of the adjective いい/よい. Trying to search further, I encountered a website that said よからず should only be used in combination with the に particle, but this particular person has used it in combination with both の and は. Example sentence: よからずのケンカに巻きこまれたって?(with of course the first word spoken like this, but written like 不良)

So I’m a bit confused and my questions are as follows: is よからず a rare reading of 不良? Are there restrictions in the use of the zu-form? Is this maybe a joke by the script writers?
Or am I missing something completely obvious?

Thanks for the thoughtful answer. If I can bother you once again, wouldn’t hazu datta make more sense for ‘should have come’?

No because they said 来ている. The coming was past tense, yes, but she should still be there, hence the いる.

Im not sure what the actual context is, so I’ll make one up to sorta explain this. のことだから tells us that coming 30 mins ago is sorta expected when specifically talking about 彼女. This could very well be because shes usually the kind of person to arrive first and make sure shes never late, so lets roll with that. MC shows up to the park on time where he was supposed to meet 彼女 but he cant find her. Hes basically saying two things with 30分前には来ているはず

  1. Since its her we’re talking about, you would expect that she arrived 30 mins early/prior to the time of him making that statement.

  2. It is expected that she is currently there somewhere at the park.

30分前には来ているはず does not necessarily imply that it is certain the person failed to show up early if at all. It’s possible that while she was waiting, she went to a vending machine or something. The speaker still has the expectation that she is there.

30分前には来ているはずだった would be for if it was certain that she didnt come 30 mins early and was not there.

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