Teasing Master Takagi-san 😝 ・ Volume 2 Discussion Thread [Volume Complete]

I’m not aware of a currently existing book club. You could always nominate for it selection in one of the book clubs (not sure of difficulty off the top of my head, but I imagine it leans more BBC than ABBC. Maybe I’m wrong about that though!), and see if there is any interest in it. :grin:

Reading on your own can be a difficult thing to start, but once you get used to looking things up as you go, it’s a big boost. I learned a lot from reading 五等分の花嫁 on my own, but I definitely had some phrases that took me absolute ages to find information on because sometimes a character would take an existing idiom and slightly change it for the purposes of exaggeration or a joke. (An example that didn’t take me as long to figure out, but stuck with me anyway is: 猿山の大将, which was comparing a group of people comparing some mock test results to the children’s game お山の大将 (basically “king of the hill”), but making it even more denigrating by reducing the 山 to 猿山, which is a fake mountain in a monkey enclosure).

I doubt if Attack on Titan will have anything quite like that, given the tone of the series, but yeah. When you decide to start reading things on your own, you’ll just need to brace yourself for coming across odd things here and there, and having to do some investigation on occasion. Figuring out what to look up is always the hardest part, but seconding what @ChristopherFritz says, you start to get a feel for that fairly quickly. :grin:

Also, your translation is correct for the most recent post you made.

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The “grammar point” + ‘grammar’ google search is definitely the way I’m walking, even tho, as it is now, i’m afraid I’ll come across things I won’t be able to translate this way…
anyway, before moving to anything else I’ll keep putting the 100% of my effort on takagi-san till I will either be able to consistently read chapters in an hour or two, or I’ll have caught you guys on volume 7… by then I hope I’ll be at the absolute minimum level to begin approaching AoT.

Actually I don’t have any idea on how difficult that manga really is, I bought it blindfolded because it’s one of my all time favorites, but I won’t be ashamed to set it aside if I should realize it’s too difficult

About Detective Conan, I loved the anime and would like to eventually read it too, maybe in the next years…

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Oh yes, it’s certain that it is out of ABBC, I hope it won’t be too difficult as next step from Takagi-san even tho if I wanted to play it carefully I should’ve definitely went with something in between these two

I’m worried so much about these :joy:

Definitely want to invest time on this part and make it more efficient possible!

Also, where exactly can I nominate the AoT book club to see if there’s any interest? i have no clue :sweat_smile:

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I have Japanese manga I bought around 1998 that I didn’t read until a year or two ago =D

Since it sounds like you’re already familiar with AoT, one thing you can do sometimes if open a random volume you own, to a random page, pick a random word balloon, and see if you can understand what’s being said.

There might still be a lot of unknown vocabulary, but the more you read in the book clubs, the easier the grammar will get over time.

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Must’ve been a nice feeling to read it after all that time :laughing:

About this, it’s not a problem. Already with takagi-san manga almost every vocab is unknown :rofl:

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What is this?


言○せたい? The 言 kanji looks different tho

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Assuming it leans BBC, you would want to nominate it in the home thread for that. Just be sure to read the opening post to make sure AoT fits the requirements (there are some length limits and such), and copy the nomination template so that everything is formatted correctly. :grin:

Checking the Natively level, it is 29, so it may end up on the upper end of that club, but when you nominate, you put in some example pages, so the club will be able to judge the difficulty from that. If it is a bit too difficult, they will just suggest you nominate it in the Intermediate Club instead. You can cross that bridge when you come to it, though.

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Thanks for the suggestion!

I just noticed that on the list of the books of BBC there also is Death Note… it’s weird, I thought it was quite harder than AoT and this is also said in the reviews on natively… maybe I have some hope
Anyway, I doubt I’ll read it if it ends in the intermediate book club, right now the word intermediate scares me…

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You have no idea!

Some kanji look different on a computer font than how they’re typically written. The image style is how I learned to write it in high school Japanese class way way back in the stone age.

There’s also checking for interest outside of the main clubs. But this is more difficult to get together, and you’ll likely have a smaller number of readers. Either way, I’d recommend waiting until you feel you are more ready to read it before seeing if there is interest, so that will give you plenty of time to observe others.

And sometimes you just get lucky. There is a manga I’m planning on reading. Recently are a few others have posted in their study log or in the “read every day” thread that they’re planning to read it sometime. Even if it’s just three or four people, we might put together a book club thread for it, and if anyone else is interested they can join in.

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It is:

言わせたい.

Regarding the kanji looking different, welcome to the world of handwritten kanji/kana. :stuck_out_tongue:

That is actually quite tame in comparison to some of the things you’ll eventually run into…

From 五等分の花嫁:

image

image

From one of the inbetween-chapter panels in 可愛いだけじゃない式守さん:

image

Edit:

Seconding this, you will want to wait until you feel ready to actually read it; there is an expectation that whomever nominates the book reads along with the club for the whole thing, so it’s definitely best to wait until you feel like you can take it on!

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I met a couple of times written kanji that were quite different from the typed version, learning to recognize written japanese looks tough :exploding_head: I also wonder why it came up with such many differences between written ones and typed ones.

To me 3-4 people looks more than enough to make a book club, I mean I’m currently the only one reading Takagi-san volume 2 but thanks to a couple of people :wink: just helping me with grammar we doubled the number of messages in every chapter and volume topic :joy: so 3-4 people can definitely be enough as long as there’s real interest in the manga

How the hell was that わ written :fearful:

The pictures you linked… I could barely understand 3-4 kana, how is it possible for a non native to get used to that?

Totally agree, I won’t start with AoT till I don’t feel confident, I’m not saying comfortable because if I don’t take that step it will never happen but I won’t definitely approach it if I feel it would be a hell… let’s say how I found Takagi-san at first or a bit easier would be acceptable, maybe

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:slight_smile:

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This is the face of someone that knows something that I don’t know :thinking:

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4.2.4.2

I have a concern on
今みんなやってるの
I know what this mean literally but I don’t get what Mina means with that
“Everyone is doing it now”
Is it common use?
Is it being done in that exact moment?
Or else?

4.2.5.2

Not sure about 勉強しなよ, what does this mean? Is it simply 勉強する in the negative form (しない) with the last い dropped?

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The same as “Everyone is doing it now” in English. Can be right now at the very moment, or “nowadays”, “these days” depending on the context. Here clearly they are not writing anything at the very moment, so it’s more like a new fad.

勉強しなさいよ

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Oh ok, clear :ok_hand:

Tricked again by なさい!

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4.3.2.1

Question on this sentence,
I guess it’s 書いて+いたり+して
And that たりする gives the nuance of ‘things like…’. But why is the sentence ending in て?

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Handwritten Thoughts

It just is. :sweat_smile: that is a pretty common way to see わ written, and was actually not the worst わ I’ve seen. I’ve had some I’ve seen where I only knew it wasn’t れ because context told me れ would be impossible (knowing more vocabulary helps immensely with this).

In the same way that one gets used to it in their native language, eventually, you just start to get so familiar with the basic shapes that it doesn’t matter how different the handwriting is, you’ll usually be able to make it out because you know enough vocabulary and know it well enough that you don’t really consciously read every character, you just kinda read the word quickly without paying special mind to the individual letters therein. It’s why that whole meme with the words with out of order letters, with the exception of the first and last letters, works. Despite the words being totally incorrect, the meme is still legible because your brain just shortcuts the words because it knows what would commonly be there from its past experience of seeing certain letter combinations, even if those combinations are not in the right order, as long as you can assume the first and last letters are correct.

After a certain point, that level of recognition kinda just happens, or at least it did in my case, after a lot of reading. Oftentimes, learning the stroke order can help, because you can follow strokes and get to it from there,
but it isn’t strictly necessary (for reading; if writing, you should learn it). And by seeing stuff handwritten more often, you just start to see what shortcuts often get taken for specific radicals and can start to have an easier time recognizing them. But yeah. If there is a quick hack for it or anything, I don’t know it. I think it is just a matter of experience.

It isn’t a sudden switch that gets flipped or anything either, like you can either read nothing or everything; it’s more of a spectrum. There will be some handwritten kanji I will struggle to read in some things I have yet to read sometimes, and I know for sure there are still fonts and writing styles that I struggle with: anything super traditional, with the kanji that kinda flow into each other a bit (I hesitate to call it cursive, but it’s similar), I have a difficult time making out, and if the fonts get crazy, that can make it harder too. 五等分の花嫁 was especially guilty of using various fonts with different degrees of readability. Some were just as easy as the basic font to read, some took a bit of effort, and some I had to look up radicals I could recognize to find the kanji in a regular font to compare it to because I had no idea what it was.

So that you can compare the computer font to the written and start to see how some radicals (and kana!) get lazy in handwriting:

1st Picture, strip of paper: 安易に答えを得ようとは愚か者め

2nd Picture, note from sister: お兄ちゃんへ 旅行の安全をねがってお守りを作りました。林間学校楽しんできてね。P.S. お礼のおみやげきたいしてます<3 らいは (Looking at her ね, you can really see the similar lazy first stroke as in the わ in Takagi-san that you posted, with the bit that is left of the vertical line. Also, I would say her handwriting is very good. It is probably the easiest of the 3 pictures to read, imo).

3rd picture, speech bubble: なんでこんな日も学校あるの!!

Chapter 4, Page 3, Panel 2

First, you have a typo here, it isn’t ない, it’s な, the sentence ender, not the negative.

And it ends in て for the usual reason a sentence ends in て: indicates trailing off a bit. Basically the same way we use ellipses in English, or end in a conjunctive without any intent to actually finish the sentence.

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There are some sites where you can quiz yourself on different fonts for kanji and hiragana. :slight_smile:

I don’t use them, but I sometimes recommend them to my students, at least the hiragana one, since it helps with the different forms of りきさ, etc.

But yeah, you’re just trying to speedrun the natural process of reading and getting used to it.

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This is what concerned me about the written japanese and the differences between it and the typed version, I guess it would need quite a lot of specific practice, without mentioning that it’s not as easy as scanning the text with google translate or simply typing the kana and choosing between the proposed kanji
I don’t doubt that if you need/want to learn it, you’ll end up succeeding, but in which instance did you encounter so much exposure to written jap?

Looking up a written kanji by its radicals looks like a tough job :flushed:

Now that I compare it, there are some things easily recognizable, and others are simply insane…

Luckily it was just a typo and I knew the correct version :ok_hand: thanks for noticing!

Great, thanks for the corrections :grin:

Edit: can someone tell me how to write in the font withe the horizontal line in the mid of the words? (Don’t know what’s called)

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