Teasing Master Takagi-san 😝 ・ Volume 1, chapter 1

p13

ろ!?ろ!!てことは!?
Ro? Ro! What does that mean?
オレの名前じゃないなぁ。。。
It’s not my name…
いや。。。別に全然ショックとかじゃねーよ。
No… It’s not like it’s particularly surprising though.
くろう!!見てやる!!こうなりゃ全部!!
Shit! Let’s see it! I’ll end it all! (Q/Answered: Not too sure of the last bit here)

p14

ろうかみろ
Look at the hallway. (Q: Is this a pun on age since Nishikata was so adamant about it being childish? If so, I’m not sure how it translate. The first part can be “age” but the みろ I don’t know.)
や。。。やられた!!!
S-She got me!

p15

ホントいい顔するわね。
You’re making a really nice face, you know.
しかも思い通りの行動するし、
Besides, I knew you’d go through with it. (lit: 思い通り → expect)
これだから西片からかうのやめらんないわ。
Because of that, I won’t stop teasing you.
見てろよ、いつか絶対にからかうて恥ずかしいがらせてやる!
Just you see, next time I’ll definitely tease and embarrass you!

p16

期待してるわ。
I’m counting on it.
あ!ムリだと思ってるだろ。
Ah? You think it’s impossible for me! (Q/Answered: Uncertain about this one.)
まーね。
Well…
ホントだぞ!覚悟しでろよ!!! (NB: This て vs で font comes back. I assume this one is で since it’s a bit long.)
Really! Be prepared for anything!
ムリだと思うよー。
It impossible I think. (NB: Agreeing by restating Nishikata’s statement I think. Not 100% sure though.)
大チャンスで二分の一を外すようじゃね。
You had a good 50% chance to dodge it.
は?二分の一?何?
Huh? 50%? What?
教えなーい。
Not saying.

Doing 4 pages today because p14 doesn’t really count, and then it’s just one short of the end and I’m too impatient to wait :smiley:

The ending is adorable! Got a huge grin at the reveal ^w^

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No pun. It’s simply ろうか (hallway) (を left out) みろ (to look + imperative form = saying to look).

(She likely wrote that in advance, before her conversation with him.)

I hate to be the bearer of bad news =(

If it helps any, here are the two side-by-side:

i-0018x

Over time, you’ll get used to when the て form of a verb uses て vs で. It may take a while, but when you do, you’ll have a feel for which is right even if the lettering is too small to see clearly.

By the way, when you write “Answered”, is it because the question you had when reading was already answered earlier in the thread? (I want to ensure we’re not leaving anything unresolved.)

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It is. That’s also why I don’t highlight them. I figure sharing my thought process might interest some people, even as I now understand some of those lines are wrong. I tend to review myself before posting by checking my answers against everyone else. It’d be easy to cheat and post sanitized versions, but I don’t see much purpose in doing so. The Q/Answered is the compromise I settled on.

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Happens to me an embarrassing amount of times :sob:

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@ChristopherFritz Not really a question but wanted to say thank you for posting so much and linking to your past posts on passive…this has been driving me insane for over a year…thank you so much!!!

So not to derail - Japanese (うけみ form) Thanks!

This has been seriously driving me mad for over a year. I even wrote two pages in Japanese and the Sensei was like no that should be regular past or whatever… Finally spent the past few days digging through your well written posts and Cure Dolly I think after many hours and lots of examples and the most helpful…doing LITERAL translations… it finally makes sense. It was one thing to sort of read and figure out a complicated sentence in the book club but actually trying to use the grammar proved I didn’t get it :upside_down_face:

Haven’t been able to prove it yet but it seems if you translate in a true literal form (it’s a mess and I’m sure my English teachers from grade school are rolling over in their graves…yeah I’m old haha)…but it seems to be always passive. It becomes active when you translate to natural English. I could still be wrong (still need to go through as many examples as I can find to prove it to myself)…but that’s not my point…calling it receptive and translating literally… it’s possible to follow and understand w/o being totally baffled (heaven help me if it’s spoken at native speed) :exploding_head: …time will tell as will some more writing practice…but seriously thank you for all your write ups and explanations. (and of course combined with Cure Dolly and watching and re-watching)…can confidently say this passive bs FINALLY makes sense!

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What’s worse is that I’ve caught myself doing this multiple times already haha

To be fair I do misread words in English all the time too

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I just wanted to drop in and say I haven’t given up, just fallen behind a little.

I had an operation on my eye 2 days ago and haven’t been able to read much since as my eyes aren’t focusing right yet.

I’m still on page 7 (where I was 3 days ago), I’ll try my best to catch up as my eyes start behaving :slight_smile:

Thanks to everyone for continuing on, it’ll make it much easier for me to catch up with you all doing the hard work =D

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Ahhh, that’s a nice segue into today’s topic for discussion: how have you been enjoying the pace this week? When I first made the schedule I chose to stick to one chapter per week, because I felt like it would be a bit awkward to chop the chapters into bits. Do we want to continue with this pace or do we want to go faster/slower in the next weeks?

Do keep in mind that you’ll find it gets easier week by week as you gain more experience :slight_smile:

Should we stick to the current pace of one chapter per week?
  • Yes, this works for me.
  • No, I want to go faster.
  • No, I want to go slower.

0 voters

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Glad to see the votes so far, please not faster :sweat_smile:

When I’m not recovering from surgery I work full-time, so the pace of 2 pages per day so far seems like quite a bit - I don’t think I’d stand a chance at 4 pages per day.

That may change in later chapters though, and I don’t want to hold everyone else back if it came down to that.

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I have exams now for a month and a bit, so don’t feel like I can keep up, but I’ll be able to catch up in June if ya’ll stick to this pace. If you go faster you’ll be done before I have a chance^^;

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Just a general note on feeling like you have to catch up: don’t worry about it! The threads will still be here and people will still be around to help even after the club has finished. There really is no rush. Please find a routine that is enjoyable and sustainable :slight_smile: I’ve had to let some book club schedules go in the past after I got behind (life gets in the way sometimes) and my self-imposed demand that I had to catch up nearly caused me to burn out from reading entirely. Slow and steady wins the race! :grin:

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I’ve never read a manga in Japanese before, so I’m a bit confused by this. Is it okay to look at translations for words, cos I feel like I don’t know most of them, or does that mean I shouldn’t be reading this yet? :sweat_smile: I don’t know if it’s ‘cheating’ to get a gist of what’s going on by the pictures. Sorry if I’m overthinking all of this!

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Well, this isn’t a university course with an exam at the end, so who cares if you do it ‘right’? Do whatever works for you and whatever is fun and makes you want to keep going!

Looking at translations for vocab is definitely encouraged. That’s why we have a spreadsheet (see original post) in the first place. Just try to read the manga and make sense of it using all the help at your disposal, including the questions and answers in this thread. Then if you still can’t make sense of something, ask your own questions and people will be sure to help.

Maybe have a look at the first couple of posts in this thread to get a sense for the different ways other people are approaching it?

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The goal is completely up to you, it could be just to put your existing Japanese into use, or it could be to incrementally improve. There is no real wrong way to do this.

For example my goal is just to incrementally improve my grammar in particular as I find it very heard to learn from textbooks.

I’m definitely looking up a lot of vocab, grammar, and trying to infer a lot from the pictures to fill in the missing gaps - and I think pretty much everyone in here is doing the same.

As mentioned there is a shared vocab spreadsheet, and above you can see lots of people helping each other clarify various parts (e.g. here, here and here).

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Thanks! Its this sentence I’m having trouble with right now ゆがんじゃったのかなーちょっと西片あけてくんない? I know the verb is bent, and after reading some of the material people have posted I think it might be ‘I accidentally bent it, would you be able to open it a little Nishikata?’ but I’m unsure, especially of the たのかなー part.
Also, if anyone has any tips on how to retain stuff we learn here, especially the grammar I’d love to know! :blush:

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Can’t they be postponed?

(Only kidding!)

Best part is, with this series, you can always jump right into whatever the “current” chapter is, then get to the earlier chapters later.

It’s possible that’ll lead to asking questions already answered previously. Personally, I don’t see that as a problem because it gives extra review for everyone else.

Before I started reading, I spent two to three years learning around 2,000 vocabulary words. Most of them I then forgot, because I was never seeing them again after so many reviews.

I recommend not waiting until you know all the words before reading!

It’s a lot of work looking up words (the vocabulary sheet helps with this!), but it’s also a lot of work learning vocabulary words in isolation, and I think it’s harder learning them in isolation.

On the other hand, if you’re read and looking up words as you go, you’ll start to see a certain number of common words coming up again. Before you know it, you’ll find you’re seeing vocabulary such as ()く and ()う and ()る everywhere.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading these past couple of years, and I’ve been slowly working my way through WaniKani learning new words from it, and I do retain some of those many words I learned years ago. And yet I’m still constantly looking up words. Expect it. Embrace it.

Over time, you’ll get used to reading, and you’ll grow a tolerance for ambiguity. You’ll get a feel for which words you need to look up, and which you can skip over looking up. As your vocabulary grows (from reading, from WaniKani, from any other source you may use for learning vocabulary), it slowly gets easier.

There’s a reason I’ve been reading almost exclusively manga these past years =D I’ve tried novels, but I don’t have the stamina for it yet because there are so many descriptive words (not necessary in manga) that I have to look up.

To add to what @Phryne wrote about doing what works for you, keep an eye out also on what doesn’t work out for you. I recommend sticking with whatever you try for the whole duration of a book club just to give the method a fair chance, then evaluate of you want to try things different for another book club. But above all else, you want to ensure you’re enjoying reading along!

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One use for the ちゃった/じゃった verb is used when something happens unintentionally. In this case, it’s not necessarily that Takagi caused the pencil case to become bent, but rather it becoming bent may have happened. (Such as when it was in her book bag.)

After that, we have three particles: の+か+な.

When adding のだ to the end of a sentence, it change the meaning of the sentence into “It is (noun)”, whereas the whole sentence prior to の fills in as the noun. But don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense at first. This is a grammar explanation. Initially, it can be useful to have more of a meaning of usage explanation.

Note: The following sentence is not the same as what’s in the manga. I’m using a simpler sentence for explanation purposes.

Consider the following sentences:

  • “The pencil case is bent.”
  • “It is that the pencil case is bent.”

The first one is a statement of the situation: the pencil case has a bend in it.

The second one states a reason: Why can’t Takagi open her pencil case? It is that the pencil case is bent. The reason why she cannot open is it is that it is bent.

(You can find more about the “explanatory の” earlier in this thread. If you can’t find it, let me know, and I’ll look up links to the posting.)

The second particle is か. This is used for asking a question. It’s sort of like a verbal question mark (though its usage sometimes differs from what we’d expect in English).

Here’s what we have when we take the prior sentence and turn it into a question:

  • “Is it that the pencil case is bent?”

Now, rather than saying the reason Takagi can’t open it because it’s bent, instead we’re asking if the reason she can’t open it is because it’s bent.

When な is used after か (resulting in かな), it makes the question less certain.

  • “Could it be that the pencil case is bent?”

Repeated exposure. Just like we review our kanji over and over through WaniKani, we review our grammar by seeing it over and over. You may need to ask about the same grammar on different pages, and that’s okay. You’ll get used to it over time.

After I finish reading a volume, I also like to occasionally flip through it now and then, and see how well I do on random pages.

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Thank you all so much for this! I loved following this thread and reading along in the book. I’m working through this with a student I’m tutoring in Japanese and this is just a fantastic resource for us!

I’m curious, as this is my first time joining one of these book clubs, other than the vocabulary google sheet are there any other documents people are sharing?
With all these great English translations being written page by page, line by line, it seems like we should collect that into a doc too, so others when they come along, as they read the book, they could have a paralleled in English? and maybe even collect main grammar / style considerations? Just a thought!

Thanks everyone here for such great discussion!

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I dunno about collecting translations, since those are slightly different from person to person. We’re all learners here, so it might be difficult to pick a “correct” version.
But listing out the grammar would be a good idea! Just as long as there’s interest. The last book club started with a grammar list, but people eventually stopped adding to it (including me :sweat:). I’d say it’s more worthwhile this time since casual speech and contractions seem more difficult to look up on one’s own.

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pg. 12-13

今のうちに高木さんの消しゴムに誰かの名前を書いといて…
Now’s the time, I’ll write someone’s name down on Takagi’s eraser…
トイレから戻ってきたらからかってやろう。
When she comes back from the bathroom I’ll tease her.
さーて誰の名前を…
Now then, whose name…
な…すでに書いてる⁉︎
Wha…there’s already [something] written?
見たらマズイか…:interrobang:
Would it be bad to look…?
ひ…一文字くらいなら…
I-if it’s just one character…

ろ⁉︎ ろ‼︎ てことは⁉︎
“Ro”? “Ro”! Is what it says?!
オレの名前じゃないなぁ…
It’s not my name…
いや…別に全然ショックとかじゃねーよ。
No…that’s not especially shocking or anything.
くそっ‼︎ 見てやる‼︎ こうなりゃ全部‼︎
Damn it! I’m looking! If it’s like this I’m looking at all of it!

I took a lot of liberties with the last line, I know. From the thread I know that なりゃ is a contraction of なれば but the rest of it was still tough.

Not sure if this was mentioned in the thread already too, but I eventually figured out that 書いといて(書いとく)is a contraction of 書いておく, meaning “to write down” or “to write in advance”. Hope that helps someone!

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