Teasing Master Takagi-san 😝 ・ Volume 1, chapter 6

Just to offer a different perspective maybe:
I don’t know either, but what do you guys think of this? It’s the normal 〜ても followed by imperative 見ろ?
The translation would then be something like “When thinking about it, look…!”
Nishikata has been speaking to himself in his thoughts a lot in previous chapters, so I could see this being a possibility? Like he is arguing with himself/his prior logic.

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Omg I’ve never noticed this, so fascinating :durtle_love:

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Here’s what I found after realising I could transform 〜てもみろ into 〜てもみて in order to check the grammar:

「考えてもみて下さい」=考えて+みて下さい、に「も」を入れて強調したのです。

In essence, the suggestion is that yes, も is just added for emphasis. I think you could see it as something like ‘even’ or ‘just’, because も also tends to be used to place emphasis on an extreme/‘edge’ case and has a similar function to those words. I think it’s something like ‘Just try thinking about it!’ (And the translations I’ve found are things like ‘Just think!’, ‘Just imagine!’ and ‘Think about it!’, so I think that’s pretty close.)

The problem is that も doesn’t add the sense of ‘when’. In fact, I think a て-form is more likely to mean ‘when’ without も, and with も, the most likely meaning is ‘even if’ (which doesn’t work here).

It’s amazing how much etymological information there is in monolingual dictionaries. I’ve fairly sure that this information is on Goo辞書 too. (I got it off 大辞林, which is no longer online.) If I remember correctly, it’s い→けれ (已然形 of the い-adjective ending) + ど(も). After all, い-adjectives used to exist as two classes in Classical Japanese – シク and ク – and as you can see, both contain K sounds in their endings. I guess the verb ending just somehow transformed into a standalone conjunction.

EDIT: Yup, here:

[補説]「けれども」は中世末、形容詞活用の已然形語尾に接続助詞「ども」が付いてできたもの。近世前期になると、くだけた感じを伴う「けれど」「けど」が生じ、後期には、「けども」が成立した。

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Yesss, I’ve recently started looking up goo’s definitions for almost every word, it’s so helpful to understand those things too! Have you learned Classical Japanese stuff from some resource or did you get it from here and there?

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Hm… mostly here and there. I haven’t tried learning it formally yet, in part because I’m expecting that most resources will be entirely in Japanese, so I’m essentially waiting for the point when I’m fluent enough to understand YouTube courses on 古文. I’ll go learn all the details then. For now though, it’s mostly just been noticing things in the dictionary and coming up with guesses before googling for more information in order to confirm my suspicions. I have gone to a few 古文 specific sites so far though, because I sometimes want all the information in one place. Here are two:
https://www.hello-school.net/haroajapa000top.htm

And here’s a 古文 dictionary from Weblio:

That aside, I think most major monolingual dictionaries have definitions for Classical Japanese helper verbs, so everything there is helpful for understanding how they work, provided you know what the headword is (e.g. searching for し might help if you’re willing to trawl through the definitions for some noun-modifying form and you know what that’s called in Japanese, because the dictionary might contain a short definition redirecting you to the main entry, but the verb you’re really looking for is き).

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Pages 11-13, the chapter end is near!

11。
オレは一体。。。
What’s wrong with me…
何をやっていたんだろうなぁ。。。
What was I doing?
12.
わっ!!うわぁ!!!
Boo! Ahh!
あははだいじょうぶ?
Ha-ha-ah. Are you okay?
カ。。。カーテンの裏に。。。
Behind the curtain…
13.
わかんなかったでしょ。
I think you did not know.
このカーテンちょっと透けるから全部見えてたんだよ。
These curtains are a bit transparent, so I was seeing everything.
畜生。。。嬉そうな顔してんなぁ。。。
Darn it. Such a happy face.
あぁおもしろかった
Aa, it was so funny!
西片の行動思い出しただけで。。。。
Just to remember how you were acting…
早起きしたかいがあったよー。
It was worth it to wake up early. //Early bird gets the worm?
このためだけに!?
Just because of this!? (She did all of this just to see him flustered)

I was happy to encounter “one body” 一体 expression that is subject of so many questions on the forums
オレは一体。。。What’s the heck with me//what’s wrong with me//What the heck
accompanied by

the very telling image of Nishikata who just had enough (page 11, the last panel)

image

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Thank you everyone for chiming in on the てもみる discussion. Isn’t it funny? I’m pretty sure this is the second time we have run into a phrase in this book where we all were pretty sure we knew what it meant, but it’s also so short a phrase that it’s a nightmare to find out why it means what it does! :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: and to clarify, I mean nightmare as a joke, not that it’s actually a nightmare. I find this kind of stuff super interesting, and I think the more work you put in to finding this kind of stuff out, the better it is for your long term memory!

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naw…it’s real when you don’t see this for a while and have to go look it up all over again :rofl:

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I may have screenshotted @Jonapedia’s explanations to prevent having to try and search it out again. :wink:

For real, though, I need to get better at actually bookmarking things so I can find them again, overall… I have the bad habit of telling myself, “Psh, you’ll remember that.”

Spoiler: I almost never remember that… Reference the post above in which I forgot a word within 15 pages. :laughing:

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Ah, thank you thank you! I feel like I’ve learned so much more from these past 5 chapters then the past year of studying!

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Finally I was able to caught up with this bookclub (*/ω\)

I have a doubt on Page 14!

なんか静かな教室で二人っきりだとさー
世界に二人しかいない感じしない?

You know, a quiet classroom with apparently just the two of us… does it feels like we are the only two in the world?

I’m not very sure about なんか’s interpretation though, I got mine from Maggie Sensei pt. 6, and also for the entire sentence itself!

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The only thing I would change is the “does” to "doesn’t:

Doesn’t it feel like we are the only two people in the world?

She’s not just asking if that is the case, she is suggesting that it is the case.

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Oh that definitely sounds better! Thank you so much ^ - ^

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page 14 なんか

なんか seems to me like one of those words (combination of words really) that can mean anything or nothing. Sometimes the translation works just fine even if you leave out なんか. I would probably translate it as “somehow” here, but your translation works just as well. It’s basically just a way to softly begin her sentence, I think.

As for the rest, I too would change does to doesn’t, like @aamunoz pointed out. And I’m not sure where you got apparently from?

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なんか

“Somehow” was my first guess, but then I wasn’t quite satisfied and deepened my research and I found this on Maggie Sensei and I thought it was more suitable:

  1. to start a conversation with なんか ( = nanka) putting your thoughts together.

Ex. なんかさあ、最近、彼女とうまくいっていないんだよね。

= Nanka saa, saikin, kanojo to umaku itte inain dayone.

= You know, things are not working so well with my girlfriend.

Ex. なんかさあ、遠距離恋愛って大変だよね。

= Nanka saa, enkyori ren’ai tte taihen dayone.

= You know, long distance love is hard, isn’t it?

Apparently

I got “apparently” from 〜とさ, and for me it translates as “apparently, you know”… but it may be wrong!

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なんか: Sure, any of those work, I think. Although I notice that all such examples on Maggie Sensei have なんか followed by さあ. It changes the feel a little, but I’m really not sure. なんか, and all those 何 combinations still trip me up quite a lot.

とさ: Right, Jisho translates it just like you say. と is another one of those tricky ones. Somehow apparently doesn’t sit well with me, as it’s really her own impression, not something she heard from somewhere else, but if it’s not that, I’m not entirely sure what it is that と is doing there either. I think I interpreted it as marking the subject like は, but as I said, I’m not entirely sure about any of that.

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Figured I’d jump in again, though I feel like everyone’s interpretations so far are in the ballpark.

I guess this is valid. ‘You know’ is probably the closer translation here.

さ is, in my opinion anyhow, one of those particles you use to ‘pause’ a sentence and draw your interlocutor’s attention to something. This tends to be the case especially when it’s used at the ends of phrases or sentences. Of course, it has other uses, but they don’t feel all that different to me even if their specific meanings are different. We’re not looking at a case of 〜とさ where と is the quotation particle. Here, と is a… conditional structure, if you ask me. It’s a conjunction, something like ‘when’ or ‘if’.

As for なんか, here, it’s something like ‘kinda’ or ‘somehow’. It adds a feeling of vagueness, possibly because the speaker is suggesting something that’s potentially embarrassing or because it’s just a feeling with no real basis.

If you asked me for a translation, I’d say this:

‘You know, when it’s just [the] two [of us] in a quiet classroom… don’t [you] kinda get the feeling that there are only the two [of us] in [this] world?’

PS: If you want to get a feel for these things, which is how I do it, frankly, after I’ve read dictionary definitions… watch more anime or dramas. For that matter, since there’s an anime for this story, you might want to see if this scene is in the anime. The way characters’ tones change when they use なんか and さ reveals a lot. Usually, you can hear the uncertainty or desire to be vague with なんか, and さ in this position is often dragged out and sounds pensive.

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Thank you so much, especially for the とさ part ☆彡

Yes, I know that there’s also an anime, but I want to first read the manga and then see it ^ ^ and then I’ll surely try to better grasp the nuance behind this part!

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That’s fine too. I hope you enjoy both. :grin:

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Pages 14-16, the final stretch!

14.
くそ。。。高木さんめ
Sh*t, Takagi-san…
ねぇ西片。
Hey, Nishikata.
なんか静かな教室で二人っきりだとサー、
Somehow in the quiet classroom with just the two of us…
世界に二人しかいない感じしない?
it feels like we are the only people in the whole world, right? // All these double negatives go over my head, so double negative == positive anyway.

15.
このまま誰も来なきゃいいのにね。
You know, I wish nobody else would come…
あの。。。たかぎさん。。。
Umm…Takagi-san…
高木さんて。。。もしかして。。。オ
Takagi-san,… could it be…that you…
オレのこと
You… [like me?] // Switch of pronoun from “me” to “you” because this may be unfinished おれのことが好き?

16.
おっはよー!いい天気だね!
Gooood morning! Weather sure is good today!
もーなんで朝からそんなにテンション高いのよ。
Why is there so much tension that early in the morning?
ホントに。。。ウザイ。。。
Really…annoying…
いたた!痛いよサナエちゃん。
Ouch! It hurts, Sanae-chan.
もーやめなって。
Please stop.
なんだっけ西片。
What’s up, Nishikata?
。。。なんでもない
Nothing.
そういえば西片、日直仕事は?
That reminds me, Nishikata, what about class duty?
あぁ!?忘れた!
Aaa, I forgot!

A question about this sentence on Page 15
このまま誰も来なきゃいいのにね。

You know, I wish nobody else would come…

What is the いい doing here?

Here is my breakdown:

このまま As things are
(だれ)も nobody else
来なきゃ would not come
いい???
のに I wish
ね - you know

:sunny: I’m very happy to complete the full chapter this week, and finish two days ahead!:sunny:
For many of participants, this book and speed are easy, but for me at my current level it’s is just right amount of challenge and effort.

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