It won’t all be on one page, @josephsl will be making threads for each week, where we can discuss that weeks reading, till we finish the volume (which is 12 weeks) if there is enough readers still reading at the end of week 12, the book club will discuss if they would like to continue with volume 2
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p.11
ちゃった or てしまった means something was done completely. Often this has the nuance of it being done regretfully or accidently, but not always. Here I would read it as a neutral statement, “I ended up getting helped, huh”
p.14
読める means “able to read,” so he’s asking if she’s able to read his lips.
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p14
I am wondering about this one too. Is the 見てくる this grammar point? And if so, does this mean something like: “This is rare - he has come to see me [in the sense of “begun to see me”] as a living thing?”
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p14
I would read めずらしい生き物 together as “rare creature”. So overall something like, “I’m seeing him approach like a rare creature.”
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I believe the translation is more along the lines of ‘[He] is looking at me like some sort of rare creature’.
めずらしい生き物 - rare creature
めずらしい生き物みたい - resembling a rare creature
に particle indicates the preceding clause as the state the subsequent verb is looking to achieve
見てくる - ‘look’ and ‘come’ (inward oriented toward the speakers perspective)
I think it’s safe to treat MMC as the subject.
‘He is looking at me (doing a look and directing it my way) as though he is seeing something resembling a rare animal’
Anyone who actually understands Japanese, feel free to correct me.
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Ah yes, I was starting to think along those lines after I posted. Thanks for the clarification.
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Yeah I think that’s spot on.
〜てくる being the temporal direction definition. “He has started to stare towards me (and now is is staring)”
I’d probably localized it as “He’s looking at me like I’m some unusual creature”, like she’s a strange specimen to be discovered.
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Oops, read ahead, this is for week 3
店長のこと好きになんないでね雪かわいいから
I think this is supposedly a contraction of ならない which is the negative て-form of なる
- なる → to become
- ならない → not become
- ならないで → “please don’t become…”
And in in context please don’t (change your state to being) - that state being please don’t fall for the manager
Also I hope I’m not the only one who mixes up 巨 & 臣 and imagine the guy is 7 feet tall or something.
My page numbers are a bit wonky I think. (Spoiler: They were.)
Kind of funny that the gaijin tourist violates less JP social boundaries than our love interest, but that’s on par for the genre I suppose.
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hmm this definitely seems like the wrong page, I don’t recognize reading that part at all.
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Hmm maybe page 10? I can’t tell if the count includes table of contents or not
Ack, it might be page ~24. I just realized mokuro made it double paged. At least I’m caught up for a bit 
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The top of this thread indicates the last panel for this week’s reading. That can help you visually distinguish where to stop. I assume each thread for each week will include the corresponding final panel.
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It looks like @meme456 read through page 16, but that’s due to a slight confusion on page numbers being used.
The title of contents says chapter one begins on page 3, with the club reading pages 3–14. However, many electronic book readers will show the chapter’s first page as page 5. This means someone reading on an electronic book reader will see this week’s reading as pages 5–16.
You can see an example of this here, where Kobo has a file named i_0003.jpg for the first page, but it's the 5th image.
For those unfamiliar with how 読む and 読める differ, read up on the “potential” form of verbs.
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Hi all,
Very excited to be reading A Sign of Affection! I read this in English but it’s interesting to see how it reads in Japanese.
Over the last few months, I reviewed my Japanese grammar and verb conjugation, and it’s already paying off here, jeez! like with 助けてもらっちゃった (he was able to help him - ?) I also had jisho open while I was reading to check some vocab, but overall this one wasn’t too difficult. I feel like the trailing off thoughts are going to be some of the most confusing material (very shoujo of them lol).
One thing I liked is that Yuki is kind of tentative-sounding (みたい, かな) but when the guy goes to explain the situation to her, she’s thinking, well yeah I got that! Off to a fun start 
some vocab that I didn’t know:
もなく - without
ながら - while
なんとか今 - somehow-now (sometime soon?)
どこかで - from somewhere
サークル - circle (friend circle?)
Also I didn’t read the author comment - handwritten stuff is still so tough. Maybe I can look at the English edition sometime and puzzle it out.
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I read it in a manner of speaking, but didn’t get much out of it besides picking up on 手話 being mentioned, a word I knew from A Silent Voice (to be more specific, it was the lack of furigana which mostly hurt me, for the most part I could understand what kana were used and what components made up the kanji)
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Yea I was confused as well but I figured, I couldn’t go wrong if I end on the “End phrase” which happened to be page 16 for me
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p3
It’s の + かな. の gives an explanatory tone, かな is “I wonder”. It’s fairly similar to “のだろうか”
p7
I just want to point out that まもなく is 間 + も + ない (adverbial form), as in “there’s not even an interval [of time]”, hence “soon” or “in a brief moment”. I find it useful to notice that to remember the meaning.
That’s not how I interpret it, I think you’re supposed you read all square boxes together as some kind of narration (including the box on the previous page IMO):
私の世界
cute things and…
friends…
university…
SNS…
And then the next page happens and things “derail” somehow. The boxes will continue in next week’s reading, I think it’ll make more sense when you put it all together.
author comment
Here it is transcribed if you want to dig deeper:
こんにちは。初めまして「ゆびさきと恋々」１巻です。
こちらは講談社さん[1]のデザートにて連載中です。
出版社が変わり、題材も色々と大変な連載ですが女性漫画と手話がうまく溶け込むよう、きゅんきゅんできる手話漫画を目指していきたいです。
よろしくお願いします！
森下Ｓｕｕ
It’s definitely a bit hard for the ABC but it’s just a comment on the publication history, the author’s intent and a thank you to the reader. You can safely ignore it, it’s not part of the story.
Kodansha, the publisher ↩︎
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Nice thing is, as you keep reading native material, you’ll see a lot of these again.
まもなく
You’ll see this as both 間もなく and まもなく. It combines 間 + も + ない.
It’s especially common on trains, as seen in this week’s reading.
ながら
This one’s fairly common as well.
We likely won’t see it again in this volume, but it comes up a few times in volume 2.
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p16
I think you’re actually correct about this one, but my original read was completely different: “That’s rare, he’s treating me like a living thing”.
So basically treating めずらしい as a stand-alone interjection, and then the rest of the sentence. she would be used to people just bailing out or ignoring her once they figure out she’s deaf, but he keeps the discussion going normally.
That felt right to me because the guy seems to be treating her perfectly normally at this point? Although looking more closely I see that the author gave him very wide eyes, so I guess he’s meant to be staring intently.
At any rate my version doesn’t really work because I think 生き物 would be just a weird way to say that in Japanese. If she said 人間 it would make more sense.
EDIT on めずらしい
In my dictionary I find these colocations:
・珍しい物 a novelty
・珍しい物[品物] a rare article; a rarity; a curiosity
So I guess she may be using the word in the sense that he treats her like a “novelty item” which makes more sense in context than “rare” I think.
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てしまう
Yeah it’s very versatile but also often untranslateable. In this case I feel like it emphasizes her lack of control over the situation, it happened to her while she was passively standing by. I think “I ended up” is indeed a good way to convey this “well it worked out in the end, I guess” type of feeling.
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I’m enjoying it so far!
I ended up typing out most of what was in there (other than things I knew for certain) into OneNote so I could take notes easily for what I did know and try to piece together the meanings. Then added lookups of some of the key words to try to fill in a little more, and then decided to go ahead and use Copilot to help with the grammatical structures I don’t know and check the work. All in all, I think I did fairly well, I kind of got the gist but some of the actual details I was off on.
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