Hi everyone. I introduced myself in a previous book club (さくら) as someone who took a couple years of Japanese many years ago and started back up recently. It turned out at that point that 1) had re-started too recently and needed a bit more refreshing and 2) a combination of being too busy, and having too high expectations meant I had to abandon that attempt.
Now, a few months later, I’m a little more up to speed (but still way farther to go) and I think have a bit more reasonable expectations. Instead of stuffing every word into Anki, I’m going to treat this more as an immersion exercise and I’ll remember what I remember. I would expect a first grade reader to have lots of repetition, and so far it does, which is perfect. にょうぼう and およめさん for instance I think I’ve got down at this point… I have enough grammar to sort of piece the meaning back together given the vocab sheet, with the help of this thread as well. After the first 5 pages, I think this is going well, and will be very valuable.
Mostly I’m writing this to say hi, and especially to thank those putting the work in to create the vocab sheet and provide explanations. I’ll probably mostly lurk, but wanted you to know I appreciate the efforts and find them very helpful!
Slight correction, this would be ‘As she said in the beginning,’ referring to what she said when she arrived. はじめに is modifying いった。
Looks good!
Page 8 sentence 4
こんな しあわせものは、またと あるまい。
This is a slightly tricky one to translate directly because it involves an expression, またとあるまい which is the ‘unique/unparalleled.’
Literally it does say ‘this kind of lucky person is unparalleled/matchless’ but to translate it slightly more naturally in English would probably be something like ‘Being such a lucky fellow is unmatched’
The ‘reasons’ meaning fits here, since Gosaku is complaining about how having a wife would mean one more mouth to feed. So, ‘because he is stingy, he doesn’t have a wife’
I struggle to understand the purpose of あれば, in this sentence. Is it a conditional form or ある? But then what is the condition? ものだ is there to either emphasise surprise or add an explaining tone, I think?
Something wonderful is happening: when doing my usual lessons on Wanikani, I noticed that suddenly I need a lot less effort to guess what a context sentence means. It seems like the time invested in dissecting and deciphering sentences is already paying its dividends
I knew reading was important, but I never expected to see results so quickly
I’m hooked.
What are your experiences? Did anyone else notice a difference?
A literal translation in this case might be something like ‘that day’s incident/occurrence’ but ‘one day’ is close enough for our purposes.
As for the あればある in sentence 3, I’m not 100% sure on the grammatical function here. I’ll see if I can ask someone else and find out.
Awesome!! Reading and seeing progress so clearly like that is the best feeling ever. Another great feeling is when you study something in your grammar textbook, then open up a book/manga and bam, there it is!
One thing I forgot to mention, but I’d like to say that the vocab sheet was extremely helpful in this first week. I barely needed consulting jisho, it was all there already.
