☄ Week 5 | ムーミン谷の彗星 | Children's Novel Club

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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:shooting_star: Welcome to week 5 of ムーミン谷の彗星！:shooting_star:

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Week 5 March 21
Chapter 3 part 1
Pages with text ~12
Ending Line 三人は、ひそひそと声をかわしました。

Discussion Guidelines

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  • (that’s [spoiler]text here[/spoiler]).

  • If you have a question about grammar, vocab, the story, cultural things or anything else related to the book — ask! There’s no need to be shy. If it’s something you are wondering about, chances are someone else will be thankful you asked first, lots of people enjoy answering questions, you learn something new, and the thread gets more lively. It’s a win-win on all fronts!

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:comet: Home Thread for Comet in Moominvalley / ムーミン谷の彗星 || Children's Novel Club
:comet: Week 6 | ムーミン谷の彗星 | Children's Novel Club
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Chapter three is pretty long.

I can’t say I’m really any better than Sniff although the personality tests say I’m most like Snufkin…

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ニョロニョロ

夕方になって、五十ぴきものニョニョロが、東のほうへむかって、川をわたっていくのが見えました。

Note that ニョロニョロ is not just random onomatopoeia here, but the name of another creature that’s found in Moomin stories. They look like this:

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And they’re called Hattifatteners in the English version.

Snufkin and speech styles

Yay, Snufkin is here! I’d much rather hear from him than Sniff :joy:

They refer to him as a ムムリク (Mumrik) here, which I think is his species- he’s a Mumrik named Snufkin.

We also get a lot of nice variety in styles of speech between the characters in this book. If this is your first time reading very much Japanese, try noticing which characters use which ending particles. Snufkin uses the question marker かい instead of か。 かい is typically masculine and more casual than か。

In Japanese fiction, typically the styles of speech like particles and politeness levels are intended to broadcast which characters are speaking, so many Japanese books will have fewer dialogue tags (‘so-and-so said’) than English books. If you start getting used to attaching a certain style of speech to a character here, it will be helpful when you move on to other books.

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Thanks soggyboy! I have not come across a ニョロニョロ before… and the picture of them in the boats was hard to understand what was going on. It’s a fun little game trying to work out what is invented Moomin language and what is just hard to translate Japanese haha.

I have partially got over my dislike of スニフ by assuming they are just a much younger child with an inevitably more self centred world view. I have no idea if that’s true or not but it makes them less annoying ha.

PS I have not caught up… next weekend!

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I’ve watched a little of the Moomin show in Japanese, so I had already come across them and had to decode their name :joy: This is the kind of thing that always trips me up reading Japanese- when something is a bit unexpected or fantastical, it can be hard to tell what’s going on since you’re wading through reading in a second language already.

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I liked this section!

Story Thoughts

I thought it was onomatopoeia at first, before seeing your post haha. But then when the picture followed in the book I realized, oh that’s what they’re called!!

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SNUFKIN YAYYYY​:heart_hands:

I actually like スニフ’s little thing he does saying like “I have a secret that starts with ‘c’ and ends in ‘at’!!” Totally a little kid thing, I love it

I kind of got the same vibe! I think that does make their character more enjoyable :head_shaking_vertically: though they haven’t really annoyed me so far anyway

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