April 30th Daily Reading ブラックジャックによろしく Manga

Ah! You learn(ed) Japanese with Assimil ?
(第一課 早く。行きましょう。どこへ。あそこへ。…)
I still remember those first words…
I never went up to 第九十課 however (even if I still have the books).

**if the non-radical component is the same, the on’yomi is probably the same

That is how I typed 回復 today! I didn’t remember it’s reading; but I knew the one for 回; and 復 has the same component as 腹, used in 切腹(せっぷく), so I tried かいふく and it was that!
And even if the right reading isn’t found that way, identifiying the components makes searching a kanji so much easier in the compoent matrix at jisho.org

Also, Shannon told somewhere that she started learning just a year ago, without any prior knowledge of the language at all!
I find she has a quite good level; particularly taking into account that the grammar and kanjis used in this manga are far above what should be her current level at Duolingo.
I think she may be the one with the one with the less amount of learning of us all; as such, I find her ability very impressive.

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Re C:

Why is is もらって? Is 〜て form + のです a special construction?

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Sorry to ruin your consistency - how come all posters on this thread are Level 1? :slight_smile:

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@Shannon-8

Well, some people might say, ‘If you don’t take the test, you can’t fail the test,’ but not trying gets you nowhere. Hahaha. And well, as long as you learn from your mistakes and keep improving, you’ll eventually pass, so keep at it!

@YanagiPablo

Hahaha. Yes, those words! I remember them too, albeit a bit more vaguely than the words of the lessons of the Assimil book with which I learnt advanced French. (OK, to be honest, I don’t remember those French lessons anymore, because it’s been such a long time, but I used to recite them in the shower every day. Hahaha.) I finished the entire book and forced myself to finish translating all the lessons from French into Japanese. I was getting a bit bored towards the end of the translation practice, because I wasn’t learning anything new, but I told myself it would help consolidate my Japanese knowledge. At the same time, I was trying to send messages to my friend in Japanese while using the dictionary to fill in the words Assimil didn’t teach me, like 学寮がくりょう (‘school hostel/dormitory’) so I could get some real practice.

I don’t know the Duolingo syllabus very well, so I’ll take your word for it. I have to admit that I can’t really appreciate how easy or difficult kanji is for everyone since I know most of them thanks to Chinese. However, yes, without any prior knowledge of Japanese or of Chinese characters (which is to say, kanji), a lot of the kanji in this manga will probably feel foreign because they’re not that frequently used in daily life (this is a medical manga, after all), and someone without prior knowledge wouldn’t have other usage examples to fall back on for each kanji. @Shannon-8 I think you can be proud of yourself for being able to follow the dialogue and understand the story, even if it’s with the help of a dictionary. It’s not easy doing that after just a year: it took me about 6 months to a year to finish my Assimil course, including the lesson translation practice, albeit while in a very busy undergrad course (it’s supposed to take about 5 months total at the rate of a lesson a day), and if I had nothing but that knowledge, reading this manga would not be easy. The underlying grammar might be comprehensible, but there’s so much slang and so many unfamiliar kanji. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of slang and contractions: my friend is fluent and studying in Japan, but he was one of the top students for Japanese nationwide (we did foreign languages up to the end of high school; I did French), and he told me he knows someone else with an N1 (like him) who had no clue that stuff like つえー for つよい existed. Plus, slang differs according to region: I used to be really lost when my friend pulled some of the slang he learnt in Osaka on me, which is nothing like the standard stuff from Tokyo. This stuff isn’t usually taught in textbooks, or on Duolingo, so really, well done. :smiley:

@sansarret

I can’t really speak for the rest, but I created this account just to join the discussion. I believe we all started learning Japanese somewhere else before coming here, like on Duolingo, and in my case, I’m a Mandarin speaker, so I have some prior knowledge of kanji. I don’t know if the rest are actively using the WaniKani programme: perhaps they are, or will at some point. I’ve never tried it, and don’t intend to (because I already know kanji; please mods, don’t remove me, I’m just here to contribute to discussions), but I’m pleased to know WaniKani includes radicals and real vocabulary, both of which are essential to truly understanding kanji (from my experience with Mandarin anyway). I’m pretty sure it’s a good programme, just based on that.

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OK, I’m gonna say no right off the bat. It’s a common slang construction, which I’ll explain in a moment, but て + のです isn’t the underlying grammatical structure. 「〜ての[noun]」 does exist as a structure, as in てのとおり (‘as [you can] see’), but in that case, の is a particle connecting two objects, and not a quasi-nominaliser.

The structure you see in 「もらってんだ」is in fact the same one I pointed out yesterday (or rather, two days ago) for「気合入ってんじゃねー」, just that this is an affirmative statement instead of a negative one. You may recall that I said it needs to be interpreted using the “のだ・のではない structure”. It’s really just もらって(いる)んだ. It’s in the present progressive tense (〜ている) because he’s been doing it all this time, and is still doing so. I’ve taken the liberty of looking for another example, explained by a native Japanese speaker this time, so you’ll see it’s not all that rare to use this contraction:

As I also explained yesterday, it’s not uncommon for R sounds to turn into ん in informal Japanese:
e.g. わからない→ わかんない (Tokyo, or at least Kantou (i.e. Eastern Japanese) slang), so the progression is
やっているのだ:やっている→やってる+のだ→んだ gives us
やってるんだ→やってんだ

That make more sense? It takes some getting used to.

By the way, since we’re on this sentence, I want to highlight something to avoid possible confusion. (I know this sort of stuff confused me the first time.) いっつも is (unless you find another resource contradicting me, in which case I might be wrong) just an emphasised form of いつも (‘always’). Again, it’s not standard Japanese spelling, but pausing before a consonant (or ‘lengthening’ it, if you prefer) is a pretty ‘standard’ way of emphasising things in Japanese. Some other examples include なんにも instead of なにも (‘nothing’/negative ‘anything’) (of course, に can be a particle too, but context will make the meaning clear). For that matter, the ‘minna’ in Minna no Nihongo is an example of this. 皆 is formally pronounced みな, but it’s become common to say it as みんな instead. One final example, this time with consonant modification: やはり(‘as expected’) is used in formal contexts, but otherwise, one can say やっぱり or even やっぱ. The meaning is exactly the same, it’s just that the latter two are less formal and indicate more emphasis. E.g. やはりめない/読めません (‘As expected, I can’t read [it].’) vs やっぱりめないな (‘As expected, I really can’t read [it]…/, huh/eh?’)
(PS: I was translating the speaker’s tone of voice as well in the last two examples, so don’t mind the extra words. Also, ‘…/, huh/eh?’ was meant to translate the ‘pensiveness’ な indicates with possible exclamations in English or with the speaker’s trailing off. The ending that is chosen would depend on the speaker’s personality and emotional state at that point, but that’s really more of a novel/dialogue translation question.)

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ヘ or F

Dr. Shiratori (with a different pronunciation like Hakuchō (Swan= white bird)?) says:

500ccの点滴の中身は要するに25gブドウ糖に過ぎません (FIXED, thanks, YanagiPablo)
牛乳コップ半分程度わずか100キロカロリーの栄養分ですよ

Vocab & Analysis
  • 500ccの点滴(てんてき)⇢500 mL IV drip

  • の中身(なかみ)は⇢(whose) contents are

  • 要(よう)するに⇢"in short", adverbial phrase

  • ブドウ糖⇢glucose (literally “grape sugar”, so now I want to know where the glucose is isolated from in manufacturing!)

  • 過(か) excessive; Aに過ぎません. I would have said "not in excess of"which is "not more thanA,

  • 牛乳milk

  • コップ半分half cup serving

  • 程度amount

  • わずかonly

  • 100キロカロリー100 kilocalories

  • の栄養分ですよ; 栄養分(えいようぶん) nutrients, nutrition

A 500cc IV drip containing not more than 25g of glucose
A half cup of milk is about 100k calories of nutrients

@sansarret

Hi sansarret! Zizka introduced me to Wanikani, and I’ve been enjoying reading this manga with them on another forum, where people were rude. I did some of the Wanikani lessons, but ran out of study time so 私のレベルが低いです.

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small transcription typo, it is 過ません, from verb 過ぎる (すぎる), to exceed.

I’ll add on a few things and suggest some full-sentence translations that would fit the context. First off though,

I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by ‘with a different pronunciation’. Did someone in the manga call him はくちょう先生? If you mean to ask whether 白鳥 means both ‘white bird’ and ‘swan’… well, the answer is yes. Interesting, no? I didn’t know that either: I’ve just checked the dictionary. Both pronunciations that you mentioned (there’s also a third, しろとり, which is probably rarer) have that double meaning, but it seems はくちょう is usually used for ‘swan’, whereas しらとり is used for ‘white bird’ and as a surname.

Now for the sentence analysis. Just a few comments on what follows:

  • I prefer to think of の as an inverted ‘of’, or as an apostrophe S ('s). I know you understand what it means, but thinking of it as ‘(whose)’ may give you trouble when parsing sentences because ‘whose’ creates a subordinate clause. E.g. ‘A whose B is [adj] does C’ would make A the subject of ‘does’, whereas AのBがCをする has B as the subject of する. The ‘apostrophe S’ interpretation covers possession, as in 田中さんの車は新しいですよ!(Mr/Ms Tanaka’s car is new, you know!). The ‘inverted of’ interpretation is useful in understanding apposition, as in ‘my friend Suzie’, which would be written as 私の友達のスーズィ. It’s important to be able to differentiate the two based on context.
An example of the difference from a fantasy light novel translation

A light novel translator translated a character introduction, 星のアルベルト as ‘Albert of the Star’ (this is from the series commonly called Rokuaka aka ロクでなし魔術教師と禁忌教典 Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor). However, ‘The Star’ was his codename (they’re based on the names of tarot cards) in the Imperial Mage Corps, not his division or anything like that, so it should have been ‘Albert, The Star’.

  • 葡萄糖 is indeed glucose (the kanji were autosuggested, so I’m leaving them there, but you know how to read them anyway :slight_smile: ), but apparently it’s called ‘grape sugar’ because dextrose (the ‘right-hand’ form of glucose) is the most common sugar in grapes!

  • You missed the 濁点だくてん (the two dots indicating a voiced aka ‘muddy’ consonant). It’s 過ません. (Edit: I see @YanagiPablo has pointed this out. I’m just leaving this here in case you haven’t seen the term 濁点 and the other uses of すぎる before.) The root verb is すぎる, which can often be added after the stem of i-adjectives and na-adjectives to mean ‘too [adj]’. By the way, what’s 過(か)?

Some examples of how adjectives are combined with すぎる

E.g. 古い=old. The stem is ふる (just remove the い), so when we add すぎる, we get ふるすぎる=too old
大切な=important → 大切 → 大切すぎる=too important
It works with compound adjectives too:
かっこいい is ‘cool’. It’s made up of 格好かっこう=external appearance/posture and いい=good. The stem of いい is よ (since いい and よい are related, and even both written with kanji as 良い), so we get かっこよすぎる. You may more frequently see the adjective written as カッコいい, because katakana are often used to replace complex kanji.

  • 栄養分: Just a little literal translation of this expression. 栄養 is ‘nourishment’ or ‘nutrition’. 分 is ‘part’. So in actual fact, this means ‘the amount of nourishment/nutrition’.
  • One more thing: 程度 can also mean ‘extent’ or ‘degree’, and is often used to mean ‘about’ or ‘around’ in a comparative fashion, as is the case here.

With all that settled, what I would propose as translations:
‘A 500cc IV drip’s contents are, in short, nothing more than 25g of glucose.
It’s just 100 kilocalories’ worth of nourishment, comparable to half a cup of cow’s milk, you know?’

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I’m taking

G/ト

する ってー と 何 かい?
do called/said when what [male-question]

In that case, what?

するってーと=(そう)するというと. It’s a verbal contraction or ‘euphonic change’ according to the dictionary. ( Here’s a discussion about this expression. You may have seen という becoming って. This is essentially the same thing, but with a と added at the end, and some vowel lengthening. そうするというと is roughly (semi-literally) ‘If (we) say (we) do that’, which is to say ‘if we take it that way’ or ‘in that case’.

I believe 何 here is pronounced なに. It could also be なん, but I doubt it since なんか is transcribed without the kanji one bubble later.

かい is a masculine question particle in Japanese. Another way is to form it is to add い after だ as in ‘どうだい?’ but I believe that only works for sentences ending in だ. Women don’t use this, as far as I know. An exclusively female (I believe) question particle is かしら, which is used instead of か at the end of a sentence.

点滴 って やつ意味いみ なんか ない の かい?
IV-drip called thing [topic] meaning something-like not-exist [explanatory question] [male-question]

There's no point to (this) 'IV drip' thingy or something then?

って=という, as said above. という is an inverted ‘to-be-called’ and is made up of と, the quotation particle and いう, ‘to say’, which is written in hiragana here, and not in kanji, because it does not indicate literal speech. AというB means ‘B called A’

奴 is often also written as ヤツ. It indicates an arbitrary thing or person. That’s why I chose to translate it as ‘thingy’.

意味 literally means ‘meaning’, but it can also mean ‘point’ or ‘purpose’. After all, something that is ‘meaningless’ is usually something that is ‘pointless’, no?

なんか means ‘something like’, but as is usually the case in Japanese, it’s an ‘inverted’ version of the English phrase, and is usually placed after the noun in this sense. E.g. あなたなんか大嫌だいきらい! = I hate (people like) you! Here, なんか is used in a somewhat condescending manner, which is appropriate (but rude) since the speaker is angry. You might hear this phrase in anime or between friends having an argument in real life, with one of them walking off in a huff. (The reason I say ‘friends’ is because あなた is a form of address that indicates extreme closeness, unless it’s being used in a textbook or other document where a 2nd person pronoun is desperately needed.) It can also mean ‘kinda’, in which case it is placed before the verb, adjective or noun. E.g. なんかイヤな感じ=a kinda unpleasant feeling (いや literally means ‘disliked/undesired/causes unwillingness’).

の here is a question particle similar to か. The difference (according to my friend) is that の tends to imply a sort of expectation on the part of the speaker. どうしたの?= what’s up/what’s wrong? indicates an expectation that something really is amiss, as opposed to どうした?=what’s up/what’s going on? I believe it’s something like a contracted のです. It’s said that の is a question particle reserved for women and children (this is what Assimil claims, anyhow), but my friend’s experience (and mine on the Japanese internet) tells me that that’s not true. の as a sentence-ending particle is feminine, but that’s for ending statements, not questions. However, to make it more masculine, の can be transformed into のか at the end of a question. A general (but imprecise) rule is that in informal speech, men are expected to end their sentences in a more complete manner with words like だ or のか, whereas women can end them without those words, or with ‘softening’ particles like わ, though apparently わ isn’t heard among Japanese women in real life, even the ‘well-raised’ ones who stereotypically use it. (わ also has a non-softening use that isn’t reserved to women, and is especially common among men and women in Kansai dialects, but NVM that for now.)

In any case, in order to capture the sense of なんか (albeit imperfectly), I added ‘or something’. I added ‘then’ in an attempt to capture the expectation of の, though I doubt ‘then’ is appropriate in all circumstances, since it changes the tone of the question. Thus, I ended up with the translation above. That is all.

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While that works in most cases, sometimes it produces unnatural/hard to understand English wording.
As in 友達のスーズィ (Susie of friend ?).

I think of AのB as A being some characteristic of B. It can be possesion/belonging (“B of A”), but also can be worded otherwise (“B that is A”)
私の友達のスーズィ : Suzie, that is a friend of mine

(until I realised that I had regularly trouble with some の constructions)

what’s 過(か)?

The ON reading of the kanji… used as prefix of sino-japanese words (as opposed to すぎる being a suffix to native adjectives)
having mistyped き for ぎ, electronic recognition didn’t make the connection as only seeing “過” that is what appears.

That also is the nice thing about this collective reading excercises. Those small glitches in reading could go unnoticided if we were alone.

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It’s because it’s run from “outsiders/newcomers” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: and locals don’t want to participate for the most part.

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Finally made my way over here too! Hey all :slight_smile:
せっかくなんで「リ」の解析させてもらいますよ~/Since I’m here anyway I’ll do I!

Transcription: 脱水症状もないのに点滴を打つなんて日本だけですよ

Vocab

脱水症状(だっすいしょうじょう)dehydration; 脱水 on its own means dehydration as well, but is used for e.g. washing machines (the spin cycle) - for the medical condition, add 症状 (‘symptoms’).

点滴を打つ(てんてきをうつ)to put someone on an IV; to be put on one is 点滴を受ける/打ってもらう.

~なんて things like ~;

Translation/interpretation

“Administering an IV when you’re not even dehydrated only happens in Japan”.
Of course you don’t have to be dehydrated to get a drip - the も after 脱水症状 is there to include (or, since it’s a negative sentence, exclude) any other possible indications.
Earlier in the comic there was a frame of Saitou having an IV after a tiring shift - oh the irony.

Totally didn’t take me a embarrassingly long time to figure out the hide details thing…

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ayamadori!!! :heart::heart::heart: So glad to see you here. The party is now complete.

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Maybe I’m missing something but:

もらって(いる)んだ

How can you tell it’s the progressive if the いる is missing?

Woohoo! Apparently I still have my account from years ago so I figured why not :smile:

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You’re right, but English also provides us an analogy with expressions like ‘a wall of stone’ = ‘a stone wall’. Thus, ‘AのB’ = ‘B of A’ = ‘A B’ (sometimes). You can try it with A=stone and B=wall to see what I mean. It works with A=友達 and B=スーズィtoo: friend の Suzie = Suzie of friend = friend Suzie. That just needs to be fleshed out with the correct possessive adjective/determiner (‘my’ in ‘my friend’, for instance), and perhaps a comma. That’s what I meant when I discussed ‘apposition’ (see below). It’s the same term Assimil used to describe this use of の in their course in French: « apposition ».

Also,

Ah yes, right… as in 過去かこ. I didn’t make the connection here because I thought we were talking about 過 in すぎる. You’re right, you’re right…

@Zizka

Like I said, R sounds tend to get shortened into ん in informal Japanese. It would probably look like もらってんんだ if we wrote everything, but no one doubles ん. That’s how you guess. However, why does it have to be the progressive? That’s because what precedes のだ has to be a complete sentence ending with a verb in a terminal form (usually the dictionary/plain form) or a copula (i.e. something that means ‘to be’). The て-form is a connective form. The sentence would be incomplete without it. To understand this through an analogy, you can try to replace の with こと as a nominaliser. Grammatically, こと cannot be preceded by a て-form. It has to be preceded by a terminal form, which is to say something ending in -u.

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it’s not uncommon for R sounds to turn into ん in informal Japanese

Ok but in your example below, の→ん. の isn’t a “r” sound.

I don’t understand the progression.

① やっているのだ
② やっている→やってる this is the part where the い disappears. Is this common in Japanese? It’s slang?

Please vulgarise as much as possible, it’s hard to take in for me with the grammatical terminology :disappointed_relieved:.

Edit:

It would probably look like もらってんんだ if we wrote everything, but no one doubles ん

Ah ok, so the ん(ん) substitutes two sounds then, not just one.

By terminal form you mean dictionary form?
Yes, the terminal form is the same as the dictionary form

So all of the らりるれろ often get replaced by a single ん in informal Japanese?

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Hey, don’t be “the outsiders”, the community is very warm and welcoming. As for newcomers, I’m the one (no Japanese before WaniKani), so I cannot participate here because I cannot read on that level.

There are several well-established book clubs, and one of them is reading ゆるキャン right now:
main thread

weekly thread

and there is a shared google spreadsheet with vocabulary which is filled by comminuty, and superhelpful for novices like me, since that’s my first manga without firigana.

You are doing your own version of bookclub, with daily threads.
I’d say create the main thread to link your dailies, and get it added to

as spin-off or one-time or whatever buzzword will fit.

Finally, where are my manners: WELCOME TO WANIKANI FORUMS!

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Maybe the same way than in 「食べないで(ください)」?

It’s the first time I see such a missing いる; but yet I have not much exposure to spoken Japanese at all.

How are the two related? I can’t understand , you’d need to elaborate more.