よつばと! Vol 3 Discussion Thread (Yotsuba&! Reading Club)

Brilliant, just brilliant!
Thank you so much @Belthazar! Much, much, appreciated! Thank you!

Page 35

So Asagi is asking Yotsuba which fireworks she likes best and then says:
せんこうはなびはさいごだな!?
It looks to me, based on the wonderful vocab list (thank you again so much!), like she is saying:
“The sparklers were last, you know?”
But what does this “last” mean?
One definition of さいご in Jisho is latest or most recent.
Is Asagi saying that this is the most recent, newest, kind of firework to be released?​

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I think, from reading on, that you are supposed to save them for last. Or that they are Yotsuba’s least favourite.

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Saving them for last! Of course! Now you say it, it’s obvious! Thank you @Chellykins!
(I read だ all wrong! Silly me! She’s saying “The sparklers are last, you know?” Not were!)

Yotsuba is the one saying that they are saved for last, to which Asagi responds 良く知ってるね~
So she’s also impressed that Yotsuba knows that much about fireworks, probably from TV shows or something. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Speaking of the sparklers, I wonder if Yotsuba has misunderstood Ena’s instruction in the last panel of page 44. Ena tells her じっとするの = “you have to stay completely still”. But from her response in the second panel of page 45, I wonder if she’s understood it as "You have to go ‘jiiii’ "

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LOL! Yes, brilliant! (So Yotsuba thinks と is the quoting particle?) Nice reading!

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じー is supposed to be an onomatopoeia associated with “staring”, right? No wonder Yotsuba’s sparkler still went out!

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you can buy fireworks like that in almost every supermarket/convenience store during the summer months!

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I go camping a lot in summer and seems like a lot of families break them out then! I also live kinda inaka and have seen families using them on summer nights. Maybe it’s less common in cities? (if thats where you live) I buy them and let them off on the beach every year! It’s so exciting because in Australia (where I’m from) they are totally illegal.

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Can confirm. Literally the only kind of firework we can buy here is sparklers. The western-style ones, that is, not 線香花火.

Edit: Oh, there’s a Wikipedia article on 線香花火 too, which explains why you have to say “jiii” while using them:

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In my area there’s only a chime at 7am & 6pm, no regular announcement. Occasionally in the mornings there will be an announcement such as “it’s weeding/clean up day, meet in the park at 8am”/“tonight from 6pm will be the bon odori matsuri”/“~san passed away. the funeral will be today at ~” etc. there is a speaker right outside my house, love those sunday 7am wake up calls to go clean or something -__- so i guess to answer your question, it differs from area to area. Once I was in Okinawa and the morning announcement was at 6:30am and accompanied with radio taiso!

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Page 16

Is it okay if I go all the way back to page 16 for a moment? I was reading this again this morning, with my mate who’s just moved to Japan, and we couldn’t work this one out.

In that brilliant dialogue when Yotsuba first meets Torako she says: かっこいいなおまえ!きにいりました!which I put down as “Cool? You! How’s that working out for you?!”

こっこいい - cool
な - ???
おまえ - you (slang)
気に入る - be pleased with (thank you WK!!)
ーました - (past of above)

My question is - - what is that な?

かっこいい is an い-adjective right? So no need for a な there. Any ideas?

Nuh-uh, this is a side-scrolling level. Once you pass a page, you can’t go back. :stuck_out_tongue:

In all seriousness, though, this is yet another case of the casual-form sentence order [main clause] + [sentence enders] + [topic]. This is お前はかっこいいな, but with the お前 shifted to the end and the は dropped.

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Wow, I’d never have got to that! Thank you so much @Belthazar! You’re a star!

This chapter. :exploding_head:

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What kind of Infinite Improbability Drive were they running when they went out to buy flowers, and Yotsuba just happened to jump on a bus, then just happened to see Jumbo from the window, who just happened to turn out to be a florist? :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, I didn’t really have any major issues this chapter, so I’m gonna address some of the ones from the cheat sheets:

Page 54:
そっち
Close to listener, not close to speaker. And yes, it’s absolutely normal to use “this” and “that” language for things that aren’t physically present - in this case, そっち refers to what Yotsuba just said.

一人
Pretty sure the usage here is “one person”, as in “you’ve only got one grandmother” - which is to say, Koiwai’s mother - to contrast with Fuuka having two grandmothers (二人).

Note on わかった - (No, we didn’t. :D)
You didn’t? Seems pretty self-explanatory - the grandmother who is her mother’s mother is the person they’ll be visiting tomorrow, while the grandmother who is her father’s mother is the one who is deceased. :stuck_out_tongue:

Page 60:
乗らなきゃ and だめ
These two lines are one expression - 乗らなければだめ = You have to ride (with an adult)

買っちゃう
There’s some sort of contraction going here, but I’m not sure what. Ordinarily, that’d be 買ってしまう, but I don’t get the relevance of しまう here.

Page 66:
コイとこの
It’s got nothing to do with Koiwai. This is another one of those lines where I can get the meaning, but can’t work out the exact words - specifically, the meaning is “I’m about to rebut what you just said, so you’d better listen up”.

Page 68:
キーパー
I’m about 95% sure the keeper is the thing that features prominently on the next page - it’s a kind of climate-controlled area that holds the flowers in a desired state. I’m not a florist, though, so I don’t know anything more specific than that.

いる
The trick to tell the difference between the いる of existence and the いる of need is that the former is a る-verb while the latter is an う-verb.

Page 70:
入っちゃ
This is short for 入ってはいけない = don’t go in there

Page 71:
しっかり
Pretty sure the meaning being used here is “shrewd”.

Page 73:
持っていけ
I already changed this on the sheet, but 持っていく in its entirely is an expression meaning “take something (somewhere)”

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Nice reference.
Taking into account that they were on their way to buy flowers, probably going to an area with several stores.
That bus probably was going that way as well. Still, the part about Jumbo was indeed surprising.

Isn’t ってしまう also “to do completely; to finish?”. Like a hard stance on, “We’re buying them here.”

Isn’t this just, 入っては? Since she says: だめだめ、入っちゃ
So it’s just rearranging 入っちゃダメ, right?

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Does しまう work like that, though? And is there a sense of firm decision going on?

Or reinforcement. だめだめ、はいっちゃだめ - “No, no, don’t go in there”

Hm… I think Fuuka had a plan of where to buy the flowers but spontaneously switched after Yotsuba’s recommendation. Maybe that’s why? “Let’s just buy them here (who cares about the consequences).”

Also, the meaning of the last part is much clearer once you realize that やっばそう refers to bad flowers… If they’re giving away the flowers that are going to go bad soon (and would be thrown away anyway), then it makes much more sense to give them to Yotsuba who’ll be very happy.

That said, I don’t understand their motivation. Flowers are still expensive; they have to be losing money by giving all these flowers away.

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