ドラゴンボールSD (Dragon Ball SD) · Volume 1 Discussion 🐉

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

Volume 1 discussion thread

Start date: 31st October

ドラゴンボールSD 第1巻
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Absolute Beginners Book Club

Schedule

Start date Chapter Page numbers Page count
31 Oct 1 - ブルマと悟空とドラゴンボール 2-9 8
7 Nov 1 - ブルマと悟空とドラゴンボール 10-17 8
14 Nov 1 - ブルマと悟空とドラゴンボール 18-24 7
21 Nov 2 - 変身妖怪ウーロン 25-31 7
28 Nov 2 - 変身妖怪ウーロン 32-37 6
5 Dec 2 - 変身妖怪ウーロン 38-44 7
12 Dec 3 - 荒野の狼ヤムチャ 45-64 20
19 Dec 4 - フライパン山の牛魔王 65-84 20
26 Dec 5 - 神龍あらわる! 85-104 20
2 Jan 6 - 悟空の大変身 105-124 20
9 Jan 7 - ぴちぴちギャルを探せ‼ 125-144 20
16 Jan 8 - 修行開始‼ 145-164 20
23 Jan 9 - 天下一武道会開幕‼ 165-183 19
30 Jan Bonus 184-188 5

Vocabulary list

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Discussion guidelines

  • Please don’t hesitate to ask questions, even if you think it’s a silly question. Helping each other learn is what book clubs are all about! :slight_smile:
  • When asking for help, please include the page number. This makes it easier for others to help you and it makes the information in this thread more searchable.
  • Please blur out major events in the current week’s pages and any content from later in the book/series by using spoiler tags: [spoiler]text here[/spoiler].
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Welcome everyone! For those of you who are new to WK book clubs I’ll explain how these book clubs typically work.

We read a set number of pages every week. This week we will read pages 2 to 9. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in this thread. You’re not just helping yourself by asking questions, but also helping other people realise whether they truly understand something or not. So don’t hold back :slight_smile:

Since this thread is for the entire first chapter we will use it for 3 weeks. Depending on the number of posts I’ll either make a new thread for chapter 2 or we’ll continue using this one. Please keep the schedule in mind when asking questions; it’s fine to ask questions about pages from earlier weeks, but please save your questions about future pages for the week they’re scheduled.

If this is your first real Japanese book you may feel a bit overwhelmed. That is completely normal; real Japanese texts don’t stick neatly to N5/N4/etc. It gets a lot easier with practice, however, so I would encourage you not to give up. Here are a few tips:

  • ichi.moe is a great site for looking up vocab. It automatically separates the different words in a sentence. It doesn’t recognise grammar points or proper names, but it is a great start.

  • I like looking up grammar points on bunpro.jp. Their search function makes it pretty easy. A free account gives you access to search, grammar breaksdowns and reference links.

  • deepl.com is a pretty good online translator that you can use to check if you got the general gist of a sentence. It won’t always be correct, but you can usually tell when it isn’t.

  • You will come across colloquial language that textbooks don’t teach. Here is a list of common contractions. You will also come across some vowel changes, for example すげえ instead of すごい. I have added these to the vocab list in the Notes field. After a while you’ll start recognising them yourself.

For pages 2 and 3 specifically, I would encourage you to become familiar with relative clauses (a sentence modifying a noun). Here is a helpful explainer.

頑張りましょう！

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Thanks for kicking us off Phryne. A fun first few pages.

Page 2: The non-Wanikani kanji 叶, which was part of the main character’s name in レンタルおにいちゃん, appears on the first page in this book in the word 叶える - “to grant”.

Page 9: There is more information about the red thread of fate on Wikipedia:

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Uhhh count me in!

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I started last week very slowly as I realise it’s gonna be a challenge at my lowly level. But…Just had a look at my first ever WK book club vocab list :heart_eyes: Woo yeah! So hello and thank you. You had me hooked at 相棒 :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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I’m with you. Definitely going to be hard at a low level, but we’ll figure it out somehow! Usually have Sun/Mon/Tues off of work, so I’m probably going to run the vocab through Kitsun for my work week, and then hopefully should have a better grip on the words being used when I read and just need to find out HOW they’re used. :sweat_smile: (That and all the other words/grammar not included with the vocab!)

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Feel free to ask any questions you may have regarding grammar, I’ll be sure to be doing that!

In my case, I’ll ask about these lines:

Bulma, at the beginning of page 9, second bubble:
食べきれないほどのイチゴっていうのもすてがたいけどやっぱり
ステキな恋人 赤糸で結ばれた運命の人

My translation:

Summary

The way I breakup the sentence is:
食べきれない = more than one can eat
ほどの = extent of
イチゴ = strawberries
っていう= it is said, quotation
の = turns the previous sentence into a noun
も = ??
すて= to throw away, to discard, to give up
がたい = difficult to
けど = but
やっぱり = also, even so
ステキな = great
恋人 = lover
赤糸で結ばれた = to be tied together by red thread = to be married
運命の人 = person of fate

All put together would be:
It is more than I can eat amounts of strawberries, discard that (difficultly) but even so a destiny person I marry a great lover.

Then I try to interpret that into something that actually makes sense in my head as:
(My wish is (from the previous bubble)) More strawberries than I can eat. Actually discard that, to marry a great lover I am destined to.

Final speech bubble by Bulma on page 9: いいのいいの最後にちょっとだけかしてくれれば

I believe I have an okay understanding of each individiual component of the sentence, but not so much when put together. This is what my rough guess is:

Summary

いい = good
の = emphasis
いいの = same as before
最後に = latest, most recent, no sooner than, once, right after (ichi moe giving me the last translations)
ちょっと = a bit
だけ = merely, just
か = turns the previous statement in a question to comment on
してくれれば = if you do for me
All together:
good, good, latest a bit just if you do - which, into more natural English:
It’s alright, it’s alright, if you do it for me, it’ll be just for a bit.

I do get the meaning the sentence it’s trying to convey, I just can’t seem to translate it in my head into something that makes sense. Or like, I do, but I feel like I’m doing a big leap betweent the first step translation and grammatical English translation.

It looks like in both cases, even though I get what the sentence is trying to tell, I can’t seem to put it together into a grammatical English sentence.

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Yeah, I found that one tricky as well.

This is what I made of it.

食べきれないほどのイチゴ
‘strawberries of a more than one can eat extent’
➝ more strawberries than one can eat

っていうの
This grammar point, I think. You’ll see in the example sentences that you often wouldn’t really translate it in its own right.

も
The particle, can be used to emphasise the largeness of something: ‘as much as’.

すてがたい
This grammar point, ‘difficult to throw away’.

And then for the rest of the sentence I think she leaves out a verb like “I should ask”.

食べきれないほどのイチゴっていうのもすてがたいけど
As much as ‘all you can eat’ strawberries is hard to say no to, but …

やっぱり「ステキな恋人」 「赤糸で結ばれた運命の人」
I should nevertheless [ask] “a great lover!”, “a person of fate bound [to me] by a red thread”.

And then I guess これよね is an emphatic afterthought? Like “that’s [what I should ask]”.

My thoughts

いいの I read as a dismissive ‘yeah yeah, sure’.

最後 means ‘end’, so 最後に would be ‘at the end’. She means when they have the other Dragon Balls and they are ready to summon the dragon, only then will she ask to borrow it ちょっとだけ, only for a little while.

かして is one word, from 貸す, ‘to lend’. So 貸してくれる would be more or less ‘lend to me’.

As for the ば-form being used, it’s not meant as a pure conditional (‘if you lend it to me’), but more as a request: she is leaving out いい, so ‘it’d be good if you lent it to me’.

いいのいいの最後にちょっとだけかしてくれれば
Sure, sure, you just need to lend it to me for a little moment at the end.

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Thanks for that explanation!

It’s true that a verb like “ask” must be omitted. I wasn’t aware of the use of the も particle in that way.

最後に as “at the end” and 貸してくれる as “lend to me”. Make the sentence very clear!

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Week 2 is upon us!

Start date: 7th November
Pages: 10-17

How is the reading going?
  • I am reading along :dragon:
  • I am catching up :muscle:t2:
  • I am dropping this book :person_gesturing_no:t3:

0 voters

I’ve noticed that there has not been a lot of discussion. I hope that is because everyone has found the first few pages very doable. If that is not the case for you, please feel free to ask questions about pages 2-17! :slight_smile:

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Finally, I had to dig for this thread. I’m way ahead but will go back through. Yay!

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I’m definitely a little bit behind. :sweat_smile: I read the first sentence with the character introductions and it seemed way above my level so I kinda stopped for the week. Just looked ahead to the actual panels today, and they definitely seem a whole lot easier to comprehend, so I’m giving things another shot! Also went back to that first sentence, and it makes a bit more sense now, especially after having dabbled a little bit with te form.

I’m still a little mystified by one thing though…

山奥に住んでいるシッポの生えた少年

Why does this sentence end with a noun? It makes more sense in my head if it was flipped around to be 山奥にシッポの生えた少年が住んでいる. I think that maybe I just don’t understand the grammar for シッポの生えた少年.

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It’s a description of Goku, he is descibed as a 少年. The other two verbs form relative clauses:

山奥に住んでいる
living in the mountains

シッポの生えた
a tail grew (note: が can be replaced by の in a relative clause).

So he is a living-in-the-mountains a-tail-grew boy ➝ a boy who lives in the mountains with a tail.

You’ll see this pattern a lot on pages 2 and 3.

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Thank you! This is what I was missing! I didn’t know how to describe the phrase in English, but now I’ve got a way to look up more example sentences and grammar notes. :slight_smile: I’ve been out of school (particularly English class) for a while, so I don’t remember a lot of grammar terms… :sweat_smile: It’s kind of funny that Japanese grammar is filling in some gaps in my English grammar knowledge in a way.

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This is fun! I love the section jumping on Kintoun. I like the flashes to characters who wouldn’t have appeared for a very long time in the original manga.

Bottom of page 11 - ちょっと！へんなことさわらないでよっ！
I assume this is Bulma talking? Perhaps saying something like “Don’t touch me strangely”

Page 16
Any thoughts on what ぬわんですって means?

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とこ, so I think it’s “don’t touch me in strange places!”?

After some digging I ended up with an explanation that ぬわん is a joking way of saying なん. I am not sure if the joking part fits in here (maybe it’s more of an exaggerated なん here), but なん itself definitely fits the context.

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Thank you. “Don’t touch strange places” makes sense - we know Goku is going to be doing a bit of that in his early days to girls!

何 definitely makes sense in context. I was looking at the verb ぬう which didn’t make sense at all!

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Week 3 is here!

Start date: 14th November
Pages: 18-24

How is the reading going?
  • I am reading along :dragon:
  • I am catching up :muscle:t2:
  • I am dropping this book :person_gesturing_no:t3:

0 voters

At this rate of discussion, I think we might as well do the whole volume in one thread. Keep it all together in one place :slight_smile:

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This is the first book I have read with a lot of dialect and I feel like I’m processing some of it ok. Other stuff, yikes I have to think about.

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I managed to catch up to the end of the chapter.
I’m having trouble understanding all the elements of this sentence (p. 18), though I believe I have a grasp of its meaning:

くっくっくっちょうどいいことに4つめのドラゴンボールまでそろっておるではないか

Sentence breakup

くっくっくっ : Jaded network says this could be laughter onomatopoeia
ちょうどいいことに : exactly right → to the thing of exactly right (? maybe こと is referencing the question Bulma asks in the previous panel?)
4つめの : ichimoe seems to have trouble with this one, I think it’s mixing the counter つ with whatever め is supposed to be.
ドラゴンボールまで : up to, ichi moe also says it can mean only, merely → up to the dragon balls
そろっておる : here, to gather, to assemble, not sure about おる.
ではないか : ichi moe suggests this could be isn’t it

All together:

Hahaha, that’s exactly right, I have gathered up to 4 dragon balls, isn’t it!

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