夏目友人帳 - Natsume’s Book of Friends: Chapter 1 Discussion

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夏目友人帳 Chapter 1

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Start Date: October 13th
Next Chapter: Chapter 2

Vocabulary List

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for content that would be considered a spoiler.
  • When asking for help, please mention the page, panel, and speech bubble.
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun! :durtle_the_explorer:

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Wheeeeeee! Excited for tomorrow :blush:

I’ve already got some vocab I can add in tonight, which might help people starting tomorrow

@Leilaure you might want to cross-link to your questions from yesterday here ^^

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I’m gonna go ahead post I guess because I already hit a bit of a wall and it killed my motivation a bit but I’m slow enough as it is since I haven’t read much before this. That and I’m really trying to avoid google translate, but my dictionary doesn’t have the kanji/words in it. (Also it’s pretty much Saturday here so might as well begin)

Page 8:
panel 3: “その薮をぬけた所にあったような気が”
I believe it’s something about the shrine Natsume’s looking for being “over there” but a few of the words have me stumped. Especially the kanji 薮（やぶ）

And then the first speech bubble in panel five has a few more kanji I don’t recognize. The line “愛想はいいがちょっと近づき難いかんじだな”

Kanji: 薮 ; 愛想 ; 難い

I can’t currently access the google docs, but I can try to add the kanji in later.

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I can’t copy the kanji because they’re in spoiler tags. :sweat_smile:

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Quote them and copy from the quote. :wink:

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I added them into my post not under a spoiler tag ;;

Can you tell I don’t do these forum things often lmao

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You’re fine, I wish we could copy from spoilers :see_no_evil:

I don’t think questions like that are necessarily spoiler-y, so it’d be fine to leave the tags off, or you could collapse everything under a details section!

You can do that by clicking here:
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Or you can do it manually by typing the tags like so:

[details]
insert words here
[/details]

And then it’d look like this:

Summary

Hi send help :durtle_the_explorer:

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You can. Sort of. As long as you copy some text surrounding the spoilered text, it should copy the entire spoilered text too. That was the extent that Discourse caved when I requested the ability to copy spoilered text. They said not being able to copy it was a feature. :unamused:

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面白い ! Didn’t know that :o

That’s useful then as long as someone’s post isn’t only spoilered text :laughing:

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You might want to get an offline dictionary app for your phone so you can still look stuff up when you have no internet access or otherwise can’t access the spreadsheet. Because all three of those words are in the dictionary on my phone.

I use Midori for iOS.

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That’s kinda weird behavior. You could always just inspect the element and copy it from there. :thinking:

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Not on my phone I can’t. :wink:

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Yayyyyy! Excited for this!
So here are my first questions, with the full sentence added as context:

On page 8, 3rd speech bubble, I’m having a parsing/meaning problem… Is it それより one word as in “apart from just what just happened, is there a shinto shrine nearby?” or それ and より as two different words, in which case I’m guessing it would be more along the line of “where’s the closest shrine in the neighborhood?”…

Full sentence: それより近くに神社ってないか？

Same page, speech bubble 5, I’m guessing the full expression would be ような気がする, and Natsume cuts him mid-sentence… Or does the suru get dropped in casual speech?

Full sentence:その藪をぬけた所にあったような気が。。。

Same page, speech bubble 10, I understand the gist of the sentence though not really how it works grammatically, especially the かんじだな part… Is that one word/compound word? Not even sure how to parse it…

Full sentence: 愛想はいいがちょっとちかづき難いかんじだな

@fandomslight
Hi there! Not sure about the meaning of the first sentence you posted either, though I do know that the Kanji means “bush, shrubbery”. I recommend using Houhou for kanji/vocab search, it’s been invaluable to me.
If I’d have to give a guess at the translation, he’s under the impression that there was a “missing place” in that bush??? Not sure I’m getting this right…

Second sentence, the first kanji means “fellow, guy”, as in “this guy is nice but…”. Second means “difficult, hard”. I’ll let you figure out the meaning :slight_smile:

EDIT: oops, sorry, didn’t see those kanjis had already been added into the vocab file… Still got to get the hang of this!

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I also struggled with this sentence. What I came up with is:

愛想はいい「です」が、ちょっと近づき難いかんじだな
As in, “He’s friendly (has good manners) but seems difficult to approach (inaccessible)”? As in, they don’t dislike him but find it difficult to get close to him.

I think かんじ can be used like the English “feel”, “vibe”, “kind of thing”?

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Yeah I understood the meaning, was just unable to find a meaning for that かんじ part… I’ll go with yours :slight_smile:

Anyone has suggestions for that “bush” sentence?

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I mean, I’m guessing as well :sweat_smile:
Weblio has an example sentence どんな感じですか translated as “What is it like?”, so I think our sentence can be read as a response to that question (“What is he like? He’s like that” kind of thing)

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@zuzu Makes me feel better that we’re all guessing at this point lol :):sweat_smile:

Also, thank you so much @Radish8 for all that vocab, it’s going to save me a ton of time and I’m grateful since I have none :slight_smile:

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Page 10!!

So 妖怪 has two different readings within the same page. The first is ようかい in the third speech bubble on the left side of the page, and then on the bottom the same kanji pops up but now it’s read as やつ.

I believe it still means Youkai from my poor translation skills, but can someone possibly explain if there’s a reason behind the reading change?

Also that whole speech bubble has me really confused and if someone else has a better translation of the line " もともとあまりいい気はしていなかつたが最近はなぜかやたらと絡んでくる妖怪がいる" I am desperate to hear it. Thanks to the google docs I know it has something to do with the youkai picking fights more recklessly than before, but I’m kind of stuck on the translation as a whole.

Other than that I made it to about page 13 without too many other struggles! Trying to space out my reading so I don’t get too overwhelmed. Plus it’s taking me a couple hours to get through as much as I did.

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From context clues and asking my supervisor at work I got something along the lines of:

“There was a place like that through that bush[those bushes].” Where “place like that” refers to the 神社

Since Natsume is looking for a shrine to protect him from the youkai chasing him, he asks them about where he can find one, and I believe that’s the best way to word the response but hey I could still be wrong.

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I was interested in that construction, so I did some more digging. According to Weblio 私の家はこの森を抜けた所にあります translates simply as “My house is just past these woods.”

Anyone can chip in on the subject of ような気が。。。?