時をかける少女: Week 1 Discussion (Chapter 1)

Do we have a date to start reading chapter 2 yet? I want to try to ask any lingering questions I have before we all move on

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Tomorrow! (1st of December)

If you check the OP of the home thread, there’s a schedule. Though we’ll be voting in week 6 on whether to speed up or not.

But you can still ask questions here after that date. I asked some questions on an old Aria thread and seanblue hasn’t kicked me out yet :wink:

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New chapters every week. I’m going to create the week 2 thread in the next couple hours (I always make them my Friday night so people in Japan/Australia area have it Saturday morning).

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Oh, and just to add, it’s never too late to ask more questions. Feel free to ask chapter 1 questions weeks from now if you’re so inclined. You’ll usually still get an answer, even if it is a bit delayed.

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I mean, I’d probably have more reason to worry, with how I asked a question in the chapter 2 thread for 魔女の宅急便 when we nearly were done reading aria.(At least I think that would be a longer amount of time?)

(I’m not actually worried though)

(I feel like I’m overusing the parentheses)

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Chapter 2 is here!

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Yesterday I could finish in time. I am not looking at all the details for now, since I still miss some grammar studies, but I could get the sense of the story and sometimes guess words I didn’t know from the context :slight_smile:

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Sorry for being so late to the party, I’m just about to catch up ^^

I was wondering, isn’t that sentence actually grouped like this:

(あまり気持のよくない) ものばかりなのである.

I.e. not really pleasant things? (instead of many unpleasant things)
In total: There were only things that had a rather bad feeling to them.

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both are fine. it’s a lab, and there’s both a lot of things that feel unpleasant, and those things there don’t feel very pleasant :wink:

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What else would あまり refer to if not to よくない

I think nothing else makes sense.

yeah, did i say something different? :smiley:

あまり not much/many
気持のよくないもの things that feel bad
ばかり nothing but / all around
なのである. because.

because there were lots of things that didn’t feel good / felt bad.

there, my original reply.

Yeah, I agree with your interpretation too.

Way late to the party, but I think さむざむしい is more specifically “bleak” or “dreary” rather than just cold.

I also feel like I remember being told that when two な-adjectives are joined together, the first often loosely implies the cause or explanation of the second, or the second sort of follows logically on (like “the place was pretty and popular” - you can infer that ‘pretty’ sort of explains ‘popular’). I’d guess this comes from the usual ‘by way of’ implication of で, but with a quick search I can’t find anything to back me up, so you should probably ignore these ramblings :wink:


Also just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has asked or answered questions on this thread. I was able to read up on Friday, and then going through this thread today basically answered all the questions I had / made some things much more clear :blush: (special thanks to @xarde for asking about the mysterious small bird :joy: )

Gotta say, the convoluted sentences about doors, screens and the locations of all these did give me a small headache :sweat_smile: but it was a pretty excitingly mysterious start to the book!

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Oh wait, where did this come from? I think I need this in slo-mo again:

なにか叫びつづけて - continuing to scream something
いなければ - if she wouldn’t (ば is hypothetical so we know that the not-screaming did not happen in reality)
こわさのあまり - excess of fear
気を失ってしまい - to drop unconscious (unfortunately)
そうだった - seems like, looks like

So how could you figure out that she “would have fainted” instead of “she actually fainted”? Is this still the effect of ~ば (because we know that the if-part is hypothetical, so the then-part must be hypothetical as well)?

The next confusion for me in this sentence: Does そう have anything to do with understanding that the fainting is only hypothetical? I initially thought it only belonged to the dropping-unconscious, but maybe it actually refers to the whole sentence: “She looked like she would drop unconscious if she hadn’t kept shouting something”? If so, how can I know the scope of そう?

Or is it just the other way around: Only because we know it is hypothetical, we can actually add そう because otherwise we would simply report the fact (that she dropped unconscious) and there wouldn’t be any need for speculation?

Send hälp plz!

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Yep! I’m not sure thinking of なければ as “indicating the preceding is hypothetical” is the most useful approach :thinking: if you think of it more like “if she didn’t…” then the rest of the sentence follows as the logical consequence: “if no scream > faint”

I think you’ve gotten into more of a tangle than necessary with そう. It does indeed mean “it felt like she would faint if she didn’t keep screaming”. You’re right in thinking the sentence wouldn’t make sense with そう if she actually had fainted (unless someone was observing, perhaps, and speculating that it looked like she had fainted :thinking:).

The そう applies to the fainting, as you thought: it seemed like she would faint. Within the whole sentence, this becomes “if she didn’t keep screaming, it seemed like she would faint”.

I really hope I didn’t get anything wrong…

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Thanks very much, that helped clear it up!

Now on to chapter 2 :slight_smile:

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No problem! Glad it was helpful D:

Heehee, same :blush: literally just started it.

Besides the そう, she was also yelling things the whole time, so I interpreted it as an explanation for why she continued to yell things even though there was no response

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More examples of ~そう available here:

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I’m all caught up with this chapter now and moving on to the second one (I was swamped last week). I like the story so far, and the author’s style of writing in general. I think this is about the level I needed for some more challenging reading practice.

The section I had the most trouble with was probably when it was describing the door layout with the 理科教室 and 理科実験室. For some reason I thought it was trying to describe something deeper there (especially with Kazuko opening the door and going おや). :sweat_smile:

It’s great reading through the questions and responses here too - it’s definitely helped in my comprehension of sentences that I was less clear on.

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Well this is late

There’s one grammar unfamiliar grammar point that stuck with me from this chapter that I wanted to confirm.

一夫かずおは、あいかわらずぼんやりした自分じぶんより二十センチひく五郎ごろうおろした。

From the context, I assume that 「自分じぶんより二十センチひくい」 means “20 centimeters shorter than himself.”

Does 「AよりBはC」 mean “B more C than A”? Also I’m assuming that it’s the topic particle wa.

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