ポケットモンスタースペシャル discussion (Beginner) June 2024

[Asher]

Hi Everyone!

This is the official thread for the book we will be reading as of the 17th of June 2024.

ポケットモンスタースペシャル, Volume 1 (Manga)

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Pace

See bottom of post.

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General Rules

For a full list of rules, please refer to the book club rules post. However, we would like to reiterate a few things regarding individual books. Please keep the following in mind in this discussion thread.

Keep discussion related to the target series.

You may of course make comparisons between grammar or vocabulary usages between series, but for the most part try to keep discussion related to the unique challenges that each book or series of books presents.

Search the threads for users that have perhaps previously asked the same question as you.

Each book will have its own thread, so if you follow the same pacing as the group, it is likely that a simple search will result in finding someone having asked the same question as you are about to ask. In addition to this, if you jump into a book late, it is expected that you would search the thread history before asking questions about content most participants have already past.

When asking questions, give as much detail as possible.

For example, if you include the page number, who is speaking, which speech balloon (in the case of manga), and explain what you want to know more about, that will be far easier for other users to answer rather than just asking ‘What does てっきり mean?’
Taking a screenshot and highlighting the portion you’re asking about would also be suitable.

Be polite! Not everyone is the same level.

Just because something is easy for you does not mean that it is easy for someone else. Let’s be thankful to those that answer our questions, and thankful also for the opportunity to help others that aren’t quite at the same level as us yet.

Keep questions in line with the pacing.

We know that some of you may want to surge ahead of the group if you are really enjoying a book. However, this can result in confusion if you are asking questions about things that people haven’t read yet. If this applies to you. Make a note of the question you want to ask, wait until the group has caught up, then ask the question

Be mindful of spoilers.

If you are asking a question about something that includes spoilers to the story, please be aware of this and let users know with a ‘SPOILER’ tag at the beginning of your question. Hiding the question by utilizing the Hide Details function of the forums would also be appreciated. Let’s allow everyone to enjoy the experience of reading spoiler free.

Let’s all have fun and create a positive learning environment together!

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Ongoing ポケットモンスター

Once we have finished reading the first volume, this thread will act as a legacy thread for the ポケットモンスタースペシャル series as a whole. We will be taking this approach with all other series as well. One thread, one series.

After the main group has finished the first volume, feel free to continue discussing and reading through any further volumes together! Also, feel free to revive dormant threads at any time if you’re reading a book that the book clubs have already read, but that you want to read as well and ask people questions about.

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Vocab Deck

Click here for our - ポケットモンスタースペシャル vocab deck!

With all manga decks, please feel free to message @Haru if you notice any missing words, as she is in charge of putting them together!

Please read here for info about our vocab decks and their future development.

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Okay, hope you’re all set to go! Looking forward to seeing the interesting things that everybody finds as they go through the book!

Here is a rough pace guide, assuming that we read one chapter each week. It may be better to aim for chapters rather than pages with manga, as it’s something easier to keep track of for everyone.

Week	Start and End Dates	Chapter(s)	Page Count
Week 1	6/17/2024 - 6/23/2024	Chapter 1	5 to 18
Week 2	6/24/2024 - 6/30/2024	Chapter 2	19 to 32
Week 3	7/1/2024 - 7/7/2024	Chapter 3	33 to 46
Week 4	7/8/2024 - 7/14/2024	Chapter 4	47 to 60
Week 5	7/15/2024 - 7/21/2024	Chapter 5	61 to 74
Week 6	7/22/2024 - 7/28/2024	Chapter 6	75 to 88
Week 7	7/29/2024 - 8/4/2024	Chapter 7	89 to 102
Week 8	8/5/2024 - 8/11/2024	Chapter 8	103 to 116
Week 9	8/12/2024 - 8/18/2024	Chapter 9	117 to 130
Week 10	8/19/2024 - 8/25/2024	Chapter 10	131 to 144
Week 11	8/26/2024 - 9/1/2024	Chapter 11	145 to 158
Week 12	9/2/2024 - 9/8/2024	Chapter 12	159 to 172
Week 13	9/9/2024 - 9/15/2024	Chapter 13	173 to 186
Week 14	9/16/2024 - 9/22/2024	Chapter 14	187 to finish

Note that this is just the physical page count, and does not take into consideration empty pages, or pages with little to no dialogue.

[Neon_Kitsune]

Yay! Excited to read this with everyone! I’ve read the series in English up to the XY chapters, so I’m looking forward to experiencing it in Japanese! It’s just about my favorite way to experience the Pokémon world.

For those not familiar with Pokémon in general, don’t worry if you’ve never played the original Red/Blue or any of the other games. While Pokémon Special loosely follows the games, it kinda does its own thing so playing the games isn’t strictly necessary.

If you’ve played the games but not read the manga, get ready for Special’s interpretation of the Pokémon world! While it does incorporates game mechanics such as levels, the four move limit, and natures (once it hits 3rd gen), there’s a lot of differences between the game world and manga world. (Kinda like how the games and anime are different) Be prepared for some major character differences! Also, this Red talks! And finally, the rival is Green ( グリーン), not Blue! (Blue is the girl, also known as Green in English.)

Let’s have fun reading together!

[Marifly]

I’m a level 50 Pokemon go player. Have never read or watched Pokemon and never played any Pokemon game other than Go. Needless to say, I often feel lost when playing go, since I don’t know anything about the back story. It will be fun to learn more about the Pokemon universe!

[Gacee]

Looking forward to reading this - played the games a lot when I was younger but have sort of fallen out of love with them. I bet my little brothers will think I’m pretty cool for reading pokemon in japanese

[Florance]

This is the first time I managed to catch a book club so I’m excited to read with the group. I’ve always been curious about Pokemon but haven’t watched anything besides a few episodes of the anime when I was in elementary school.

[Zenyth]

Missed the last book club, but very excited for this one! The Pokemon franchise is what got me started learning Japanese when I was a kid and the English version of Special was one of the first manga I ever read so this feels like coming full circle. Can’t wait to get started.

[Gacee]

And thus it begins! I think I’m just going to make one post for each chapter and edit it each day as I read so I’m not spamming the thread. Looks like we start with a lesson on how to catch pokemon

Btw here’s a breakdown of Japanese gen 1 pokemon names that I imagine would be helpful

Ch. 1 / Pg. 5-6

Since this is a place in the south, it seems we’re running into a bit of kansai dialect here - interesting but also made this first page take quite a bit longer than it should’ve I think haha

マサラタウン - Pallet town

お前に捕まえられんのか - As always, I had a stroke trying to read the passive form and then realized I totally forgot how the particles go with it. Victim is subject

そんなんじゃだめ → Like that is no good. This phrase took me a really long time to parse just cause it took me a while to properly split そんなん and じゃだめ and then interpreting both of those things together gave me some pause.

けりゃ-> ければ / Gotta love colloquialisms

Next page was fortunately much easier haha.

ニョロゾ - Poliwhirl
ニドリーノ - Nidorino

[mbuck867]

Just checking in to say I read the chapter this morning, happy to be reading this in the native language now. I really enjoyed the electric tale of pikachu as a kid(a different pokemon manga).
Possible I should be participating the the intermediate book club too at this point to push myself a little more, but I didn’t really have the drive to read Super Cub as I had just worked through the anime when that was starting.

[Sisthra20]

I’m going to jump in by adding some quick context and trivia about the manga itself.
So Pokémon Special (or Pokémon Adventures in the west) started serialization in March 1997, while the anime debutted 1st April of 1997. I find it interesting that they started so close together and it shows in the completely different interpretation and spin they gave to the games!
For example, we can see in the first couple of pages that the manga has Poké Ball be see through in their upper half with the little Pokémon sitting shrunken inside them.
This was maybe inspired by early concept art of the games when Pokémon was still called “Capsule monsters”, which was in turn inspired by gachapon.

[https://external-preview.redd.it/4x5DuCMMypKT5IyPpEW7T5K0KUHZSxscs2t_xmefseo.jpg?auto=webp&s=551cd5e278618a8845434a6fd74dd04c66ccbecb](Early concept art)

Some little trivia about some names we’ve seen in these couple pages:

マサラタウン: “Masara Town”, the starting town of the games, this story, and really the entire franchise. All cities in a specific Pokémon games follow a theme, with Red and Blue’s cities being named after colors. The starting one was named “Pallet Town” in English, while the japanese original seems to reference 真っ白 , as in pure white (other translations like German, Italian and Spanish seem to follow the japanese theme since they named Pallet Town in various ways that reference white)
Fun fact: Masara Town was based on the town of Machida, which is the hometown of Satoshi Tajiri, the original creator of the Pokémon franchise.

Also, Pokémon attacks are almost always called in hiragana, since game boy screens at the time didn’t have the resolution to show kanji and of course to allow little kids to read and learn them.
The attack used in the first pages by ニョロゾ is translated pretty literally as “Water gun”.
Some attacks have interesting references in their japanese names so I will bring that up if they get used!

[skullclutter]

I mentioned this when this manga was first suggested, but I’d like to point out this resource again:

PokéJisho (pokejisho.com) → Translates Pokémon names, move names and other series-specific terms between their Japanese and English equivalent.

[KentG]

Wow. There are already a lot of good comments here!
I was a bit hestiant to join, as this is my first Japanese book club, but your comments already made it worth it.

But it must say that I find this book very difficult.
I can mostly get by with a lot of dictionary lookups, but I’ve not been able to decipher page 7, bottom-most right and left panel:

1. この町のポケモンのトレーナーで、オレにかなう奴はいない。
2. え? ポケモンってなにかって?

As for 1., I guess he want to be the pokemon trainer of this town (the part before the comma), but what does it mean after the comma?
“With the exception (いない) of the come true (かなう) guy (奴)” - that doesn’t make sense

As for 2., those are lowercase っ, right? I sometimes have a hard time seeing the difference.
JPDB translates this to “What is Pokemon?” but how did it arrive at that? Two quotations and なにか as in something?

I hope someone can help me out.

Also, am I allowed to post questions for the entire chapter today, or do I need to wait until later this week? Because I’m confused as to what is happening on page 11, middle-left panel.

[mbuck867]

For 1, a rough literal translation is something like ‘Out of the pokemon trainers in this town, there isn’t anyone who can match me’ an ‘ore ni kanau yatsu’ would be a yatsu that can match him, of which, there aren’t any.

Edit: in my head I often never translate yatsu to anything, it helped me understand the concept of yatsu a lot better I think.

I’m not sure on 2, I’d have to look at it again.

[Sisthra20]

I’m going to try and break down the sentence a bit:

この町のポケモンのトレーナーで、オレにかなう奴はいない。

When looking at sentences like this, I usually try to “strip” them to their most simple form of just subject and verb, so in this case 奴はいない

(Lit) “A guy/someone is not/there isn’t.”

オレにかなう describes 奴, so “There is no guy that can match/rival me”

The phrase before comma provides more context

“In/Among the Pokémon trainers of this town, there is no one that can match me”

As for 2, the way I interpreted it is: out of the two って, one is putting the emphasis on the term Pokémon(like とは) , while the second acts as a quotation, and the rectangular boxes imply that there is a sort of narrator addressing the audience.

[Uh? “What are ‘Pokémon’?”, you say?]

And then it proceeds to explain what Pokémon are in the next little panels and a bit of the page after that, while the characters are in the background.

[Zenyth]

Has there been an update on the vocab deck? I thought it was supposed to be posted yesterday but I can’t find it. I wanted to start the deck before starting to read but if it isn’t posted by tomorrow I might just start reading anyway.

[SnowTale934]

Hello, I have a question on page 8.

たとえどんな奴が相手だって、オレ様の敵じゃない: The だって in this sentence resembles this grammar point. So could the sentence be loosely translated to something like “No matter what is said about that person, they’re no match for me”?

Thank you!

[Zenyth]

That translation doesn’t feel quite right to me. In the grammar point that you linked, there’s a section called caution about halfway through. Under this section it says that after a noun sometimes だって has the meaning of “emphasizing what has come before it, in order to explain further.” Looking at the example sentences from that section, I think a more natural translation would be “No matter what type of person my opponent is, they’re no match for me.”

[CursedKitsune]

It is this grammar point! I know this is in N2 but it’s a fairly common one in my opinion so it’s worth taking a look at.

[thworthwar]

@Asher any update on the deck for this? I was holding out like @Zenyth on starting the book until we got the deck, as my vocabulary is pretty far behind and I if I am going to study any words I would like it be for this book…

[Asher]

It will be up tonight! Apologies for the brief delay .

[skullclutter]

I’m definitely noticing the increase in difficulty with this one. It’s going to take some getting used to all of Red’s slang.

That said, I’m having trouble with the top leftmost panel on page 11:

Spoilered, just in case

「その幻のポケモンとやら、このレッド様が先にイタダイちゃうもんね。」

I can’t quite make sense of the 「イタダイ」here. Is it some kind of slurred version of 「頂き」?