Looks like the deck is done, there are just a few words that need to be confirmed from when we did the parse through the deck. I’ll go through it tomorrow (1am here atm) and try to get the last little bits looked at so that it can be uploaded!
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Everything confirmed that needed to be confirmed for the deck. Will be uploaded once someone is on that is able to upload it (will update this post at that time). We will probably go ahead and do the other volumes, or at least the next couple, of Yotsubato in advance, as it’s bound to be a pretty popular title in the long term.
Deck - よつばと2 | Bunpro
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I know I’m planning on reading them all!
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Yay! I have the next couple of volumes (3 and 4), so that will be helpful!
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Well it looks like the deck is good to go, shall we get started this week?
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I found a couple of errors in the chapter 8 section of the deck:
- I’m pretty sure のに (JLPT N4) | Bunpro is the correct grammar point for this deck, not のに (JLPT N3) | Bunpro (which requires a verb to attach to, besides not making sense in context). Yotsuba is saying “Jumbo is big, but despite that, this Jumbo (that I’m drawing) is small.”
- 薄 doesn’t belong in the deck, it’s probably a mistake from Fuuka and Miura greeting each other with ういーすand ういっす.
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I vote to start this week, I think this is what the calendar will look like.
| Week | Start and End Dates | Chapter(s) | Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 11/25/2024 - 12/01/2024 | Chapter 08 | 30 |
| Week 2 | 12/02/2024 - 12/08/2024 | Chapter 09 | 26 |
| Week 3 | 12/09/2024 - 12/15/2024 | Chapter 10 | 26 |
| Week 4 | 12/16/2024 - 12/22/2024 | Chapter 11 | 26 |
| Week 5 | 12/23/2024 - 12/29/2024 | Chapter 12 | 28 |
| Week 6 | 12/30/2024 - 01/05/2025 | Chapter 13 | 28 |
| Week 7 | 01/06/2025 - 01/12/2025 | Chapter 14 | 24 |
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Aaaaaand we’re off!
Notes from pages 1 - 15:
Pg. 7:
- By the way 風香 and みうらちゃん greet each other with ういーす and ういっす, we can tell that he’s a good friend of えな’s who she knows well. Along with him being a fair bit younger, 風香, who is usually very polite, would be comfortable with a slangy greeting.
pg. 8:
- The deck has まあね (JLPT N1) | Bunpro, which 風香 stylistically expresses as “まっねー”.
- 風香：「かわいいっしょ？」 I’m assuming this is a contraction for かわいい + でしょう (JLPT N5) | Bunpro, which, again, she probably only uses with very familiar people.
- Poor 風香. Middle siblings really have it rough.
Pg. 14, third panel:
- First instance of ‘slit-pupil-よつば”. Hilarious.
pg. 15:
- よつば：「なにもんだおまえ」 I initially thought that she was just using a casual variant of 物to say “You! what’s that thing??!”, but a) that’s not how you’d say that, and b) the deck contains 何者 | Bunpro, which makes it more clear that she’s just saying “what kind of a person are you?”
- みうらちゃん: 「考えたの私違うし」
- I figured he dropped a は from 「考えたのは私違う」, like “as for the one that thought of it, it’s different than me.” But I might be mis-parsing the phrase, maybe it could be “the me who thought of it is (an) incorrect (assumption).” Thoughts?
- The deck contains し～し (JLPT N4) | Bunpro , but he does not seem to be listing reasons exactly. Is this an alternative use of that particle?
- The deck contains すい | Bunpro, but it’s writen on the page like a sound effect. Is it a) a mistaken inclusion in the deck, or b) is that adjective being used as オノマトペ, like when ジーーーー is used like a sound effect for someone staring?
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Chapter 8：
I kept notes of questions and observations. Some of the questions may be very easy and overlooked on my part. I expect that to happen a lot.
[Page 7 & 10] We seem to encounter a lot of words with variations. Jisho lists ~11 versions of ういっす (hey; yo; hi) and でっけえ appears to be a variant of でかい (huge).
[Page 11] Yotsuba says「さんせー！！」 Is this supposed to be 賛成 (JLPT N4) | Bunpro (approval)? Personally, this is an example of the lack of kanji making it harder to understand the text.
[Page 12] よおいしてくる apparently means “I’m gonna run along now.” but I don’t entirely get what よおい is in this sentence.
[page 15] Miura says 「これはなー靴の裏にコロコロがついてんだ」 regarding the shoes with wheels in them. I don’t know what that 「なー」 is doing in this sentence as there’s nothing obvious from a dictionary or google search.
[page 19] Miura says 「つーかさ」 which translations turn into “You know what?” or “I dunno…”, but I don’t see this in the dictionary or know what word it might be based off of. Edit: I see now this is つーか with what is probably さ - Casual よ (JLPT N3) | Bunpro. It can be really hard to parse this stuff out while reading on the fly.
[page 23] Ena says 「…よくわかってないの！」 Maybe a symptom of being a noob at navigating “real” Japanese, but I was surprised to see ない attached using the て-form. Is this related to てある (JLPT N4) | Bunpro, even though it’s used with an Intransitive verb here? My guess is it’s probably simply this instead: Verb[て] + B (JLPT N4) | Bunpro
Very enjoyable and funny chapter. If I remember correctly the next chapter (without any spoilers of course) is quite hard. I’m not looking forward to that. 
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You’re going to see a lot of that. Long dashes for mora extension in hiragana as if it were katakana, long dashes extending vowels just for exaggeration, and other pronunciations that are kinda slurred or exaggerated. For those, it actually helps me to imagine high energy anime characters talking, it’s really similar.
You’ll even come across some straight-up mispronunciations, because Yotsuba sometimes gets words wrong. It definitely makes things challenging… I got a lot of help from the forums when we were reading volume one of this series.
This is another example of the text trying to convey Yotsuba’s tone by taking liberties with spelling. See 用意 (JLPT N4) | Bunpro In the accompanying deck… if it was written 用意していくyou’d see she was just saying she was going to go prepare and return.
I’m pretty sure he’s just using なあ, also written なー, as filler, like I might say “Ok, what’s going on here, you see, is the shoe bottoms have rollers attached”.
Yeah, it really is hard! What I can tell you is that sweating through volume one was really hard for me, but so good for my comprehension that it’s incredibly obvious how much easier reading volume 2 is for me now.
This one is really hard if you don’t already know that つーか is slang for と言うか | Bunpro. (You can find that in Jisho, though.) He’s basically saying “uh, I mean… c’mon…”
Oh, speaking of which, @Asher , the deck has さ (JLPT N4) | Bunpro in it, but that’s definitely not how he’s using さin this case, he must be using is just as an interjection like “come, now”, right?
This one is really common, you’ll see it everywhere: dropping い from ーている, per ている① (JLPT N5) | Bunpro. Formally it would be よくわかっていない.
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Thanks for the detailed reply. It certainly helps a lot to know Yotsuba mispronounces things on top of the text not having kanji. 
I definitely should have known about ている① (JLPT N5) | Bunpro since thinking back the い seems to be dropped more often than not in manga and elsewhere. As for つーか being slang for と言うか | Bunpro, it makes sense given this entry: つ (Slang) (JLPT N0) | Bunpro.
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Chapter 8, pages 16 - 30
Pg. 18
- I laughed out loud seeing よつば carefully measuring what she’s sketching with her crayon.
- more examples of slangy speech: 「やっぱ」instead of やっぱり (JLPT N4) | Bunpro and 「うめー」 instead of 上手い (JLPT N5) | Bunpro
Pg. 20
- よつば：「でもえなもふーかもとーちゃんもみなうまいっていった」
- @Asher This is just a note for the grammar item [も (JLPT N5) | Bunpro ]— I noticed that while [と (JLPT N5) | Bunpro] explicitly calls out the way とcan string things together and omits the last one often, no such guidance exists for も.
- “いや え？ じゃなくて へたじゃん”. I really got stuck in a comprehension hole with this one for a bit, but I think I get it, and if I’m right, this is a good examplar for learning to figure out which unstated or previously stated thing is being referenced. So here goes, and I’d appreciate any feedback:
Given the associated grammar [ではなくて・じゃなくて (JLPT N3) | Bunpro] means “not A but B”, then B would be へたじゃん (か omitted from [じゃないか (JLPT N4) | Bunpro], but still meaning “it’s bad, amirite?”), but we have to infer that A is something that’s been mentioned before. I had a hard time with that, becuase I got stuck thinking it had to be something he had just said: 下手だ. Maybe it’s because all of the examples in the grammar point are one person simply asserting that something isn’t A, but B. And although it wouldn’t make sense for him to be saying “it’s not bad, rather, it’s bad, right?”, I kept on trying to figure out how it could make sense… until I realized A could be something someone else said. In this context, that would obviously beえな saying うまいねー. “It isn’t (good), though… it’s bad, right?” Phew!
- みうら：「そりゃうそだ」, another example of elision, from それは.
Pg. 21: I think I answered my own question about すい from my previous post, seeing [しょんぼり | Bunpro] used like a sound effect.
Pg 22: I just love how Miyura first feels bad for hurting Yotsuba’s feelings, but reflexively doubles down when she implies he might have lied!
Pg 23.
- OMG えな just digging a deeper hole…!
- @Asher I see [ずんずん | Bunpro] is in the deck, I assume because of the ずーん effects on this page, but that’s gotta be an error, right? (I know, I’ve said that before…)
pg 24 みうら：「ひょっとしてジャンボってあれか？」
- I believe this is implyingっていうのは, but not as in “the guy named Jumbo”, but as in “the Jumbo that you had mentioned”… thoughts?
Pg. 27
- I could not stop laughing at Ena and Miura desperately willing Jumbo to tell Yotsuba her drawing is good.
- Also illustrating… Ena pleading with [Verb[て] (JLPT N4) | Bunpro ] vs. Miyura demanding with [命令形 (JLPT N4) | Bunpro ]
Pg. 28
- みうら：「よく見えるとやっぱしうまいなー」
- @Asher I think [やっぱし | Bunpro] belongs in the deck?
- Can someone confirm that Miura is saying something like“It’s properly visible now and sure enough it’s good”?
I just looooove how excited Ena and Miura get when they’ve figured out how to unwind hurting Yotsuba’s feelings!
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Glad to see the revival of the club!
Your analysis of which grammar is shortened is on point, but じゃなくて is more straightforwardly referring to Yotsuba’s shocked reaction just before.
Ermm, don’t “whaaat!?” me, it’s bad isn’t it
Or more literally “No, it’s not 「え？」, it’s …”.
よく見ると、「見える」じゃなくて、「見る」だった 
みうら：「よく見るとやっぱしうまいなー」
Now this should make more sense right? よく見ると | Bunpro is a set expression.
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Yes exactly, or rather I’d translate it as “who the hell are you?”. Yotsuba probably picked it up in an anime, and as usual it’s not a very polite thing to say to somebody you met 15 minutes ago 
Miura has indeed dropped half the sentence, partially due to balancing on one foot with a roller attached, but the general idea should be “It’s not even me who invented it”. I have to say I struggle somewhat to recover a proper sentence.
I think of it as also giving reasons, in a way, it’s just not easy to explicitly spell out what the reason is for. JMDict translates し as a sentence-ender as “the thing is; for one thing” (usage 3 of し – Vocabulary details – jpdb).
Perhaps kids tend to overuse し outside of “proper” listing of reasons? One character in particular that comes to mind is Sora Narukami who seems to use it in every sentence (https://youtu.be/3PWt6fzB3tk?si=G9vGWRLDZXtii8SK&t=3).
Also, I might have missed something, but why is Miura a boy? Language seems consistent with a tomboyish girl.
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Oh, that is SOO helpful (and so clear in hindsight)! I had just assumed he was saying 「え？」himself because he was surprised she didn’t already know… but he was literally quoting her. I might have gotten it if the question mark wasn’t included in his quote…
OMG Duh. Yes, it makes perfect sense when I actually read what’s written 
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I had read that JMDict definition, but I was hoping for a more elaborate explanation along the lines of the ones I see in the grammar point explanations. Incidentally, in the time since I posted, I’ve actually heard this sentence-ending use of し several times, but it was while I was watching some subtitled anime, no doubt, so I noticed it but did’t stop and parse it out. Wasted opportunity… next time. But my sense is that it was very similar to this usage, like it’s explanatory, even if it’s a list of one item.
You think so? I hadn’t noticed, but I went back to look for gendered language markers… whatever you’re noticing is above my head.
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I love all the details!
I usually move on quickly once I understand reasonably well. But reading you guys’ comments going through the weeds forces me to think harder about whether I really got all the nuances.
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Agreed! I am still really green here, so diving into these details really helps me. I have read my chapter for this week. I have struggled a little more with these first two chapters than with most of the last book, but I am going to put some of that to I had read parts of the first book multiple times. Whew!
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Yeah this is only my second book club, but I learned to do that by seeing other people’s posts in the thread on the first volume of Yotsuba — I found a lot of value in going the extra mile to really make sure I understood as close to every word as I could!
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