I did Japanese at University and one piece of coursework I had to do was to read a popular Japanese children's book and write and write a summary and my thoughts/feelings on the book. The thing I noticed that was different to the textbook Japanese I had been learning up until then was the frequency of と. It appeared in almost every sentence after verbs, nouns at the end etc... and I had no idea what it represented as I had only learnt it as meaning with someone, for quoting people and with 思う and AとB = A and B. So I just used to ignore it but felt like I was missing a bit of the meaning with every sentence.

I'm now struggling to read よつばと！ and have just noticed it again in the sentence: 「あんまりのり出すと危ないぞー」I understand all the words in the sentence: not very/much, ride, get/put out and dangerous, but trying to piece this together makes no sense to me and I have no idea what the to means!

So this is my first question: what does the to particle in sentences like this actually mean? And why is it so prevalent in children's story books (like every sentence)?

I got yotsubato because its meant to be very easy to read for beginners, but I'm really struggling moving from structured textbook Japanese even into very basic real Japanese and I'm not really making any progress.

My second question is: how do you learn the differences in the ways of saying things between English and Japanese without learning every single direct translation? As the way of saying things is so different to me that even if I understand the meaning of every word its very unlikely I'll actually understand the sentence at all.

For example the simple sentence: とーちゃん手がはなせないからな俺の分もよつばがふってくれ made no sense to me even when I looked up each word.

Is there anything I can do to help me read easy manga as I am finding it hugely difficult not understanding any sentences and am not enjoying it one bit.

Any help would be great, especially about と!

Thank you.

It's the 3rd main use, as a conditional.

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/gra...nditionals

Edit: Btw, 乗り出す is a word in its own right, and is being used in this context to mean "leaning forward" (out of the window of a car, if i remember よつばと correctly).

Edit2: Should throw you a bone on the second one too: とーちゃん手がはなせないからな俺の分もよつばがふってくれ = "Daddy can't let go (of the wheel) right now, so please wave for daddy too".

Thank you very much! I didn't know about this meaning of と! If you don't mind me asking how did you come to this translation? To me this says daddy hand isn't able to speak,(lol?) so (random na?) can you (yotsuba) also wave for my part.

はなす in this sentence is 離す not 話す. 離す means to seperate from something, let go of something etc.

Btw, the random な is the な that can go at the end of a sentence, which has a meaning sort of like ね (if you've done that one). It's in the middle of his sentence because, well, that's sort of two sentences. It all gets a bit messy with speech.

And as qwertyytrewq mentioned, this is extremely common grammar (N5 level i believe), and definitely isn't confined to children's books.

I did an "Intermediate" course at university which was 2 years long. We never covered と in this form unfortunately so I get the feeling there are a lot of holes I need to fill in grammar wise

zigmonty Wrote:Btw, the random な is the な that can go at the end of a sentence, which has a meaning sort of like ね (if you've done that one). It's in the middle of his sentence because, well, that's sort of two sentences. It all gets a bit messy with speech.

I assume in the actual manga what is after the な is either in a separate bubble or at least on a new line in the bubble. One of the tricky things about manga is that punctuation is not as common. Periods and commas are often not used at all in speech bubbles, instead just using some occasional blank spaces, new lines, and new bubbles to break sentences. (And new lines don't always start new sentences, only sometimes. Of course, native speakers don't need any help knowing where a sentence ends.)

Quote:I got yotsubato because its meant to be very easy to read for beginners

One comment about this -- I'm not entirely sure what "meant to be very easy" means here, but the author certainly did not intend the manga to be easy for foreign language students. People claim this manga is easier than others, but personally I don't think there's *any* native material that can truly be called "very easy to read for beginners."

Even just looking at that line:
とーちゃん手がはなせないからな 俺の分もよつばがふってくれ

Grammar-wise, this involves a potential verb, the conditional と, から at the end of a sentence, and てくれ, plus the idiomatic 俺の分, and the trap that you fell into of using the wrong はなす verb, the use of the zero-particle after とーちゃん, and the use of ー as a vowel lengthener for hiragana. All of those are potential difficulties that can trip up a beginner.

Unfortunately there's no shortcut. You either have to suffer through it, or use something easier like a textbook until you have a better understanding of the grammar. (I did the latter, but I didn't mind textbooks.)

Lots of people say that Yotsubato is the "easiest manga for a begginer", but I don't think anyone has said it is "easy for a begginer". Whatever you read it's going to be hard at first, but persevere and it will get easier. One thing you can do is read a translation alongside the Japanese version. They're usually easy to find online.

I'll also second the recommendation for Tae Kim's guide. I found it most useful to work through a section and then do some reading while looking out for the new grammar.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Btw, the random な is the な that can go at the end of a sentence, which has a meaning sort of like ね (if you've done that one). It's in the middle of his sentence because, well, that's sort of two sentences. It all gets a bit messy with speech.

I assume in the actual manga what is after the な is either in a separate bubble or at least on a new line in the bubble.

Yep. Next sentence is in the same speech bubble but on a new line (err column). It's only confusing if you're not used to manga. That and, unless i'm seriously missing something, there's no way to grammatically make sense of the な otherwise, so it has to be that.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Quote:I got yotsubato because its meant to be very easy to read for beginners

One comment about this -- I'm not entirely sure what "meant to be very easy" means here, but the author certainly did not intend the manga to be easy for foreign language students. People claim this manga is easier than others, but personally I don't think there's *any* native material that can truly be called "very easy to read for beginners."

I'd agree that it's the easiest manga i've ever tried to read (i don't read a lot of manga though). It is, however, *not* easy. Kids know a lot of grammar and have big vocabularies. Also, the manga is *about* a 5 year old, but i seriously doubt it's *aimed* at 5 year olds. There's plenty of furigana, so it's aimed at least partly at kids, but small children won't get the jokes. Some of the stuff よつば herself says is actually just outright incorrect for humour. Her trying to remember the word 地球温暖化 is kinda cute.

In any case, if there is *any* grammar that tae kim talks about that you don't know (about N4 level think, been a while since i last looked at it), you're going to struggle. I read it at around N4 level and again at around N2 level and there was a huge amount of stuff i realised i'd skipped/misinterpreted the first time around. N1 grammar pops up occasionally.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Even just looking at that line:
とーちゃん手がはなせないからな 俺の分もよつばがふってくれ

Grammar-wise, this involves a potential verb, the conditional と, から at the end of a sentence, and てくれ, plus the idiomatic 俺の分, and the trap that you fell into of using the wrong はなす verb, the use of the zero-particle after とーちゃん, and the use of ー as a vowel lengthener for hiragana. All of those are potential difficulties that can trip up a beginner.

And they really did write はなす in hiragana just to mess with beginners.

i found the kanzen master 3 grammer book really good for an intermediate grammar introduction.

seems like you have a beginner grammar understanding and in order to read at the next level you need to fill in some gaps as you say.

the book is also a good reference that I sometimes look back to still. it's small and full of simple examples. kinda boring but when you finish you've learned a lot.

I'd say you can also fill in the gaps by reading more in general. manga is great because you have a picture to help you when you don't understand something... so you can learn by context.

anyways after you've gone over the grammar once it's much better to learn in a real-world context because you're more likely to remember, instead of this thing being 1 of 30 grammar points you learned that day.

dtcamero Wrote:I'd say you can also fill in the gaps by reading more in general. manga is great because you have a picture to help you when you don't understand something... so you can learn by context.

Yes, and manga like よつばと in particular is good because the dialog is rarely relevant to the plot (there isn't really a plot in most of them, just a bunch of stuff that happened). If you miss something, it won't matter a couple of panels later. At most, you missed a joke.

Thank you very much everyone for your help! You've all been awesome!
I'm going to persevere with yotsubato I think and I'll use that to fill in the holes in what I'm lacking.

Thanks again everyone!