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Zizka

Sempai
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14 Apr 2016
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鳥取県 中学校の給食で1人1匹のズワイガニを食べる
The article is available
here.
By the way, how do you guys put X and O in your messages, I mean the little symbols?
鳥取県: this is a prefecture northeast of Hiroshima.
給食: lunch service
ズワイガニ: snow crab
"At a Tottori middle school lunch service, each person eats one snow crab."

取県岩美町の岩美中学校では毎年2月ごろ、もうすぐ卒業する3年生の給食に、ズワイガニというカニが1人1匹ずつ出ます。
"At Iwami middle school in the city if Iwami of the Tottori prefecture, every year around February, for the celebratory graduation lunch dinner of the third year student, each person is given a snow crab apiece."

取県岩美町: Iwami is a city of about 11,000 people located in the Iwami district.
岩美中学: that's the name of the middle school, simply Iwami middle school.
では: indicates that something is happening at a place, in this case, the middle school.
もうすぐ: soon, shortly, before long (adv.)
ごろ: suffix, approximately, usually written in kana.
卒業: する noun, graduation of a class
給食: する noun, lunch service
3年生: 3rd year student
ズワイガニ: snow crab
カニ: crab (weird how it's spelled without a dakuten here but with one in snow crab)
ずつ: suffix, meaning each.
出る: more than 20 meanings for this verb! Judging from the context it probably means "to give" here

Second Sentence:
岩美町の漁師の団体は12日、100匹ぐらいのズワイガニを中学校に届けました。教室では、団体の人がカニの食べ方を教えました。りょうじ鳥取県 中学校の給食で1人1匹のズワイガニを食べる
"At Iwami middle school in the city if Iwami of the Tottori prefecture, every year around February, for the celebratory graduation lunch dinner of the third year student, each person is given a snow crab apiece."

岩美町の漁師の団体は12日、100匹ぐらいのズワイガニを中学校に届けました。
漁師: fishermen (n.)
団体: organization (n.)
The rest I think I'm ok:
"On the 12th, the fishermen association of Iwami city delivered approximately 100 snow crabs at the middle school."

教室では、団体の人がカニの食べ方を教えました。
教室: classroom (n.)
"In the classrooms, a person from the association taught the way to eat the crabs."
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I've done the first four sentences. I find this easy fairly easy to understand, a lot easier than the first one or maybe I'm just getting better with all the time and energy I'm putting it in.
 
Your link appears to be broken, and there's some weird duplication going on with your first and second sentence. There's some bolding going on as if you were going to refer to it, but you didn't ask a question.

It's also probably best not to give all your jisho lookups. Nobody's going to check that you look things up correctly, and it will distract from definitions that you *do* need checked, like your interpretation of unique compound words, research into a person or place, and the like, where it's more than cut-and-paste.

By the way, how do you guys put X and O in your messages, I mean the little symbols?
In my IME I type ばつ for ✖ and まる for ◎ or ○. The first time you do this you may have to tap or scroll through until you find the right conversion.
Arrows incidentally are やじるし, but also -> and <- also work.




NHK News Easy Link

Second Sentence:
岩美町の漁師の団体は12日、100匹ぐらいのズワイガニを中学校に届けました。教室では、団体の人がカニの食べ方を教えました。りょうじ鳥取県 中学校の給食で1人1匹のズワイガニを食べる
"At Iwami middle school in the city if Iwami of the Tottori prefecture, every year around February, for the celebratory graduation lunch dinner of the third year student, each person is given a snow crab apiece."
As an interpretation, it's reasonable, but it doesn't actually say 'celebratory graduation', it says 'right before graduation'.

Also it's not 'lunch dinner', it's a 'lunch' (or 'school lunch', or 'school provided lunch').

I think it's better to be quite literal in your translations at this stage. I believe these translation are educational ones meant to check your understanding, not to practice for translating for an audience. Translating for an a audience certainly requires a natural translation. I mean, if you want to do natural translations instead of literal ones then that's fine, but be prepared for a lot of criticism of your English if that is what you're doing.

岩美町の漁師の団体は12日、100匹ぐらいのズワイガニを中学校に届けました。
"On the 12th, the fishermen association of Iwami city delivered approximately 100 snow crabs at the middle school."
Hm. This is almost certainly right, but be aware that 漁師の団体 can also mean 'a group of fishermen'. This group though, aside from the obvious fact that they annually take part in official activities, also (in the full article) is said to have a 会長, so it must be a formal group, and is almost certainly the same as or a part of the local branch of the 鳥取県漁業協同組合 (and with a name like that you can see why they rephrased it).


岩美町の漁師の団体は12日、100匹ぐらいのズワイガニを中学校に届けました。
"On the 12th, the fishermen association of Iwami city delivered approximately 100 snow crabs at the middle school."
Seems right to me!

教室では、団体の人がカニの食べ方を教えました。
教室: classroom (n.)
"In the classrooms, a person from the association taught the way to eat the crabs."
Awkward English, but sure, that's the right idea.
 
"It's also probably best not to give all your jisho lookups. Nobody's going to check that you look things up correctly, and it will distract from definitions that you *do* need checked, like your interpretation of unique compound words, research into a person or place, and the like, where it's more than cut-and-paste."

Sorry, didn't mean to be obnoxious, I kept the words nearby for reference. I'll refrain from doing so in the future.
 
"Hm. This is almost certainly right, but be aware that 漁師の団体 can also mean 'a group of fishermen'. This group though, aside from the obvious fact that they annually take part in official activities, also (in the full article) is said to have a 会長, so it must be a formal group, and is almost certainly the same as or a part of the local branch of the 鳥取県漁業協同組合 (and with a name like that you can see why they rephrased it)."

Gotcha. So I take it context determines whether it's a group or association. From your experience, does it convey one meaning more often than the other?

"As an interpretation, it's reasonable, but it doesn't actually say 'celebratory graduation', it says 'right before graduation'."
もうすぐ卒業する3年生の給食
This is where I made a mistake. Third year (students implied) is associated with the lunch. "Right before" modifies "to do graduation" qualifies the lunch. So right before the graduation lunch or lunch for graduation. に is a time marker here.
 
生徒たちは箸を使ってカニの身を出しておいしそうに食べていました。
So the topic is the students. They use the chopsticks to take out the flesh of the crab. 'Delicious' followed by the suffix 'seem', so it looked delicious. I think I have all of the elements. How can I integrate 'delicious' to 食べたいました... the たい suffix has a connotation of 'wanting to'... The students want to eat. The food is delicious. How can I turn 'delicious' into an adverb?
 
This is where I made a mistake. Third year (students implied) is associated with the lunch. "Right before" modifies "to do graduation" qualifies the lunch. So right before the graduation lunch or lunch for graduation. に is a time marker here.
This is incorrect. This should be parsed as [もうすぐ卒業する3年生]の給食. In other words, the clause about graduation only modifies the students. The lunch is then described as the lunch of those students.

生徒たちは箸を使ってカニの身を出しておいしそうに食べていました。
So the topic is the students. They use the chopsticks to take out the flesh of the crab. 'Delicious' followed by the suffix 'seem', so it looked delicious. I think I have all of the elements. How can I integrate 'delicious' to 食べたいました... the たい suffix has a connotation of 'wanting to'... The students want to eat. The food is delicious. How can I turn 'delicious' into an adverb?

That's 食べていました, not 食べたいました. The latter would be ungrammatical. There is no instance of the -たい form anywhere in that sentence.
Regarding 美味しそうに, it's being used adverbially to describe the manner in which the students ate the crab.

Care to try again?
 
"As an interpretation, it's reasonable, but it doesn't actually say 'celebratory graduation', it says 'right before graduation'."
もうすぐ卒業する3年生の給食
This is where I made a mistake. Third year (students implied) is associated with the lunch. "Right before" modifies "to do graduation" qualifies the lunch. So right before the graduation lunch or lunch for graduation. に is a time marker here.
Ermm. I'm not quite sure what you're saying. I may have misled you also with my phrasing, since もうすぐ卒業する means actually "just about to graduate".
"right before graduation" is the implied time of the sentence, but not explicitly stated.

もうすぐ卒業する modifies 3年生 directly. "the 3rd year students who are just about to graduate".

The modified3年生 modifies 給食, "school lunch for the 3rd year students".

All together, "school lunch for the students who are just about to graduate."

It does mean by implication that the lunch also is right before graduation, but grammatically it's the students who are described as about to graduate.

If もうすぐ卒業する modified 給食 it would mean the lunch was going to graduate, which isn't a sensible thing to say.


に is not a time marker. In a phrase like 給食にカニが出ました, it means "crabs were given out for the lunch", not "crabs were given out at lunchtime".
 
Ah ok, it makes more sense now.
食べていました
So in that was it's ~て+する form, so an action in progress in the past. The students were eating... but how do you use 美味しい as a an adverb, I'm still confused. English isn't my first language but I don't know how to word it.
 
but how do you use 美味しい as a an adverb, I'm still confused. English isn't my first language but I don't know how to word it.

SがOを美味しそうにV ⇒ "S was Ving as if O were delicious".

This grammar is almost always rephrased in natural translation to something other than 'delicious', but the above is how you translate literally.
 
Ahhhh ok. Now it makes sense.
「生徒たちは箸を使ってカニの身を出して、おいしそうに食べていました」
"The students were using the chopsticks to pull out the flesh of the crabs and eating as if it tasted delicious."
Final answer.
 
団体の人は「今年もカニを届けることができてよかったです。
Note from translator: the a member of the association/person from the group is saying the sentence above. The end of the quote is in the sentence after, just like in the first article.

Is よかった in the grammar dictionary? I've seen it before and I want to read about it. I looked it up in the dictionary, it means 'pleasant', い adjective. I mean, it's the inflected form of 良い I think. I'm not confident about it's meaning however. I think the person from the association says it's pleasant to deliver the crabs but I want to understand in depth.
 
Translation:
"This year as well it was good to be able to deliver the crabs."
 
子どもたちには自分が住んでいる町のカニのおいしさを忘れないで育ってほしいです」と話していました。
So the topic is in blue, the children. Followed by 'oneself', then staying somewhere... the crab... won't forget... The man from the group was saying...

I think I know it's just 自分 which is bothering me. Since the sentence is about the kids I imagine it means they live in the village on their own? I don't understand the purpose of 自分 here, in what sense?
 
I imagine it means they live in the village on their own?
Not on their own. 自分 means "oneself" = "this individual person", not "all by oneself"="alone".

In a grammar like 自分で because it's 自分で = "as an individual", "by oneself" it takes on this meaning of alone, but not as a general rule.

In 自分が住んでいる町, the 自分 is just a pronoun here standing for "child". It emphasizes that the sentence applies to each child individually, and incidentally helps avoid any ambiguity about the subject of 住んでいる.
 
Is there a tip or a method to help me parse sentences efficiently? I'm sometimes stuck when I have long sentences all tied together with particles. Surely there's a clever way to approach understanding reading?
 
Unfortunately, there's no all-purpose tip or trick to shortcut the process. You simply need to continue to gain exposure and deepen your understanding of particles, conjugations, grammatical forms, and Japanese sentence structure in general. When you're still new to the process and your understanding of sentence structure is still relatively incomplete, you may feel like every sentence is something you have to pick through and puzzle out. As you get more comfortable with the language and how it works, you'll be able to grasp the connections between words and the resulting meaning more intuitively (and even anticipate what is coming ahead), like you're able to do in your own native language. It just takes time and practice.
 
Alright then, each children who lives in the city wants to grow up and not forget about the delicious crab?
 
Ok, I misunderstood the meaning of ほしい. I thought it meant to want but it's more nuanced than that. It's an auxiliary adjective which expresses that the speaker wants someone to do something. In other words, the fisherman (the speaker), wants the children to do something which in this case is not to forget the taste of the crab.

~さ I already knew about, it turns a noun into an adjective. So in this case: delicious → deliciousness (Thanks for the IME arrow trick, it worked!).

So it's the fisherman who want the children of the city to grow up and not to forget the great taste of the crab. I think that's it.
 
That's pretty much it.

It's a subtle difference, but I think カニのおいしさを忘れないで育っている means "growing up without forgetting the great taste of the crab". That is, that the memory of the crab should remain with them throughout their upbringing and be carried with them into adulthood.

~ないで often has sense of "without doing ~", compared to ~なくて being a flat "not do ~, and".

ADoBJG does have entries on naide and nakute and some of its subtleties, but I'm not sure it has an example that clearly explains this particular case.
 
The link to the news article doesn't work well in your initial post. I revised it.

取県岩美町: Iwami is a city of about 11,000 people located in the Iwami district.
This might be a trivial thing, but 取県岩美町 is not a city. Check again what 町 means, and what "city" is in Japanese.

weird how it's spelled without a dakuten here
The phenomenon (カ --> ガ) is called 連濁.


This is off-topic, but the reason why "to serve 100 snow crabs for each student" can be a news article is ズワイガニ (called 松葉ガニ in the region) is very expensive in Japan. It differs depending on the size/type/state of crab, but the price is around ten thousand yen each. Of course wholesale price is lower than that, but it's very expensive anyway. My avatar is exactly ズワイガニ. 松葉ガニ is used only for male snow crab, but my picture is female, so it's called 親ガニ in the region, though.
 
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