absolutely blessed! Will let you know how my custom ePub export goes lmao.
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Nice! Any chance someone could give the equivalent finishing lines for the Korean version? @bibliothecary maybe?
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Would you mind sharing if you manage that?
My ebook appears to have no chapters(??), so I just let the first audiobook play to the end.
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I’d feel most comfortable guiding you through how to replicate yourself, but if that’s a bit too intensive DM me (its sort of a grey area thing already)
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Finished this week’s part! Grammar and vocabulary-wise it was very approachable. The first few paragraphs were definitely more difficult than the following text. As for thoughts:
Summary
Interesting how the author decided not to name the cat and call it 彼女 thus throwing off some readers at first. It seems like it would be a trend in this book - using nicknames instead of proper names.
The same is true with アバズレさん and Nanoka. アバズレさん is obviously a nickname (a vulgar one, it’s probably going to be explained further) and she refers to Nanoka as お嬢ちゃん。
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Going back over (I note she doesn’t initially say her friend is a cat, you just have to infer it through context, though obviously she constantly describes her end of the conversation as 鳴きました so that gives quite a big hint), though she mentions it obliquely in conversation a little bit in), a few qs
After school when she goes for a walk:
彼女は相変わらずのちぎれた尻尾をぴこぴことさせながら
Not sure what verb のちぎれた is, or if it’s の 千切れた, or what. Also not sure what ぴこぴこ is in this context (probably because I don’t know the relevent verb). Is the kitty’s tail damaged in some way?
This construction repeats later, so I feel like it means tail wagging or similar, but… I still don’t know what it actually is.
At the apartment
部屋の中にピンポーンという音が響いて数秒後、私が足元にいた一匹の蟻を見つけるのよりも早く、 ドアが開きました。
Does this mean ‘even before I could find the animal sitting at my feet’? [more literally ‘compared to being able to find the animal at my feet’ i guess]
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I’m pretty sure it means that the tail is considerably damaged. Also, I’ve found a YouTube video of a cat wagging its tail with the title 尻尾をピコピコ.
Yeah, more or less. The animal in question is an ant. and the relevant vocabulary より早く
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lmao i didn’t even notice that the IDE turned アリ into the correct kanji for me. I thought it was still referring to the kitty!
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Your wish is my command! 
I’ll have a look later today and post the info in the home thread. 
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The audiobook had Nanoka sing an actual melody to (with?) the cat, so I got curios. Pretty sure it is this song from 1968. It even has its own wikipedia page 
(though only in japanese)
It really says something about Nanokas character that she sings an old song like that
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google agrees that this is the song. well researched. 
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I’m now finally understanding this part. I read 머리 as 머리(카락) so I thought it was talking about people with weird hair. I agree with your translation over the official English translation though, the Korean translation would be something like “In Japan, people who are weird in the head can escape/avoid the things that they hate/dislike.”
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And I’m done with this week’s part! ナー
Comments
I really like what we read so far! Nanoka seems both really smart and delightfully weird.
Sadly I spoiled myself to the existence of the cat, but I like how it’s only alluded to. I’m looking forward to seeing how long it’ll take me to figure out similar things when they come up again!
Questions:
In the apartment
「もう三時過ぎよ？」
「この時間が朝だっていう人間だっているさ。私がそうだ」
「他にいるの？」
「ほら、アメリカ人とか」
私はアバズレさんの適当な言い方がおかしくて、くすくすと笑いました。
適当, my eternal nemesis, we meet again. What’s its meaning here? “Vague”?
And phew, starting the sentence with 私は makes it really weird to parse. Is it basically this?
アバズレさんの適当な言い方はおかしくて、私はくすくすと笑いました。
Like “Her vague way of saying this was funny, and I laughed”?
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ahh you’re right, sry for the mixup… I deleted my post so as to not accidentally spoil any further. Can you edit yours to say there’s a potential future spoiler
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re: 私はアバズレさんの適当な言い方がおかしくて、くすくすと笑いました
Meaning, and also 適当
It’s two connected actions (you can tell by the くて)… so something like “I, finding Abazure-san’s 適当 way of saying this funny, giggled” (sry I’m not sure how to translate 適当 here either… sloppy. lazy, careless, or non-commital maybe?
I’m actually a bit confused by this section overall. Is she basically saying “This time of day is like the morning for me”, and then attributing it to being an American?? If so, then maybe that last part is why the MC uses 適当
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Answer to answer
I understand that て can connect actions, but I didn’t see the adjective as an action.
Is [A]は[B]が[Adjective] a pattern that means [A] finds [B] to be [Adjective]? I haven’t seen that before.
Here’s how I’m understanding this section:
“Isn’t it already past 3 pm?”
“There are people who think of that hour as morning. Me, for example.” (Literally: “I’m that way.”)
“There are others?”
“Americans, for example.”
It’s probably “morning” to her because she has a really weird sleep rhythm for some so far unknown reason. When probed to explain the “There are people who…”, implying there are others, she doesn’t really explain it, but jokes that “Americans” are another example, probably because the time difference would mean that 15:00 in Japan is morning there.
That’s not really the case, considering that the time difference between Japan and America is somewhere between +7 (22:00) to +10 (1:00), but that’s the only explanation I can come up with.
Clarification
I didn’t mean “finding xyz” in a literal sense. To slightly rephrase it: “With regards to me | Abazure-san’s 適当 way of putting it was strange (odd/funny) | And (て) | I giggled”. In general, て just connects clauses… doesn’t matter if it’s verbs or adjectives (see Te Form: Connecting words and clauses in Japanese for some other examples with い Adjectives). The 私は + て makes it apply to both clauses. You could rewrite it as 私は[Clause A]。私は[Clause B]。
Overall passage meaning
Hmmm, so if she’s naming Americans as separate example, I would assume it’s a stereotype of Americans in Japan that she (and others?) holds, based on tourists, college students, people working remotely, etc. I could be totally off tho.
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適当 and Americans
Yep. I know this well.
Take this with a grain of salt, but this is my current* feeling for 適当.
It’s acquired a slang form that means the opposite of what the word actually means. I’m struggling to think of an English equivalent that isn’t woefully outdated, but words like bad or sick have this same pattern where there’s the normal definition and then there’s the reversed one. So the speaker, tone, and context will help a lot to tell you which of the 適当s you’re looking at. For example, “your dog is sick” almost certainly means that you should take your dog to the veterinarian, but in some contexts, you just have a really awesome dog.
wrt the passage, I actually don’t know which one she’s using since I’m not entirely sure what she’s implying about Americans here. When I read it, I thought she was making a joke that it’s morning in America in the afternoon in Japan, but that doesn’t work out with time zones, so I think that @暁のルナ is probably right that there’s some sort of stereotype about Americans in Japan… If that’s the case then I’d say that the 適当 here means something like lazy/haphazard in the sense that she’s just naming someone to say that it’s not just me, there are other people who wake up this late. But maybe someone with the English translation can help us out 
*subject to change at any time
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適当 and Americans
Ha. That would explain the completely opposite JMdict definitions, haha.
At least for this first part, thanks to Amazon’s preview we all have have access to an English translation:
…whether that helps or not is a whole other story
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適当 and Americans
I think this confirms the second, reverse meaning at least. Now, what in the world they mean by Americans is anyone’s guess
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