I love this book, and I know it well. So I'll try reading a bit of it in Japanese. I went to Amazon.co.jp and found they do have a Kindle version, and I can download a sample. (To do this, I have to give my address as somewhere in Japan, and I can't have Amazon.com downloads on the Kindle at the same time. No problem.)I'm not that strong on Japanese, so it would help to have a rikaichan-like dictionary. As it happens, it wasn't hard to get one, though I read online that this didn't work on Android Kindle apps but only dedicated Kindles: after highlighting a word, I told it I wanted to download the 日本語 - 英語 dictionary, and it did.
Internet doesn't seem to know how to disable Wikipedia lookup. Too bad: screen's looking cluttered.
Hey, that's interesting. If I highlight a single word, I get dictionary. If I highlight something longer, I get Bing translation. Seems to work OK. I wish there weren't this menu continually blocking part of the highlighting.
Sometimes the Japanese-English dictionary doesn't bother with any English (!). You can click and go to another page with more detail. It's easier to use the Popup Japanese app, but you still have to highlight, which isn't that easy, and then say copy. With rikaichan, all you have to do is touch part of the word (and maybe adjust). I haven't found an easy way to do this yet. Argh.
Here's my notes as I struggle. Maybe they only interest me. We'll see. BTW, put no stock in these translations; I'm stretching here.
ライオンと魔女
１るーシイ、衣装だんすをあけて みる1. Lucy, wardrobe open and see
Lucy looks into the wardrobe
むかし、ピーター、スーザン、エドモンド、ルーシイという
In the past, Peter Susan Edmond Lucy called
四人の子どもたちが、いました。
4 children were.
Once there were four children named Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy.
この物語は、その四人きょうだいが、 この前の戦争（せんそう）
In this story, those 4 brothers & sisters, the previous war
（第二 次 世界 大戦 ）の時、 空 襲 を さけて ロンドン から
# 2 next world great war ’s time, air raids avoid London from
疎開 した時におこったことなのです。
evacuation did when occurred because
This story occurred when the four brothers and sisters left London to avoid the air raids during the last war (World War II).
New kanji to remember:
襲. Boy, this one's a bear. It's composed of a jinmeiyou (used-for-proper-names) kanji for dragon, the top part, and the bottom part is clothes. It means pile on or attack. Dragon's piling on/attacking your clothes? I guess I'll put this in Kanji Study and see if I can get it..
疎. The left bit is a radical I don't know and the right part is bundle. Together they mean penetrate/sparse/shun/neglect/rough/alienate. Will have to consult Henshall on this.
New vocabulary:
衣装だんす or
いしょうだんす: wardrobe
戦争 せんそう: war
次 じ counter that applies to wars
世界 せかい: world
大戦 たいせん: great war
空襲 くうしゅう: air raid
疎開 そかい: evacuation
おこる or 起こる: occur
New grammar:
なのです。Per Japanese Stack Exchange, のです means the sentence is an explanation. な is there before the の because what precedes is a noun or a な adjective; if it were an い adjective or a verb, we wouldn't need な.
A lot of work for three sentences! OK, for one; the first two were easy.
I don't know if I can keep it up. But I'm interested to see that な goes before explanatory の or
ん for な adjectives and nouns. I keep thinking the rule in Japanese is to put a lot of vocabulary I don't know and then end your sentence with an apparently random stream of particles. Hah. Maybe it'll be less random now.
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