The rant on ambiguity.
Yeah, guys, thanks a lot for the grammar lesson. Point is, you haven't even understood me. Point is, in the current phrase there's ambiguity. It partly comes from the placement of the adverb "even". More on that here, and here, for example. So in the written dialogue, I'd change the phrase to "I haven't been working here for even half a year" to set the focus on the duration rather than on what Hina hasn't been doing.
And partly it comes from the IMHO unnecessary use of perfect continuous. Both, the latter and perfect simple can obviously be used to describe an action that has started in the past and continues now. Perfect continuous however gives more focus on the process of the action itself rather than on the overall action duration.
For example, compare "I've been working here on project A for seven years." to "I've worked here on project B for seven years". The first one tells you that over the last 7 years I've been doing work, various tasks for project A. It really highlights and focuses on the action itself, on what it consists of in the scope of the given time duration, which lasts immediately from now on to some time in the past. The second one tells you that I've worked here on project B for seven years indeed, and I perhaps still, but not necessarily, work here. What's interesting is what I'm gonna do from now on, thanks to me doing this work till now. Besides, what's interesting is the duration of seven years itself, not much the related process attached to the now time. In fact, I might have worked for 3 years on project C afterwards, and on project D in parallel, but for sure I didn't spend more than 7 years working on project B.
I'm not sure if I express the differences correctly, and I don't really know how to do it better, but there's clearly quite a difference between the two tenses. Therefore, I think that "I haven't yet worked here for half a year, and I'll feel bad for the manager... but I'm going to quit" works a lot better. At the very least, this certainly resolves the ambiguity about the duration aspect and the now time. The possible time skip hypothesis simply cannot survive in this case, at all. It's not that today is March 2017, and Hina hasn't been working for her manager for the last 6 months for god only knows what reason, and you have to WTF how things come to this weird time skip, which doesn't make sense at all. It's that Hina has worked for her manager some time in the past for the overall duration of less than 6 months. It doesn't even matter that they are the very last 6 months. What matters is that those less than 6 months are not a long enough duration to get used to a workplace and colleagues, but Hina still feels attached to her manager and thus feels sorry to suddenly quit the job in August 2016. This ambiguity by the way is also not present in the original Japanese version thanks to 未だ and のに.
Oh, and thanks, you guys motivated me to find the manga on book walker and read the rest of the Volume 2 in Japanese.
PS
I'm sorry for jumping to wrong conclusions though and hurting the TL's feelings. I sure could've presented my original concern in less arrogant, more respectful and friendly manner. I'll try to keep it in mind in the future.
last edited at Aug 10, 2016 8:56PM
