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It’s possible that someone has already asked this question, but as I couldn’t find a way to search the forums, I’m asking it anyway.
I’m a little confused by the bit in Season 2 about “negative nouns.” I would’ve said of English grammar that it has negative verbs, but not negative nouns. Am I wrong? One of the example sentences used in the lesson is “ねこじゃありません” = “It is not a cat.” Surely, the verb in this sentence is “is not,” right? Otherwise, we’d have to form a weird sentence in which the verb was still positive and the noun was somehow negative, like this: “It is [not-a-cat].” Or is that exactly what we’re doing? And if that is what we’re doing, then why don’t we keep the positive です verb?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Okay, now I’m definitely befuddled. I just got to Season 2, Lesson 4: “Past Tense Nouns.” Am I losing my mind, or is it only the case that verbs can be past tense? I mean, we’ve been using です to mean “is,” and now we’re about to start using でした to mean “was.” Unless something is lost in translation, aren’t those words verbs (specifically, state-of-being verbs)?
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This reply was modified 12 years, 1 month ago by
jrc03c.
The nouns are not changing tense, nor becoming negative. I believe Koichi actually says that near the begining. But he’s just trying to get across the point. Just think of じゃありません as is not, and でした as was (along with じゃありました as was not). He’s trying to say “Okay, this is a ‘negative noun’. It is not the noun that we list in the sentence, for example ‘ねこじゃありません’. The cat is listed, but the じゃありません makes it ‘negative’, therefore it is not a cat”. I hope my Koichi impression helped. :) So yeah, です means is, じゃありません means is not, and so on and so forth. Koichi just has an unorthodox was of describing them. If you still don’t understand, I’m sure some kind forums-people will come along and explain it better than I. Or you could send Koichi a email. :)
Instead of trying to wrap your head around the parts of speech why not just learn? You dont need to learn what is what at all. Just learn where things go and why. Are you trying to learn Japanese or are you trying to learn how to write a textbook?
You don’t start learning verbs here on TextFugu until towards the end of season 3. You’re still on season 2. Don’t even think about verbs yet. You don’t need to either. You’re still learning about nouns.
I think you’re getting confused as your comparing Japanese to English too much. です、じゃありません、でした、じゃありませんでした are all sentence enders. They come at the end of sentences and determine whether the sentence is positive (です), negative (じゃありません), past (でした) and past negative (じゃありませんでした). They’re not verbs. English doesn’t have sentence enders as the tense comes at the start of the sentence. Japanese is reversed.
Koichi tells you that です means ‘it is’, じゃありません means ‘it isn’t', でした means ‘it was’ and じゃありませんでした means ‘it wasn’t’ to link it to a concept in English you already understand. The sentences you’re learning have a simple structure of Noun + Sentence Ender. Think of the yoda grammar to help.
As tubatime said, don’t question why something is the way it is. Just learn it. Just accept that Japanese isn’t like English. If you keep questioning the differences, you will end up driving yourself mad and waste valuable study time.
“It is [not-a-cat].”
I’m rather reminded of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead here. “You can’t not-be on a boat.” =)
@kanjiman8: It’s exactly because I don’t want to waste time that I’m asking this question. What I don’t want to do is “learn” that です is a noun, only to find out later that it’s a verb, or whatever. In short, I don’t want to have to do any un-learning. Plus, TextFugu isn’t my only Japanese learning resource — I also use Tae Kim’s guide and Human Japanese — so I just want to make sure that my learning in one resource squares with what I’m learning in another. If, as @phillip says, @koichi just has an “unorthodox” way of saying things, that’s fine. I guess I just don’t want to be memorizing something that’s not true only to have to un-memorize it and memorize something else later.
I would also like to have very clear in my own mind the differences between English and Japanese so that I don’t try to make English grammar structures in Japanese and end up sounding stupid.
です is a verb-like thing called a coupla. It’s sort of a verb that goes on the end when you don’t need a verb, but it’s not in itself a verb. It’s rather like the function “is” performs in English, which is why people explain it as “です means is”. That [is] a cat. That [is not] a cat. Mind you, the über-formal version of です is でございます, which is a verb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(linguistics)#Japanese
Also, I’m gonna go against tubaman and kanjiman, here: keep asking why. Question everything. If you don’t question, you just learn by rote – asking questions helps understanding.
Keep asking questions! Sometimes it might not make sense, but that’s because, in many cases, Japanese can’t be compared to English. です is one of those examples of something that wouldn’t directly translate.
Just to throw in another comment, there are state-of-being verbs in Japanese – specifically ある (for inanimate objects) and いる (for animate objects) – but they’re generally used to indicate the existence of something, the location of something, or the state of something, rather than describing the nature of something.
Hey guys. Lets borderline rage at the people helping us! Yeah! Sounds like a great idea.
Dont ask for help then get mad because the people helping you are giving you an answer you don’t want to hear. Seriously. Ingrate much?
To clarify, I’m not against asking WHY. I am, however against the wasting of time and those that want to compare Japanese to english. It’s just not really possible a good portion of the time. The languages share next to no roots. They developed in complete isolation from one another. Dont. Compare. Them.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 1 month ago by
tubatime1010.
Frankly, your “helping” post was essentially “that’s a stupid question – stop trying to understand it and just learn it.” You stick your nose up at him (“are you trying to write a textbook?”), and then get surprised when it annoys him?
You’re right, it’s risky to go “this Japanese concept is this English concept” but for most of us, English is all we know, so it’s going to have to be explained in terms of English until we get the framework to understand it better. It’s unhelpful to say “don’t bother comparing”. Instead, say “there’s not really any English equivalent, but X is a good way to understand it.”
Sure, it’s true to say that linguistically speaking the languages have no common roots (and for that matter, Japanese barely even shares roots with the other Asian languages) but one thing it does have in common with languages the world over is that they’re all on the same planet, and they all need to describe the same sorts of things, so you’re going to find the same concepts popping up in both languages regardless.
Anonymous戦え！戦え！戦え！
Frankly, Joel, I don’t give a rats ass. I just enjoy coming here and raging at people who angrily ask for help. You try to spend a day in Teamspeak with us when we get a new person. You’ll have a whole new impression of this “community” and it’s not one you’ll enjoy.
90% of the time when you ask Japanese questions on this site or any other site you’ll get 20 conflicting answers…so I can assure you I’ve done no damage.
But by all means. Go ahead and continue helping these people here who are just going to drop off the face of the planet in a couple days without even thanking you. You prefer the gentle explanation method of learning. I prefer the “You’re thinking too deeply into this. Stop trying to make this something that it’s not.” method. Some people just like to take the long way, I suppose…
チンチン電車止まります。
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This reply was modified 12 years, 1 month ago by
Anonymousチンチン電車下がります。
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This reply was modified 12 years, 1 month ago by
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