The "I found some Japanese I don't understand" thread.

[MomoIroMember]

Joel is right.  You can use  本日 in speech, but the listener will probably expect something satirical as though you’re deliberately being formal for comedic purposes.  For example, instead of saying “I went to Walmart today,” you’d be saying something like, “I have an announcement.  On this day, Sunday, January 13th, I went to Walmart.”  Obvious all those words aren’t implied, just the formality of the sentence.

That said, don’t use it in speech.  :)

• This reply was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by  MomoIro.

[JoelMember]

MomoIro wrote:

You can use 本日 in speech, but the listener will probably expect something satirical as though you’re deliberately being formal for comedic purposes.

そして、吾輩は猫である。

[AstralfoxMember]

Seems like the best place for this question… Has anyone ever heard ジャガイモ being used as an insult. Like lazy and/or useless?

If not it’s just an author being creative.

[JoelMember]

I’ve heard it used in one series where the character happens to look like a potato – it’s something of a berserker button for her, rather like called Edward Elric short. If you mean “is it ever used in the sense of ‘couch potato’ or similar”, I can’t say I’ve seen it. That’s not really saying anything, though.

[vanandrewMember]

There’s an example sentence in the nominalisation lesson:

かんじ　を　手　で　かく　の　は　むずかしい　です。

The “かんじ　を　手” throws me a bit, I expected the を to precede the verb.

Shouldn’t the sentence be structured:

手  で  かんじ  を  かく  の は  むずかしい  です。

 

[missingno15Member]

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/2005/02/16/debunking-the-japanese-sentence-order-myth/

[AstralfoxMember]

In this case, I don’t think the ordering changes the meaning at all. The particles are attached to the preceeding word and define their gramatical presence, so the ordering is benign. Here is the article I first read on the subject. There are a lot of cases where word ordering is important though, so you cant just throw a sentence together without thinking about it.

This may be wrong, but to me it has a slightly different inflection. Like someone was going to say “Writing Kanji is difficult” but amended it after they began speaking with ‘by hand’, as opposed to typing which is easy. What are other peoples thoughts on this?

Edit: Beaten to it while I was typing things.

• This reply was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by  Astralfox.

[JoelMember]

In complicated sentences, though, don’t put the object too far from the verb – otherwise you may find people have forgotten what you are talking about before you get to what it is you were doing with it. =)

[MisterM2402 [Michael]Member]

Why not think of 手で as an adverb? As far as I can see, it’s functioning like one (whether or not it’s formally classed as an adverbial phrase, I don’t know). In English, adverbs can be thrown all over the place – “Quickly, she ate the apple” vs “She quickly ate the apple” vs “She ate the apple quickly” vs “She ate quickly the apple”. In Japanese it’s similar in that there’s no one specific placement of an adjective in a sentence.

(I know Japanese is Japanese and English is English, but it can help to draw parallels between the two sometimes, to make sense of things, or to show that certain things in Japanese aren’t really that weird in comparison to what you know about your own language.)

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s pretty common to put the adverb right before the verb in Japanese:
「日本語を毎日勉強しなさい。」

「宿題をまだ終わってしまう！」

「足が痛いのに早く走っていますね」

And as I think someone might have already noted: particles come *after* words, not *before* them. So in this case it’s かんじを, not を かく, even though it’s common to see を precede a verb.

[JoelMember]

One way to think of several of the particles is that whereas English has prepositions which come before (such as the “by” in “by hand”), Japanese has postpositions, which come after (the “で” in “手で”).

[vanandrewMember]

Thank you all for help. I’ll never forget you.

[Anonymous]

Now kiss.

[EricMember]

Hello everyone, I recently started using lang-8 and I received this message in a friend request that I’m having trouble translating. I’m up to season 4 at this point and I know some of what this message says (I’m also using jisho to try and fill in the gaps) but I could use help. The message reads:

“はじめまして！ ユウジロウといいます。 最近このサイトを使うようになりました。 皆さんの日本語学習のお手伝いと、自分の英語の学習に役立てたいと思います！ よろしく！！ Let’s keep in touch! And Happy new year!”

What I think it says:

“Hello nice to meet you. I am called Yujiro (my name is Yujiro). Recently I’ve started using this site. Everyone’s Japanese language assistant (?), I think being an English language student is useful (?). Regards.”

I’m having the most difficulty with the last sentence. I know what most of the words mean but putting it all together is a bit tough. I’d like to know what it actually says and why the grammar works the way it does. Any help would be appreciated. ありがと！

[JoelMember]

“If I assist in everyone’s Japanese studies, I think it will be helpful to my own English studies.”

It is a little tricky, because the first clause literally just reads “everyone’s Japanese language studies assistant”, but from the context, it’s fairly clear (at least to me) that he’s writing to you because he wants to help you with Japanese.

As for grammar, this is a case of と meaning “if”. Also, you seem to have confused 学習 with 学生. =)

I’ll admit the 役立てたい could be my unravelling, though, since it seems to mean “want to help”. I could pass it off as a contraction of ～ていた, but then what’s that い doing on the end?

[EricMember]

Thanks Joel. That makes more sense now. Context is a little hard for me to decipher at this point but I guess that’s half the fun of learning the language.

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