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

[vanandrewMember]

Ah, ok. Thanks マーク.

 

[eru777Member]

言葉は無力と気がついてる
【ことばはむりょくときがついてる】
I realize that words are powerless.

In the above sentence, the translation says it means “I realize that words are powerless” But I don’t understand where that meaning comes from word by word.
Where does the sentence have the verb “I understand”? The ついてる in dictionaries means “to have , to be in a state”, and what does the と気 have to do there?
Thanks in advance ,

Hey! Lip them? Lip them? What?

[ShudoukenMember]

言葉 = word(s)
は = are
無力 = powerlessness
と = The particle to truning the sentence before into: that words are powerless
気がついてる = I have realized

気がつく = to notice, to become aware

You have read the が as a particle instead of と, I suppose?
Hope this helped :D

[JoelMember]

More specifically, と is the quotation marker – in the same way as “that” in English, it’s a way of putting verbal speech marks around what came before. I realise “words are powerless”.

Remember, particles are always post-positions – they come after the word they modify, never before. It’s not 無力+と気 but 無力と+気

[MisterM2402 [Michael]Member]

What does と思うと mean if it comes at the start of a sentence? I can’t figure it out from the given English text.

Sentence: と思うと、すらりと揺らぐ茎の頂きに、心持首を傾ける細長い一輪の蕾が、ふっくらと瓣を開いた。
Translation: From its gently quivering tip, a long slender bud tilted ever so slightly to one side and opened its luxuriant petals before my nose.

Wow, 傾ける （かたぶける）doesn’t come up when I type it in the IME.  Not even listed in jisho.org or Jim Breen. It could be that the book’s made a mistake and included 傾ける （かたぶける） in the dictionary part instead of 傾く （かたぶく）(nothing seems to imply it’s in potential form though), but even then, while 傾く （かたぶく）is in jisho.org it says its kana is outdated or obsolete :D
…turns out the story is from 1908, that’ll be why :P

[JoelMember]

My dictionary says the current reading of 傾ける is かたむける and defines it as “(transitive) to incline, to lean, to tip” et cetera.

As for と思うと maybe “in my mind, (such and such)”? Just a guess, though.

[eru777Member]

1. I didn’t know of the 気がつく idiom that’s why I was super confused when I tried to understand the meaning of the sentence. I knew that 気 means mood / feeling but I couldn’t figure out how it tied to the sentence grammatically with that seemingly odd と before it.

2. I didn’t know that particular usage of the と particle (I thought it always meant either AND or “Quotation marks” if followed by a 言った. Quotation as in “Get out” – said John- Not with the current connotation of the word in my above song lyric.

Thanks Shudouken , I feel enlightened now.

 

To Joel , I thought that a quotative と needed the word 言った after it , and since I didn’t see any direct quoting taking place in the translated sentence, it elluded me. It seems that the と particle is much more than that though, isn’t it.

Thanks guys, I appreciate your help .

 

Hey! Lip them? Lip them? What?

[JoelMember]

It’s an indirect quote. =)

Still, the trick is that when in doubt, break the sentence up into chunks at the particles, remembering that the particle goes with the word before rather than the word after. That might not have helped with 気がつく – 気 is a bit of a sneaky one that tends to pop up in a lot of verb-phrases, like 気をつけて or 気に入る – so it’s probably a matter of getting a hang of all its little tricks. If I search my dictionary for 気が together, 気がつく comes in one of the first few results.

[ShudoukenMember]

This may not be a japanese phrase or sentence I don’t understand but more like a “mechanic”, so I’ll ask it here
When is it okay to leave out the 「は」 particle?
When introducing people on Japanese TV shows, I hear sentences like this quite often:
この男ボビー
(no は and だ/です)
Is this just a sentence that cannot have a different meaning, so the particle is left out because of lazyness/convenience?

An example can be seen at 4:10 in this video (and it is used a lot more after that)

[eru777Member]

To Joel: I see, I’ll bear that in mind. Thanks for pointing it out.

Hey! Lip them? Lip them? What?

[JoelMember]

Being casual. Particles tend to fall by the wayside in very casual speech, often being replaced by commas.

今日、食べる？

今何時？

[missingno15Member]

Basic Principles of Slang

In the world of slang, anything goes and rules that apply to written Japanese are often broken. The most difficult part is that, of course, you can’t just say whatever you want. When you break the rules, you have to break it the correct way. Taking what you learned from textbooks or Japanese classes and applying it to the real world is not so easy because it is impossible to teach all the possible ways things can get jumbled up in the spoken language. Learning how to speak naturally with all the correct idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies in a language is something that requires practice with real people in real-world situations. In this section, we’ll look at some common patterns and themes that will at least help you get an idea of where the majority of slang originates from.

One thing you’ll soon realize when you first start talking to Japanese people in real life is that many sounds are slurred together. This is especially true for males. The fact is voices in instructional material such as language tapes often exaggerate the pronunciation of each letter in order to make aural comprehension easier. In reality, not all the sounds are pronounced as clearly as it should be and things end up sounding different from how it’s written on paper.

There is one major driving factor behind the majority of slang in Japanese. The primary goal of most slang is to make things easier to say. In other words, the goal is to reduce or simplify the movement of your mouth. There are two primary ways in which this is accomplished, 1) By making things shorter or, 2) By slurring the sounds together. We have already seen many examples of the first method such as shortening 「かもしれない」 to 「かも」 or preferring 「と」 to the longer conditional forms. The second method makes things easier to say usually by substituting parts of words with sounds that fit better with the sounds surrounding it or by merging two or more sounds together. For example, the same 「かもしれない」 might be pronounced 「かもしんない」 since 「しん」 requires less movement than 「しれ」.

The fundamental goal of slang is to reduce mouth movement

[YamadaMember]

On lang-8 I ran into a part I didn’t get from a native translation…

Mine: “すきな「はじめのイッポ」はにぎやかでした。”

Native: “「はじめのイッポ」はにぎやかですきです”
I think I get all but the “で” after “にぎやか”…. Is it just a polite thingie or is it necessary?
[edit]: Also, if nobody minds me asking, should I start using ひめ for ‘princess’ or just stick with おうじょ….?

• This reply was modified 11 years, 8 months ago by  Yamada. Reason: [edit]

毎秒は一世一代。

[マーク・ウェーバーMember]

In this context it simply means “and”.

[YamadaMember]

Thanks マーク :D

毎秒は一世一代。

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