Oh hey Chris, thanks for stopping by!

• This reply was modified 10 years, 3 months ago by  Eihiko.

The forums were nearly dead for a while, but they’ve recently been picking up again with an influx of people buying into the new TextFugu sale.

I personally come through the forums like a wave, replying to everything once every two weeks.

It certainly is! I will let you know, and we can consume so much Japanese culture that my English will be as sub-par as my Japanese c:

良い is usually written in its hiragana form　よい because it’s a very common word and よ is a lot easier to write than 良. This happens with more than a few common words. If you look them up in a dictionary like jisho.org, there will be a note by the definition saying “(usually written in kana)”

の can be used to describe a type of thing by turning the former noun into an adjective to describe the latter noun. So 男の子　and 男の人 mean “boy” and “man” respectively. Literally they translate to “male child” and “male person.” As for 市販のもの, the もの part is hiragana for 物 which is a thing or object. This is another common word that’s usually written in hiragana. 市販 means “commercially available,” so the full phrase 市販のもの is “a commercially available object.”

Hope that helps!
-Eihiko

Oh, I know kanadajin3! Her face is impressive. Maybe I will check out the community when I have more of a grasp on the language.

I have no idea what any of this is about! ^_^ What’s Mira-Gate? Did Nixon break into the JVLogger HQ?

So I’ve been looking and I can’t actually find anything to suggest that “deshita” is in any related to “desu.”

The masu form of verbs goes like this:
present: -masu
negative: -masen
past: -mashita
past negative: -masen deshita

Let’s assume when masu verbs were invented, desu didn’t exist. Why deshita? Well, the shita part indicates the past. The particle ‘de’ is used to indicate the time/location of an action, so deshita is sort of indicating that the preceding action occurred in the past.

But then what’s desu? No one knows for sure, but common belief is that it’s a shortened form of “de arimasu” (all the middle letters are removed). The de is, as far as I can tell, put there because historically it softened the phrase, making it sound more polite. That’s why desu is considered polite. So if you expand desu and look at all the ‘to be’ stuff, it looks like this:

present: de arimasu
negative: ja arimasen
past: de arimashita
past negative: ja arimasen deshita

So at this point, it’s beginning to look a lot like the masu form for aru, which is the “to be” verb. The only strange thing about it is the ja and the de. ‘ja’ is actually a shortening of ‘dewa’, and as far as I have found, dewa functions similarly to de in this context, but is even softer and even more polite. Perhaps this originated because speaking in the negative was considered more harsh and in need of more softening? I have no idea.

So the point of all this is that if you add desu to the end of ja arimasen, you’re actually saying ja arimasen de arimasu, which is nonsensical, where as if you put deshita at the end of ja arimasen, you’re just conjugating the masu form.