I hope you enjoy today's lesson. After a lot of discussion (and holding a poll on my Patreon), I decided to use quite a lot more kanji on the story text. I have tried to make the furigana bigger and bolder. Please don't be nervous of it. You don't need to learn it all at this stage (though it really is worth starting to get used to the simpler ones). To anyone moderately familiar with early kanji the all-kana text can look quite hard to read (it is surprising how quickly one becomes kanji-minded - they really are fundamental to the language). It is because a lot of people found that and asked me to increase the kanji that I have done so, but I am trying to make it approachable to people with and without some basic kanji. A little story on how "comfortable" kanji quickly become (or how "uncomfortable" being without them gets). In my first year of learning Japanese I picked up an old copy of Pokemon Fire Red (my first Japanese game with an appreciable amount of text). It was in all-hiragana with spaces. I had to give up on it because the lack of kanji made it so difficult to read! It isn't that I am a kanji wizard, and I certainly wasn't one of those people who learn thousands of kanji before I started. I picked them up as I went along but they quickly become part of one's way of "seeing" Japanese. PS if you like my way of doing things and would like to pick up a basis in kanji, may I recommend my book _Alice in Kanji Land_ learnjapaneseonline.info/alice-
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I love RTK as it has benefited me greatly as a beginner (Too many to list but I can if anyone wants to know) but I agree it’s not for everyone and I do find myself in a ‘strange’ place right now as I know all these kanji but no vocabulary. I found that the only way to counter all the downsides of RTK (No readings, abstract, all or nothing) is to speed run it by doing 50 Kanji a day as this will only take just over a month to complete the book. I actually found out about your channel from doing RTK as I was on KanjiKoohii looking for stories/mnemonics and one of the stories linked to your channel so really, I would of never found you if not for RTK XD
Awesome! I understood why you were leaving kanji out of the earlier lessons. With Alice's story, they'd help a lot with figuring out which words are structural, and which are vocabulary
@@DanneoYT I know right. But you don't need to do the whole book, only the most popular 1000 kanji + 250 primitives. Then you could get it done in 10-15 days ( recognition ) or 15-20 days ( production ). You will pick up the rest from immersion anyways. The point is to reach kanji fluency ( when brain stops seeing them as random scribbles and sees them as made up of elements )
I know she won't see this but I have to say the sound at 10:05 scared the life out of me. I've enjoyed your lessons very much. Thank you. Rest in Peace.
I cannot say enough how much I appreciate that all these amazing videos are free. This shows Dolly-sensei's genuine passion about the subject and spreading this passion to other people. RIP.
I am so happy to hear that. A lot of things don't lend themselves to story-lessons but I do think they are useful for introducing some points and also for getting us used to encountering things in context.
this is literally a gold mine!! Thank you Dolly Sensei, RIP. Also, I have found that it's taking some time to really learn each lessons and soak it up. I have been making notes in my iPhone notes app and might even go back to watch again. Anyone have study tips they found helpful? I'm also listening to the Nihongo Con Teppei podcast and reading some graded readers between lessons to see where things make more sense... Good luck everyone!!
Thanks a lot for another enjoyable and informative lesson. Two things I really like about it: first of all - as you‘ve already mentioned - the use of Kanji. It is exactly as you‘ve stated, the use of Kanji makes reading Japanese so much easier! The second thing I like is, you‘re explaining the grammar by using a real novel, not just some easy reading text to explain a singular grammar topic. This is really helpful and interesting. So again, thank you so much for your work. お疲れ様でした！
Thank you so much. I was trying to be beginner-friendly but I think only a minority of viewers are really beginners - and I am trying to make sure that they are still covered. My original intention in upping the kanji was only to use those in _Alice in Kanji Land_ - but as that adheres pretty strictly to first and second grade Japanese kanji I have tinkered a little bit - leaving out a few that look scarily complicated, and including a few that make the kana look too "bald" when they are left out! And of course following usual practice where that is relevant (for example 上がる is usually written with 上, but ~てあげる usually isn't). I'm hoping I have the balance about right.
Well, I think it‘s a about the good old trial and error(^^). When I started learning Japanese, it was already quite challenging to learn all those Kana. But soon I realized that it is much better to start learning Kanji as soon as possible. Yes, at first it looks frightening to a Novize, but as you already mentioned - Kanji are absolutely essential for the study of Japanese. And concerning your audience here, you’re right again. Your lessons are maybe a little bit too elaborate for a real “Newbie”. But for those with some basic knowledge your explanations are really helpful, entertaining and full of good advice. だから頑張って下さい(*☻-☻*)！
English is my second language, and my native language doesn't distiguish between adjectives and adverbs, so I always had trouble understanding their place in grammar. This totally cleared it up.
Oddly enough......in a video explaining も , it finally clicked why は can be a horrible particle compared to が when giving a compliment. I always heard that は can be for contrast, but it finally made sense. This channel is saving me from は vs が!
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Yeah. People always said that. They just never explained why. I thought it was just something to memorize, but this break down made me truly understand why. I'm so happy. I immediately bought your book after this.
I was confused with the noun + に, I was thinking that it somehow a target of an action but it's not since there's the 穴に... But when you said that, it acts an adjective, I remembered the pattern of "na-adjectives" that was taught to me!!! Where I was taught to turn まじめな into まじめに! My past Japanese learning experience really left a huge confusion... Thank you Cure Dolly Sensei for your contents! I'm really learning very well now!
It is really an adverb rather than and adjective (describing an action rather than a thing). Anything with に attached to it has to be a noun. Usually it marks a target but it can also turn certain kinds of noun into adverbs (now I think this is an extension of the targeting function, but I won't go into that here). Assimilating な and に is a strange way of teaching, because に is a logical particle and な isn't a particle at all, it's the copula (だ). However it is true that since _very_ large numbers of Japanese words are nouns (every word that came in from Chinese came in as a noun) there are ways to turn nouns into (or better, use them as) verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I am just about to release a new video on this, because I felt it needed to be made clearer. It will be going up in approximately eight hours from now!
It is really an adverb rather than and adjective (describing an action rather than a thing). Anything with に attached to it has to be a noun. Usually it marks a target but it can also turn certain kinds of noun into adverbs (now I think this is an extension of the targeting function, but I won't go into that here). Assimilating な and に is a strange way of teaching, because に is a logical particle and な isn't a particle at all, it's the copula (だ). However it is true that since _very_ large numbers of Japanese words are nouns (every word that came in from Chinese came in as a noun and still is a noun) there are ways to turn nouns into (or better, use them as) verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I am just about to release a new video on this, because I felt it needed to be made clearer. It will be going up in approximately eight hours from now!
Rewatching this just reminded me: have you made a video on the nuances of using の vs. こと? I recall the nominalizing の video but did you have one yet talking about both? Thanks for this series. Best explanations I've come across. Please keep up the great work.
Thank you! おどろいた is in the past tense because it is being used as an adjective for こと. We do this in English too. For example we say "a surprised look" or "a tired smile" - we are using the past tense of the verb "surprise" or "tire" to express that someone is in the state caused by having received the verb. Now admittedly it isn't the こと that was surprised, but this again is a common phenomenon in English. For example we say "a happy accident" when strictly speaking the accident wasn't happy, we were. Same with "a lucky find", "a sad day" etc.etc. In other words it is quite usual to a) use the past tense of a verb to express the state caused by it and b) to project our subjective feelings onto the thing that causes them (English is less likely to do both at the same time).
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks for the answers, I get it now. As a non native english speaker I never actually realized that the verb used as an adjective was indeed in the past tense. In french (my native tongue), because the word used is an adjective it isn't in any tense.
As usual video is great and explanations are just perfect! I have some minor questions: I didn't quite understand, ゆっくり is kinda an exception, and there are only few word like it that are, hm, can we call them natural adverbs? Coz it's not really noun, right? Also I encountered before ゆっくりと, with the same meaning, I haven't found much information about this form, it seems that adding と to an end is just to make word sound better and more formal, without any changing of the meaning? And about おどろいたことに - as far as I understand it's an expression? It's also given in some vocabularies. I can just remember it as "surprisingly" and can use it in any tense, as we are here talking in past tense, but for present tense it still would be the same, right?
Is ゆっくり a noun? We are here in possibly slightly controversial territory, but only slightly. Even the main J-E dictionaries agree that ゆっくり _is_ a noun among other things. It has to be a noun because we can use ゆっくりだ and ゆっくりな, so the only question is whether it is also anything other than a noun. This question is purely one of terminology, since it clearly works as an adverb. So we can call it an adjectival noun or a pure adverb that is also a noun, and for practical purposes (for foreign learners of Japanese) I think the latter modelling will serve us better. The dictionaries also call it a suru-verb (in addition to noun and adverb) which I would say it isn't, because ゆっくりする doesn't mean "do ゆっくり", it means "act ゆっくりly". In other words it is still working adverbially, like しずか in しずかにする but dropping the に. I would class it as "an adverbial noun that is allowed to drop に - and this is actually a small class of nouns, mostly ending in the い sound (not usually the い kana). Now I am not going to try to make a "case" for them being nouns because I don't think a question of accordance with the facts is at stake here (I would make a case against it's being a suru-verb - but note that even if it were, a suru-verb is in fact a noun). So why do I class it that way? Because a) it is as defensible as any other classification and b) I believe that in modelling Japanese for non-Japanese learners it will prove to be the most useful way to define it. According to my model, most things in Japanese that are not verbs adjectives or particles are in fact species of noun (perhaps in place of "in fact" I should say "can legitimately be seen as and beneficially modeled as"). おどろいたことに I would not call an expression. It is a piece of natural grammar and works with other adjectivals than おどろいた. おどろいた is here working as an adjectival as any verb can ( ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html ) . We can also use this form with adjectival nouns, as in ふしぎなことに or with adjectives, as in うれしいことに. In all cases the adjectival modifies the noun こと which then usually modifies a complete logical clause by telling us its emotional effect. Interestingly, not only is this ことに the same form as an adverbialized noun, even though it is used to modify a whole clause, but it is used in very nearly the same way as an English adverb-modifier. For example, we can say "surprisingly quickly" but we can also say "surprisingly, she didn't come". So no, I think "expression", if by that one means something that does not work logically as grammar, is not applicable to this construction.
I am learning Japanese based on your series, and I am finding it very enjoyable and easy to understand. I was just a bit confused on how "こと" works. I made up my own reasoning for why it can be used this way, I would like to know if it’s a correct assumption. I imagine it to function like と in the sense that everything before it is "quoted" as the abstract thing. So: 「しゃべるウサギをみた」ことがない (0 ga) [Talking rabbit seen] -> thing [abstract]/experience is not exist Alice had never seen a talking rabbit I also had an additional question regarding the double "が" implied in this sentence. If there is 2 が particles which is the actual topic of the sentence / how does it work? Thanks in advance!
Yes. I talk about putting a clause into the こと-box (or もの-box) we can then treat the loaded もの・こと as a noun. When there are two がs in one logical clause one of them will be part of a modifying (adjectival) clause ruclips.net/video/HmU2l0pM2gk/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 My bad, for some reason I did not clue in to the explanation. I can't believe I missed it lol. Thank you for your response!
Hello Cure Dolly, I am a bit confused about the sentence that appeared at 13:11. Could you please explain why in "でも、おどろいた ことに ゆっくり ゆっくり 落った", Odoroku is used in the ta-form (Odoroita) instead of just saying odoroku? (Part of my confusion comes from i-adjectives just following nouns with no modification; e.g. おいしい たべもの)
The thing to note here is that おどろく is a verb being used adjectivally (to describe a こと, or thing). And actually it is doing just what we do in English when we use the verb "surprise" or any similar verb as an adjective. We say an annoyed person, a surprised person etc. I.e. a person in the state of having been) surprised, annoyed etc. So the only question is why do we say the こと is surprised rather than Alice was surprised? This is a bit different from English but we do often use this kind expression strategy in other cases. We say "It was a happy day" when we, not the day, were happy. Or "her actions were suspicious" when it was we, not her actions that were suspicious. So this adjectival-transfer (from the subjective state to the cause of it) is not unusual and as we will see later is a much bigger part of Japanese than it is in English. Does this clarify?
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49Yes, I do find it a little strange how 'おどろく' is a noun instead of verb as it ends in an u-sound, but I'm fairly certain I understand my question now. Nice lessons and thanks for the explanation.
@@yugawaakeel8372 あぁごめんなさい。That was a slip of the keyboard! I meant to say a verb, which of course it is There's nothing to stop a noun ending with an う-row kana and many do, but this is a verb. Obviously since it is in the past tense here and nouns don't have tenses. I am very prone to typing the wrong word (a small circuitry problem) but I usually catch it and correct it before hitting return. My apologies (corrected now. Thank you for pointing it out)
Hi, thank you for your lessons, they're great. Can you please explain why it's 早く走って, not 速く走って? Some quick googling said that the former is related to time and the latter is related to speed.
I've done several videos on words with alternate kanji. In most cases there is one "base" kanji that is learned first (in Japanese schools). Usually one can use this one for all the uses and the others are optional for indicating particular uses. This is true of 早い・速い in which 早い is the base and can be used for "early" and "fast". I generally - especially in the early part of the course - use the most basic kanji as it is the one learners are most likely to be familiar with.
@@chad7615 Kind of. There are a lot of cases like this. For example if you say you are talking about watching a movie, the "correct" (that is, the more specific) form is 観る but it is not "wrong" - or unusual - to write 見る. _Five_ common variants on 見る here: ruclips.net/video/6Kh1AJx77Ng/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for this I was so confused as to why you weren't using 速く and also as to why people use 映画を見た -------- This explains a lot. どうもありがとうございました :))
Thank you very much for the lesson. As you have explained in the lesson, when we replace i in an i-adjective with ku, we have an adverb. So how about "yoru osoku", "yoru osoku made" ? i have encountered those expressions somewhere (maybe i am wrong). My question is that if osoku in those cases is an adverb ? or "adjective-ku" has another role but you have not covered yet ? or in Japanese , an adverb can stand after a noun ...because i think it shoud be "osoi yoru".
Thank you! In よるおそくまで the おそく is indeed an adverb. It is not modifying the noun よる but the verb. What verb? Well, there has to be a verb. よるおそくまで means "until late at night" which obviously cannot make a sentence on its own. _Something_ must be happening until late at night, and that something is the verb. So in よるおそくまでよんだ "(I) read until late at night", the verb is よんだ, read and おそい is an adverb saying more about the reading (it was late) よる is a modifier (white engine) telling us more about "late" (in-the-night late) and まで gives us "until" but does not interfere with the fact that おそくis an adverb describing よむ. So we can have this sentence with or without まで, meaning either "I read late at night" (without it) or "I read _until_ late at night" (with it), but either way it is telling us more about the reading-verb よむ. The same, of course, goes for whatever else may have been happening late at night or until late at night.
This combination, and also はやくに are found quite frequently. The に seems to be redundant but it does serve a purpose. You rarely find it with most adverbs from adjectives such as さむく or あかく, but おそい and はやい have double meanings - late/slow and early/fast. The attachment of に, which is the particle used to position events in time (in absolute time-expressions), makes it clear that we are talking about an event taking place at an early or a late time, rather than happening quickly or slowly.
i've been doing input learning and except for slowing me down, it really stressed me out. So its a good thing that there's also this approach that has no pressure and actually fun at the same time. I feel like if I reached atleast 40 of this guide Im gonna be able to challenge myself at watching anime without subtitles. Alongside this I can now only use Anki for kanji and vocab, what do you think is the best way to be consistent, or things that I need to set in mind? Thanks for your videos Dolly-sensei :))
watch it with japanese subtitles and put the phrases and also individual words into anki to review, then rewatch and rewatch and rewatch and rewatch...and rewatch! (it might take you one month to do your first episode)
Dolly, have you thought about a focused lesson on adverb-adverbs? You mention creating adverbs from nouns with に, and from adjectives with く; but what about the third category, like はっきり or どんどん, some of which take と (and what's that about? How does it relate to と as a quotation marker, or と as a conjunction), and some of which do not. Is there anything generalizable to be said about these? There seem to be so many of these adverby things and they are (to me) very hard to retain.
I covered these adverbial nouns (which is what they mostly are) here: ruclips.net/video/8AXyP5GeJFg/видео.html (last section) と is used with some adverbials, especially those that are pseudo-onomatopoeia like どんどん. The original idea is "quoting" the "noise" (although it isn't really a noise) something makes while doing something, as in うさぎがぴょんぴょんと飛んだ。But from here the use has widened considerably in some cases.
Do you have an videos or articles on the subject verbs like おどろ く (emotion and desire) going to their past tense but still having "present" meaning? You said they "shift very easily from the thing that experiences the emotion to the thing that causes the emotion and back." Here, Alice is experiencing the feeling of being surprised and the hole caused this feeling. Why is おどろいた not written as おどろいて? The experience of being surprised seems to be a continual state and I think that the cause could be past tense or continually "causing" Alice to feel surprised warranting the use of te form. I ask partly because I'm unaware if there is a case where putting おどろ く(or any verb) in a different tense for the same purpose shown here would be more suitable. Great video by the way as well. I learned some new things!
Thank you s much for your kind appreciation. You couldn't use おどろいて here because without いる the て-form does _not_ indicate a a continuous state or action (past or present). In fact in a modifying clause like this it would be completely meaningless. The use of the past tense to express a continuing state (even in the present) is a very common linguistic phenomenon. It happens in English all the time. You don't say "I am surprise", do you? You say "I am surprised". The same with "tired" and other states. These are the past forms (though they are so commonly used in this way that people may forget that). Literally "I am (in a state of having been) surprised (and therefore still am)". So the only difference from English really is this ability to move the state from the receiver of the experience to the cause of the experience. Even this isn't completely unknown in English (we can say "we were happy that day" or "that was a happy day". The day wasn't experiencing happiness. However it is much commoner and more regular in Japanese and I have talked about that at some length here: ruclips.net/video/X_HlngOAvX8/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for the response. You make it all seem so simple. I can't believe I forgot about いる being the verb that defines something's existence. The past tense usage now makes perfect sense too. I can't count how many times I've come across this in the last month or so in my readings where I just skim over it and say "I'll figure it out the more I read." Thank you!
Thanks for the great lesson, I really enjoy all your videos! I have a question about the third category of adverbs you named, when you were talking about ゆっくり。There seems to be lots of Japanese words that follow this ｘっｘり structure: ぐっすり、がっかり、そっくり、すっかり、はっきり, etc. Is there a name for these kinds of words? i have the most difficult time remembering them and want to learn more about them
They are structurally a class of noun - adverbial nouns - one of the three "super-noun" classes that have each have a property that other nouns lack (in this case being able to drop the に in forming adverbials). I talk about the three super-nouns here: ruclips.net/video/8AXyP5GeJFg/видео.html
Question about the sentence at 4:36. You explained that we can't make definite statements about the emotions of other people (Lesson 9 i think). Then why is it that we can make a definite statement about what Alice has seen in her life? We can't know for sure what she has seen, just like we can't know for sure what she feels.
What about と adverbs? I often see adverbs with 「と」, 「とした」 or 「として」 attached, and I wasn't able to understand the difference between those three and the plain form without anything attached. Some example from a short story: 「その手をそろりそろりと井戸に突っこんだ」, 「ゆっくりと三分の一開けた」, 「ちょうど膝丈ほどまである井戸は、がっしりとした白っぽい岩に囲まれていた」. I'm wondering if with 「とした」 it modifies a noun, but I'm not sure. I tried skimming your video list but I didn't find a video on this topic, hope I didn't miss anything.
と is the quotation particle and in origin it is "quoting" the way something is done, so it is most regularly used with "onomatopoeia" as they are called in English although it only covers a certain area of these Japanese "likeness" words そろりそろり here is an example. It can also be applied to a wider range of words but still with the root idea that we are "quoting" the manner in which it is done. とした is slightly different in that it is saying how we "take it" to be (literally how we "do" it to be "quoted" - to use a very crude assimilation to English concepts).
Thanks for the explanation! I have a question regarding the た-form + ことに grammatical structure. I understand that the に in this case converts a noun into an adverb. However, currently whenever I see a に in a sentence, I immediately think of the に-car. Do you have an explanation on how the ことに works expressed in the "train"-framework, or are these two separate cases?
こと is what I call a こと-box. We'll meet の and こと boxes later in the course. What they do is put what went before them into a box which is essentially a noun. So it makes whatever is being adverbialized (whatever is modifying the pronoun こと - therefore the content of the こと-box) into a noun that can take the に. So then we have a に-car which works similarly any other に-car noun that is acting as an adverb (such as 静かに). Does this clarify?
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you very much for answering! I have such a bad and traumatic experience learning Japanese at uni that when it got to that part of the video and I didn't get it I panicked haha you are srsly a Japanese structure goddess lol
Do you all understand all this from just the previous videos in the playlist? I´m following roughly but difficult to know meanings of everything before she explains it
Thanks for one of many great videos! I haven't watched them all yet so sorry if this has already been answered. In what way can yukkuri be considered a noun? What "noun-like" behaviours does it exhibit? Thanks in beforehand!
First my apologies for a very slow reply - I somehow lost track of your comment. I believe that most Japanese words that don't fall into one of the other main categories are in fact nouns or noun-like entities. This may in some cases be controversial, but even the J-E dictionaries tend to call this one a noun, though they also call it a suru-verb and an adverb (that is to say they say that it can play all three roles). Now suru-verb seems to me to be completely amiss. It is no more a suru-verb than 静か is, When we ゆっくり(と)する we are not doing the action ゆっくり (there is no such action) but are acting in a やっくり manner just as with 静かにする we are acting in a quiet manner (not doing an action called 静か). Now I think what leads to calling ゆっくり a suru-verb is the fact that it can have する directly attached to it like a suru verb and unlike a noun working adverbially (or, of course an adjective working adverbially, which it clearly isn't). However it doesn't actually do what a suru-verb does. It is working adverbially, even with する. It is certainly more defensible to call it a pure adverb (at least some of the time) and it is really a matter of how we choose to model it. I find it more useful to model it as a noun acting adverbially, sometimes marked with の but allowed to drop it.
PS - I should add that it it were in fact a suru-verb, that would only reinforce my contention that it is fundamentally a noun since that is precisely what a suru-verb is: a noun that can be "verbalized" by attaching する to it. However I can't see this as a defensible model.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I see. Interpreting most japanese words as nouns has certainly cleared up some confusion for me. Thanks again, I appreciate the answer.
I think it does make things easier to understand and handle and that is why I do it that way. Modelling of language has two criteria in my view - 1 it must be in accord with the facts (the textbooks don't seem to have noticed this one in many cases) and 2 it must be suitable for its purpose. My purpose is to help non-native learners understand Japanese structure so my models may differ in other ways from models with different purposes (for example Japanese-for-Japanese academic models).
In the sentence where Alice fell straight down , アリスはすぐ下に落ちた, is に marking 下 as an adverb that describes how she fell or as a location to where she fell? Also is すぐ下 one word or two separate nouns.
It would be an adverb because すぐ下 here a direction, not a place (this from context - it was long drop and we don't know the bottom). "One word or two" is really a concept from English/European languages. Japanese has no word spacing for a reason. Words are very fluid. While we can and dictionaries do nail them down for purposes of reference and convenience, one should not take these as absolutes. Interestingly native Japanese grammar has many technical terms for elements of speech, but the concept "word" is not among them..
ドリー先生、thank you very much for your lessons! I have a question about だった in the sentence on 12:00. Maybe it's my misunderstanding, but I don't remember if you were talking in your previous videos about this form of... だ、i guess? Is this a past form of だ in the sentence type AがBだ ?
Hi, im a bit confused about adjectives becoming adverbs with ku. I've rewatched episode 6 and 7 but im still a bit lost. So かわいい -> かわいく, this gave me the impression that 早い would become not fast as 早く. I assume this whole not cute thing only applies with the Nai helper verb? Thanks!
Thanks for the awesome video as always. I've been following this up to now and just have a question small question in mind. It's about the word たて穴 Would it translate as standing hole? a combined word of tatsu and ana? I can't seemed to find the word in the dictionary. Sorry if this is a confusing question, I was under the impression that "te" form is for the sake of combining one verb with another verb. So, it's okay to use the "te" form like this and use it to describe a noun as a form of adjective? on this case, if it's litterally translated, would it be "standing hole"? Am I understanding it correct? Thanks for the kind response in advance.
This たて is not the て-form of 立つ, "stand" (I suspect that they are etymologically related though the kanji aren't the same). It is the noun たて, which means in this case "vertical dimension" - so the meaning is pit, shaft or vertical hole. The construction is the kind of two-noun combination-word we have seen with words like 本棚 (ほんだな), bookshelf.
thanks for the promt reply. I appriciate that. I guess the reason why it doesnt have a tenten on it is because you cant add it in the kana "あ" in ana for the combination of two nouns.
It isn't an absolute rule that the second noun must take a ten-ten, though it tends to do so most of the time when it starts with an unvoiced consonantal sound or indeed with the は, ひ, ふ, へ, ほ column (so おもちゃ, toy and はこ, box become おもちゃばこ when combined to make toybox. But of course there are many words that either can't take a ten-ten (like あな) or already have one. PS - no need to worry about "unvoiced consonantal sounds. It's simpler to just remember that if the second noun _can_ take a ten-ten it usually will. And if it can't it won't, of course.
Thanks again for the promt response. I`ll be sure to remember that. I might be asking a few questions more as I browse your videos. (if I cant find the answers on google or japanese dictionaries or on the comments section.)
I have a question,please: regarding mono for concrete thing and koto for abstract, is there any ambiguous cases where the boundary between them is unclear?
I can't recall こと being used for a concrete object, but もの, while mostly applied to concrete things, is flexible to some degree and can sometimes refer to non-concrete things that would more commonly be associated with こと.
To simplify it, there is always が, but not always is it visible. Actually, most of the time it is not visible. The zero が is a theoretical tool to help you with grasping how Japanese think and how the language functions, but since Japanese is not ego-driven language like English, it mostly is not expressed outright except for certain situations where the subject needs to be expressed. So, Dolly sometimes does not show zeroが as being there (when there is no visible が subject marker), but it is there, however in an actual sentence it is not said obviously. English also uses zero articles. Such as with: I need a bowl of rice. ← indefinite article I like the rice in this restaurant. ← definite article I eat (zero article) rice every day. ← ZERO article
I think the way of looking at this is to start by looking at に as marking the target of transformations. Whenever A becomes B, whether Sakura becomes a frog or the day becomes sunny, we use に to mark the B - the target of the transformation. This can also be used with transforming actions. So with 静かに歩く we are saying that our walking should be transformed into quiet walking, or in other words the act of walking (verb), just like a person (noun) can become or be quiet. In this older video lesson ruclips.net/video/p_QWMdZhSvU/видео.html I referred to this as "the target of the transformation of the action", which is a bit cumbersome but is essentially what is happening. With きれいになる remember that きれい is a noun. An adjectival noun, but adjectival nouns are still nouns. So we are just saying "become pretty" exactly as we might say "become a frog" - the only difference with adjectival nouns is that they represent states rather than separate entities. And - as a side note - with abstract nouns like 魔法 or 不思議 there is a wide area of overlap between the two, which is explained in the standard texts by calling them "no adjectives" which only causes confusion in my view.
すぐ is an adverbial telling us that the fall was direct. 下に indicates the direction. Between them they mean straight down. Why do we say "I am frightened" and not "I am frighten"? Same reason.
Does the adverb always modify the closest following verb? For example, after getting a description of how a country is a natural impregnable fortress, i get this: 永遠に外敵の侵入を許す事は あり得ないかのように見えた。 At first i thought 永遠に was modifying 許す in the relative clause but it feels weird. "It looked like as if forever allowing the invasion of foreign forces was unlikely." but 永遠に is actually modifying 見えた, and therefore not part of the relative clause. "The invasion of foreign forces, forever looked as if it was unlikely." Is that correct? I hope i am making sense.
Sometimes phrases in all languages are technically ambiguous (more often than we tend to notice in native or well-known languages). We automatically apply rules of likelihood to these and it is an unwritten rule that if you want to say something _unlikely,_ then you need to clarify that by your choice of words. So your reading of this is correct. The other would be possible but unlikely. More on the ambiguity factor in language here: ruclips.net/video/gcbbSW-KuTQ/видео.html
One thing that I was wondering when you explained the も particle (which btw was very well explained!) is that if も makes it so that the comment on the new topic is the same of the old topic, why do we have to repeat the sentence after saying アリスも? Just curious and I'm sure you'll explain that later in a separate video, just curious.
I was under the impression that すぐ下に落ちた would mean like "quickly/immediately fell down" instead of falling straight down. Would that be correct as well?
In this case すぐ is modifying 下 rather than 下に落ちた. すぐ下 = directly down/directly under. It could probably be read the other way but I think that with the natural tendency of language to try to remove ambiguities it would be more likely to be すぐに which can only be read as "immediately/quickly". More on the way language in general and Japanese in particular deals with ambiguity here: ruclips.net/video/gcbbSW-KuTQ/видео.html (It's something that doesn't get taught and should)
the alternate version of alice in wonderland where alice decided not to follow the rabbit and instead went back to her sister and continued her life as normal would have been an absolute bestseller, i'm sure
I'm slightly confused about not grammar this time, but the existence of the rest of the sentence after も. It seems kind of redundant to effectively say "The rabbit jumped into the hole. Alice jumped into the hole." Since も already tells us that the same comment applies to the new topic, wouldn't it be easier to just say "アリスも"? Or does that somehow lead to confusion?
It would be possible and about as unclear as in English. That's to say, you _could_ say "the rabbit jumped into the hole. Alice also". It would sound a bit truncated and might leave some people thinking "Alice also what?"
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Aah, eye sea. I had been thinking it was closer to "Alice did the same." So in the case of longer sentences then, how would we say something shorter like "Alice did the same?" Like if the rabbit had done a list of actions in a particular order, and we didn't want it to be long winded way to say that she copied that list of actions in a particular order.
I was wondering about the sentence しゃべるウサギを見た事がない。 I would have never thought to just use “しゃべる” in this way. I figured it would have been used like しゃべり if it’s being used as a noun. Since you have it as a verb. For a talking rabbit. Could you have used しゃべり here for this sentence? Does it basically just come down to this is the way things work in the language if you were describing a “talking something( in this case a rabbit).
しゃべる isn't being used as noun. It is being used to modify a noun (ウサギ). All three engines can modify nouns. This was explained back in the lesson on adjectives: ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html - Very important. One of the keystones of the language.
@@coheedmonstar33 It's really worth going back over them from time to time. As you gather more information and experience you learn more even from lessons you thought you fully understood - it's a common phenomenon.
I'm sorry to be this late to ask a question - here we go. Are "onomatopeic nouns" the only exception to the ～な／～に rule for trasforming a noun into an adjective/adverb or are there more, even outside of that particular group? Thanks ^^
Obviously not every noun is a candidate for being used as an adverb or adjective (foot, desk are simple examples). Using と is not limited to ones that are obviously "onomatopoeic" - there are some others that prefer と because they are regarded in some way as "quotational" adverbs. It isn't advisable to learn these in the abstract - you will pick them up as you encounter them in immersion.
Startled and surprised, are they the same? No word is exactly the same as another. Each has its own shade, its own place on the meaning spectrum. The place to learn the weight and nuance of words is not classes, lists or dictionaries, but immersion in the language: More about the meaning spectrum here: ruclips.net/video/CpiELpGR-VU/видео.html
I am confused how よどろく changes to よどろいた. Is this because it is the past tense form? I thought the past tense only appears once in the sentence, and at the very end.
Lesson 4 on tenses and Lesson 5 on た/て form explain the change (which does make the past tense). Lesson 6 on adjectivals explains how any Engine (verb, adjective or copula) can be used as an adjectival. In this case the adjectival おどろいた (not よどろいた) is acting as an adjectival for the noun こと. You'll find the relevant lessons here: ruclips.net/p/PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks so much for your help! I'll be sure to rewatch those lessons to make sure I understand/remember. It's so great you are able to answer questions with so many subscribers!
This is one of the toughest points of Japanese to me so far. It came up SO often (same as "passive") in the intermediate text books. Literally every 3rd sentence uses it. Just to double check I get it... しゃべる兎を見たことがない is (She) has never seen a talking rabbit. しゃべる兎を見なかった is (She) had not seen a talking rabbit. This is different in that you are saying at some point in the past she hadn't seen a talking rabbit but may have at some point after that point seen one. しゃべる兎を見ない is she doesn't see a talking rabbit now or in the future. Wondering if something like 従来,しゃべるウサギを見ない gets you to the same place? Basically past and nonpast... neither get at the same this as ことが modified by a verb clause, right?
Yes. Most of the time しゃべるウサギを見なかった is best translated simply as "she didn't see a talking rabbit". しゃべるウサギを見たことがない means literally "the fact (thing/matter) of her having seen a talking rabbit does not exist" and in natural English would be said as "she has never seen a talking rabbit". However rather than thinking of the English it is better to try to see it in Japanese - that ことがない what こと? the しゃべるウサギを見たこと. A big part of the problem with the English teaching of Japanese is that they try to get you to memorize these "grammar points" as magical formulas, when in fact they are just logical speech _if you think about them in Japanese_ and not in English. The term 従来 really means conventional, normal usual. Often used when talking about a new method of doing something as opposed to the one that has been used up to now. So 従来,しゃべるウサギを見ない would be an instance of Dictionary Dumping learnjapaneseonline.info/2018/08/25/on-dotards-and-dictionary-dumping-getting-japanese-words-right/ That is using words for what they appear to mean in an English-Japanese dictionary without having any familiarity with them as living entities.
I am not gonna lie, I got completely mindfucked by ~takotoni . Its something I did not understand at all before this video but thinking of it in multiple steps helped. こと "noun-ifies" the verb, and に "adverb-ifies" a noun. It really does mean Japanese just fits together like Lego. Its made me think, if I dont understand a sentence in Japanese, I just need to try breaking it down to its absolute most simple parts and piece it together.
at 13:30 why isnt「おどろいて」used but「おどろいた」in 「おどろいた ことに」? i would have guessed it would be te-form instead of the past tense ta-form to connect two nouns together
There is no て form of the た form so that is not possible. However the use of the past tense to express a state is common in language and happens in English too. In fact. When we say someone is tired or something looks worn we are using the past tense to express a present state. In fact we even do it with the English equivalent of おどろいた when we say "you seem surprised" - once again the past tense is used to express a present state. This is logical because in all these cases the word in question is a verb and the state is the state that prevails because the verb happened (after we tire we are tired, after something wears out, it is worn out, after something surprises us, we are surprised).
Thank you for the lessons! I'm really enjoying these. I'm struggling trying to understand what is going on with も and ば in this example sentence that I found online. も～ ば～ も～ このレストランは、値段も安ければ味もいい。 The food in this restaurant is cheap and delicious. To begin with, I was confused on why も was being used twice, why not just say このレストランは値段が安くて、味もいい。or something like that. But by watching this video, and your video on how も works in combinations, I think I've been able to get some sort of understanding. It is because, we want to add more to the comment about the restaurant, right? As for this restaurant, in addition, the prices are cheap, and in addition, taste is good too. Right? It still seems very strange to me to use も, because in my head I think of it as "even", "in addition", "also" or something similar. And saying something like: "This restaurant also has good prices and also the food tastes good", is extremely weird. But that's not the worst part, も I can kind of understand why it's there, however, I cannot for the life of me understand why 安ければ is used here. There is nothing conditional going on in this sentence! Or at least the english version of it. Is my understanding of ければ completely off? I hope you will be able to shed some light on this piece of grammar for me.
In every language there are "pure idioms" - that is wordings that defy exact logical analysis as to why they mean what they mean - such as "it's up to you" or "a far cry" in English. A non-native English speaker can't work these out from looking up the individual words and understanding the grammar. Japanese doesn't have a large amount of these but of course it has some. The problem is that current Japanese-for-foreigners treats all regular Japanese as if it worked this way and one just had to remember a gobbet of Japanese vs a gobbet of English with a roughly-similar meaning as a "pattern". In the case you cite we really do have a "pure idiom". We are literally saying: "As for that restaurant, if the price is also cheap the flavor is also good". The two もs don't really translate to double-also in English because this is standard in Japanese: 母も父も知っている = both mother and father know But we are still left with "As for that restaurant, if the price is cheap the flavor is also good" It could be compared, perhaps to Irish-English expressions like "if there was one of them there were a dozen". It can't be put down to an older meaning of the ば conditional because we can do the same thing with なら. There is clearly a colloquial usage "if x also y" meaning "x and also y". Every language contains "pure idioms" like this, and one really does "just have to learn them". Fortunately, despite what the textbooks teach, this does _not_ apply to 99% of Japanese!
Thank you very much for the reply! While it is the tiniest bit frustrating to know that there is not much I can do about this, it is comforting to know that it is not my understanding of japanese that's failing me! Perhaps I will try to get a better understanding of this idiom by looking into how it came to be. Thank you again, and I look forward to your next video!
You are like me - you like everything to tie up logically (you're not an android too are you?) All I can say is that with that kind of mind you definitely came to the right shop, both in this channel and in learning Japanese. Among human languages, Japanese is by far the most logical I have ever encountered. I don't think there is any that doesn't have the odd "inexplicable" quirk - though as you suggest, if you look into it deeply enough it probably _can_ be explained. My job here is to keep things relatively simple - so some of my more complex explanations literally end up on the virtual cutting-room floor. That is, even after I film them I cut them out because my job is a trade-off between dotting all the i's and keeping things simple and uncluttered. However if you do find out anything about how the "if x then also y" = "a and also y" idiom came about in Japanese, I would be very grateful if you would pop a comment here. It would certainly satisfy my urge to tie up all the logical knots!
I have a question regarding the に particle I encountered in a sentence. I haven't finished your series yet, so as far as I understand, there are three uses of the に particle: 1) target [physical, purpose, existence, or transformation], 2) attached to a specific time [e.g. 月曜日に], or 3) turning a noun into an adverb. So in the following sentence what purpose does the に serve? 晩御飯に食べた物を吐いてしまった。 Now, the に doesn't seem to me to serve the "target" function (either physical, purpose, existence, or transformation). So is the 晩御飯 an adverb describing the eating of food or a time (e.g. dinner time)? Thanks again!
Yes you are right. に is also the absolute time marker that marks the time or period when something happens. I talk about this toward the end of this video: ruclips.net/video/lU5rmrAORDY/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks! So just to clarify, in the above sentence, the に is an absolute time marker? What about in this sentence?: 最近、やっと仕事に慣れました。 I can't quite figure out what the に is doing.
@@niket527 Remember that Japanese has no prepositions. Most of the time where a preposition would be needed in English (essentially showing a less "direct" and object-oriented relation to something one is acting on/in relation to than を) then we will use either に or と. So here the "target" of our becoming used to is marked by に, not を because we are not acting on it directly. For more on these subtler uses of に (and と) please see this video ruclips.net/video/gVqs4TzqySw/видео.html - It is more about human interaction but perhaps helps to understand the range.
Another point here is to recall that while に marks the "target" of the action in "push" sentences, it marks the "source" of the action in "pull" sentences such as those that use the receptive helper or constructions like Xてもらう, so in cases where the action is one that changes us rather than the external entity に is sometimes used because を suggests an other-change action. More on this here (if it is a little advanced feel free to skip it for now) ruclips.net/video/CESFJaFp8FI/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Ah I see, because 慣れる is a self-move verb を wouldn't really make sense. Man it's complex, but when you understand the puzzle pieces it all starts to make sense, slowly but surely!
What about adverbs that use words which aren't adverbs or abverbed (???) in english? For example: in the sentence 夜の底が白くなった there is 白く As far as I understand, く makes 白 into adverb. Of course in english we don't say 'whitely' or such. Now, なった, as I understand means, in this case, became. So does one read this as 'became white'? Because 'becoming in a white manner' sounds quite silly. Also, the beginning of the sentence is 夜の底が. Does this mean 'bottom of the night' in same way as we say 'bottom of the ocean' ? Am I getting it anywhere near right if I understand the sentence as 'The bottom of the night became white' ?
Really the important thing is to throw English in the trash can. Japanese is not English and we will tie ourselves in endless knots if we (like the textbooks) try to understand it as if it were. An adverb in Japanese modifies a verb (tells us more about it). The core of a Japanese sentence is the subject (A-car) and predicate (B-engine) and everything else in the sentence is telling us more about A or more about B. So in: 夜の底が白くなった The core is A夜の底が Bなった. The depth of the night became. The adverb tells us more about the Engine "became". How did it become? It became whitely. This does not work in English. This is not how English does things. It is how Japanese does things.
Hi cure dolly, Just wanted to ask a follow up question again about this video. its about the word 込む. been really confused about this for a while now and I must appologize if this is an obvious question. because it always says "to be crowded" if you search its translations in dictionaries. if its just the same, i think thats going to be confusing. like 電車が込んでいた。can be translated as the train became crowded or entered somewhere or remain the same? . . . or would there be a better way to differentiate it? sorry if this is a confusing question. thanks for the reply in advance.
This is a good question and not a simple one to answer. The dictionaries have to try to explain in concise English concepts that actually do not exist in English at all. 込む has a number of meanings, all united by the same fundamental concept - I really should do a video on this. In the kind of context you cite the meaning is - put into English "be crowded". However the English is a passive construction while the Japanese is not (Japanese has no passive - not even the receptive helper verb which gets called the "passive conjugation" by the English texts ruclips.net/video/cvV6d-RETs8/видео.html ). So what is really going on here? In Japanese the train is the agent. It is doing something and what it is doing can really only be translated into English as being crowded, since English is in many cases actually incapable of rendering the more "animist" nature of many Japanese constructions - this is a key point in understanding Japanese which I explained here ruclips.net/video/vk3aKqMQwhM/видео.html However, in this case we don't need to worry too much about that (though I do recommend following up the videos I linked). And the reason for this is that in this particular construction 込んでいる the core verb (the sentence engine) is in fact いる, which means "exist" and what we are saying is that the train _exists_ in a state of crowded-being (note that I have to use the be/exist concept _twice_ to put this into English - but the Japanese is only using it once). So if we can understand that 込む is a verb, then 込んでいる simply means "exist in a state of doing that verb". In most cases this is easily understood as the English and Japanese constructions are very similar. For example 歩いている means "exist in a state of walking"; and "is walking" means exactly the same thing (is = exist). 込む is in fact trickier since English cannot express the concept of "being crowded" without turning it passive - but as I say we can probably manage without worrying about that too much. It will start to become clearer with the above videos. So the only question that remains is why do we use the living-things form of "exist", いる for a non-living thing? Well it is not absolutely true to say that いる only depicts living things. The truth is that it depicts anything that has or appears to have _will_ - and for reasons I have explained in this video ruclips.net/video/cYrqFjPvwSI/видео.html the difference between 〜ている and 〜てある is that the former treats the subject more like a willed being whether it is (from a Western perspective) or not. A complex answer, I know. But if you really want to understand how these things work (and your question seems to indicate that you do) then we have to re-adjust our thinking to the way Japanese grammar looks at things. Dictionaries of course don't do that. Their job is to give as-near-as-possible brief English definitions. And sometimes as-near-as-possible is - in terms of real structure - nowhere near.
Thanks for going through all that trouble to answer my question. your the best, sensei!! I'll be watching those links now. havent watched all of your videos yet, so I must appologize if the answer is already there.
You are welcome. I am always happy to see people thinking seriously about structure (not that structure is an end in itself but it is so helpful to understanding). I haven't answered the exact question you asked. But what do aim to do is to build up all the elements people need for answering questions for themselves. This is the fundamental difference between the textbook approach and the structural approach. Textbooks like the Kanzen Master 文法 books, at the higher levels, devolve into long, long lists of "grammar points" with lists of 接続 (how they connect into sentences). If we learn the structure a lot of this becomes unnecessary. We can see for ourselves what things mean and why and (consequently) how they must connect into sentences. Asking questions helps with this process. There is still a lot to explain (that's why I keep making videos) - a language is a pretty big and complex affair - it has to express the whole range of human experience. But more and more my videos keep cross-referencing each other and right from the start my aim is to present information that makes people think not, "another twenty facts to memorize", but "another swathe of Japanese that falls into place and makes sense". Which is an over-lengthy answer to your point about whether the answer was already there. It isn't, but the elements needed to find it are. And helping you to find and apply those elements is part of what I do.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 sorry, been really busy with holidays which is why i couldnt get back sooner. but, you actually did answer my question. based on my understanding, we cant go ahead and translate things word per word. dictionaries arent perfect, and meaning of a word will change depending on the sentence. in 電車が込んでいる sentence. いる was used, it is talking about the crowd of people(A does B). but if aru was used, then its talking about the train. i.e. entering into a tunnel. (A is B) . in the end, the engine is iru. 込む is just a carriage so it just tells us more about the sentence and not exactly running it. 込む i believe is internsitive, other move, so. . . . I dont know, theres a lot to consider in this sentence. (￣ー￣) (i`ll get back on this after watching all your videos) It just became confusing for me because 込む is considered one of the most common verb in japanese. but hey, how often do you say does a place even become crowded? but on the video here where alice enters into the tunnel, you use とび込んだ so it shed some light on me that 込む have a lot of uses. its just a big headache that some dictionaries doesnt show those other meaning but always highlight "being crowded" instead.
Can I ask your help for this sentence? "珍しく色々起こる日だよ". 珍しく should be an adverb but how does it works in this sentence? How does it modify the meaning of 色々? I guess it should literally mean "Today new and various things will happen", right? I can get that by intuition.
I think it means "Unusually many/various things will happen this day" 珍しく, being an adverbial is of course not modifying a noun, but the verb next door to it 起こる. If we dispense with natural English it is more like various things will unusually occur today. Probably implying both that it is unusual for it to happen and that the occurences are unusual in themselves.
Great video as always. Personally I prefer the normal lessons, but that's mainly because I am still a beginner and have a very small vocabulary. Would it be okay for you to check if these sentences are correct? (they might be weird but I don't know many words so that's all I can make). 桜が美しく歌った。Sakura sang beautifully. 犬がやんちゃなに走っていなかった。The dog was not running naughtily. Thanks!
They are both correct although the implication of the second is more "the dog was naughtily not running" (i.e. failing to run constituted the mischief).
Up to this point in my slow japanese learning journey I have mostly been using the Japanese from zero book series, but your lessons are very informative. I decided to try your books: unlocking Japanese and Alice in kanji land. What are your thoughts on the from zero series? Greetings from Norway.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Well i liked it because it doesn't overload me with to much text and explanations in each lesson, it has dedicated workbook areas and the author also has a long running video series on RUclips where he goes through the lessons. That being said, after watching your lessons up to now I can also see that it uses some conventional Western "Japanese grammar".
I am confused why 上がる is used over 上げる in relation to jump. From my little experience with Japanese grammar, I learned that 上げる is transitive, where you do the action of raising something, and 上がる is intransitive where the action of rising happens on its own. Since Alice is doing the jumping, why then does Japanese use the intransitive to attach to jump? I realize I can just memorize that it is used in this way, but I want to understand the reason for it happening this way. Thanks again for a great video!
Because Alice in jumping is raising herself and not something else. I think the terms self-move and other-move (which translate what these types of word actually are in Japanese) are much clearer than the English terms intransitive and transitive (which don't fit Japanese all the time anyway). The lesson on that is here: ruclips.net/video/ELk1dqaEmyk/видео.html . If we use these terms I think it is clear that jumping up is a self-move action.
Oh you address that in lesson 15. I plan to watch the entire series in the order it is presented anyway, so I will get to it in a few minutes. I started yesterday, and plan to finish the series today. Thanks for clearing that up!
I just want to add to this that this series is actually helping me to understand English grammar better as well. I'm not a native English speaker and sometimes the different terminology can be confusing, but your comparisons to how things are in English make things "click" not only in Japanese but in English as well. I wish there was an "Organic English" course too, haha.
Interestingly, the past tense is used in English to express a state, for example, as in this case: "surprised" is the past tense of the verb "surprise". It is also used to express the state of being surprised, as in "I am surprised". That is exactly what 驚いた is doing here. So near-literally (literal translation is impossible here) 驚いたことに means something like "(it was a) a surprised thing (that...)". Why "surprised thing" rather than "surprising thing"? This is similar to English "It was a happy day".
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Ah, so when attaching adjectives or adverbs to reflect the state something is in (in this case, what type of thing falling slowly would be) I use past tense, just as past tense is used to describe present states in English. I assume this is similar to how many things that are verbs in English are declaring states or things in Japanese? This is quite interesting, considering Japanese doesn't use past tense when declaring somethings state. It does feel like a slight inconsistency.
H i, thank you for making these. Im currently struggling with the stem system. I was wondering what I could do to grasp it better. I think i might need more exposure. Thanks!
I'm afraid I cobbled it together out of several old versions partly for copyright reasons and partly to make sure it included points I wanted to teach.
@@elmhurstenglish5938 The illustrations are copyright-free older ones from all over the Internet, in some cases edited by my sister (no, I'm not human. She's a doll).
Sensei, "めったに... ない" is usually explained and traslanted as "Rarely ~something happens~", the dictionary says that めった can also mean "Usual" (I don't really know if this is true), so wouldn't be more logical treat this little construction as something like "Usually ~somethings does not happen", the overall idea is the same, but at least in my head it makes more sense since the verb in japenese is in its negative form.
The thing about めった is that it has a number of meaning including reckless or careless - but they are not very commonly used any more. So めったに・・・ない is almost a fossil. But I think you are right about the origin.
I have a confusions with takusan, in genki why both "mizu-o takusan nomu & takusan mizu-o nomu" mean "drink a lot of water"?, is takusan modify mizu or nomu ? And have you created a video for using counter in japanese senteces, like "i eat 3 apple 3 times" this is confusing me
In Japanese modifiers modify what they directly precede (video here: ruclips.net/video/T5PD1lORiwk/видео.html/ ) so in ther first sentence たくさん is modifying 飲む (のむ) but in the second it is modifying 水 (みず). This is useful because the meaning is slightly different - in many cases it doesn't make much difference but sometimes it can. I haven't done a video on counters yet, but I think it might be a good idea so thank you for the suggestion.
Thanks for another great video. I just started reading native material and came across this sentence: こういうこと急いでるときに限る Is everything preceding 限る the target of that verb or is it an adverb describing 限る? All I can make of it is something like, "(zero-pronoun) restrict like this is-hurrying time" which makes little sense to me.
Sentences out of context are very often impossible to interpret correctly because Japanese is a very context-dependent language. However this sentence is not grammatical. It is using somewhat truncated particle-dropping speech. It is also likely referring to an ∅が subject that would be clear from context. Xにかげる means X is the best thing for/in Y circumstance and the circumstance seems to be hurrying over Z. For just starting native material it might be better to try something less colloquial. If you would like to tell me what the material is I might be able to comment further. To comment further on the sentence I would need more context.
Thank you so much for replying. The line is said when a friend breaks her tableware and they all help to clean up just before school starts. I uploaded the clip here: ruclips.net/video/2KJt8jxWW9w/видео.html The full sentence appears at 0:35 in that clip. I cut out only the first clause (changing 限って to 限る).
@@Yunotchi Really you must never, never take less than a sentence as your unit of meaning. What you quoted could have been a sentence but we have something entirely different here. I looked at your link and here is what she actually said: こういうこと急いでるときに限ってやっちゃうんだよね First let's strip out the んだ structure which is explained in this video: ruclips.net/video/lYvIOi8Q3I8/видео.html and the sentence-ender particles The basic sentence is: こういうこと (を) 急いでるときに限ってやっちゃう I think it is clear what the engine is now. It is the verb やる - plus ちゃう = てしまう - see this video for that: ruclips.net/video/q6vDkjv4ac0/видео.html What is the structure of this? Obviously there is a zeroed A-car: ∅がこういうこと (を) 急いでるときに限ってやっちゃう There are two ways to interpret this - they come to much the same thing. We can read やっちゃう as a way of saying "mess up" or we can read it as an abbreviation of something like そんなことをやっちゃう "you go and do that kind of thing". So overall the sentence means "It's exactly when you rush this kind of thing that you do (end up doing) something like that". The "end up doing" here is a way of rendering the ちゃう. People sometimes recommend this kind of anime as simple - and in a way it is. But it is very colloquial, which may cause its own problems.
Thank you very much again. Your explanation makes sense to me. Also I just subscribed to your Patreon and am ashamed to see my question being used as a bad example! haha So, I will instead watch something (hopefully) less colloquial: Cardcaptor Sakura
@@Yunotchi Oh dear! This is not a criticism of you! We don't know how to look at sentences until we do know. And part of the trouble caused by conventional teaching is that it really doesn't teach us how to do it. I added a bit to the Patreon post if you have read it already, this adds one more piece of information I didn't give in my original answer: The zero A-car here is the general "you" or in more formal English "one" - this use is covered in this video: ruclips.net/video/GN_tGX0W-LE/видео.html
Yes. The English term "adverb" is a little misleading but in English as in Japanese it means "a word that modifies verbs and/or adjectives". For example we can say "she sang beautifully" (verb modifier) or "it was beautifully sunny" (adjective modifier). The Japanese word 副詞 means a verb/adjective modifier without the implication of solely "verb-modifier", however I used the English term since it actually means verb/adjective modifier and is better known to learners.
come to think of it I think my question should be reworded is there any reason why しゃべるウサギを見たことなかい is in present form instead of past like the other sentences?
The answer to your question is that the English rule that a past tense narrative must have every sentence in the past tense does not apply to Japanese. In past tense narrative present tense sentences are often thrown in for various stylistic reasons (greater sense of immediacy etc.) I talk about this in this video: ruclips.net/video/g5uyGx5OnuE/видео.html
Hi :) Thank you for the video! It was very educational and eye-opening, as always :) I have a question about the ni - particle and how it turns nouns into adverbs. If you take 急 for example, this is a noun in Japanese, correct? Then that means that 急 has to mean "suddenness" and not "sudden" in English, right? Then how would one break down 急に? "To suddenness"? "With suddenness"? "From suddenness"? Or am I just completely bicycling in the park on a Sunday afternoon, as the saying goes in Swedish...?笑笑 Anyway, thank you in advance for any type of answer!
Good question. 急 is indeed a noun and the nearest English equivalent would indeed be "suddenness". However, "suddenness" is not an exact and accurate translation of 急 and can't be because Japanese isn't English and doesn't work in exactly the same way. So, for example きれい (綺麗) is also a noun, and so means "prettiness" more than it means "pretty". But what it actually means is something between the two. When we say さくらがきれいだ we aren't saying "Sakura is prettiness" we are saying that she _manifests_ prettiness, or that prettiness is one aspect of what she is. We do this in English too but in a less consistent way. "Magic" is a noun. But if I say "that's a magic hat", or "don't put on that hat, it's magic", I am not saying that the hat is the phenomenon called magic, but that it it _magical_ which is the adjectival form of magic - but isn't necessary for turning "magic" into an adjective. Similarly we can say "that ring is gold". The adjectival form of "gold" is "golden", but we don't need to use it in order to turn gold into an adjective. Japanese does this in a more consistent way with its adjectival nouns. They (mostly) don't have real adjectival (い) forms but work like the "adjectival nouns", "gold" and "magic" in the examples above. So, to the に-question. We know that we can say カエルになる turn into a frog. We can also say きれいになる become pretty (turn into pretty-being) and we can also say きれいに歌う which means "sing in a turned-pretty way". Bearing in mind that Japanese is much more prone than English to describe states in terms of "becoming"-type verbals such as お腹が空いた (tummy became empty) for "hungry", we can see that this is very much in line with the overall logic of Japanese. These things are a little hard to explain because rather than pretending that Japanese works like English (which gives easy-feeling explanations that don't really work), our aim is to use English as a poorly-designed (but usable) tool for showing how Japanese really does work. I described this adjective-forming function as に marking "the target of the transformation of the action" in an older video lesson on に ruclips.net/video/p_QWMdZhSvU/видео.html - a rather cumbersome definition, but I think it usefully shows what is happening.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for the explanation! Do you also have a video on the nouns and na-adjectives that goes more in depth into on these "adjectival nouns"? :)
@@evertgoran Although it is very basic I would recommend the very first lesson in this series ruclips.net/video/pSvH9vH60Ig/видео.html and then the one specifically on adjectivals ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html - the first one because it clarifies the three basic engines of the language, which is fundamental to everything and not made clear elsewhere and the second because this shows how the whole "adjectival" concept works in Japanese. This is crucial to the structure of any even slightly complex sentence, whether it would be "adjectival" in English or not. I am planning a video about the "noun-heavy" structure of Japanese - how a majority of words that are not either verbs, adjectives ("い-adjectives" as they get called in English) or particles are in fact functionally nouns. This is a big and pretty radical topic so I am taking my time in refining the thesis and finding ways to make it easily understandable. This idea is crucial to the deeper train-modelling of Japanese and will probably clarify many issues. I have introduced parts of this piecemeal in other videos - including the current one. However for the information you want I recommend the two I linked above, in that order.
So, let me get the 驚いたことに straight. Let's compare the two expression 「驚いたことに」 and "surprisingly". As I see it, if something, so to speak, "happens surprisingly", it means that the action unfolds so as to make me feel surprise, so in a sense it is a characteristic of said action affecting me; that is, I'm on the receiving end of the interaction. On the other hand, 「何かが驚いたことに起こる」means that something happens in such a way so that I've experienced the fact of being surprised, but that feeling started from within myself, or that I was-doing surprised (in the sense that I am on the starting end of the interaction, if that makes sense), if I understood correctly the difference between 他動詞 and 自動詞 ; I was wondering if in this regard is possible to substitute 「こと」with 「状態」in this particular construction, in the sense that being surprised was (and still is) my condition. Don't know if any of this made sense but still, よろしくお願いします。
何かが驚いたことに起こる isn't usually the way we would use 驚いたことに, and that is because the こと changes it from a direct adverb - like 静かに to a comment on the こと - the event or circumstance. So 驚いたことに is usually applied to an entire event (logical clause) rather than an isolated verb. So we might say 驚いたことに何かが起こった - "surprisingly something happened" (when we weren't expecting anything to) but wouldn't really say 何かが驚いたことに起こった - it sounds a little "off". This is interestingly similar to English "surprisingly" where we can say "surprisingly she ate it" but "she ate it surprisingly" is a bit "off" (at least without a comma which essentially throws the "surprisingly" back into being a comment on the whole statement: She ate it, surprisingly.
I tried using the も particle for the first time. I think this makes sense, but I don't trust anyone else to correct structure, honestly. (Except perhaps a native speaker who knows a little english) *JP:* 知っていた！DELTARUNEの英語版では この対話が 紛らわしい、の日本語版でも 「教会音楽のスカ」とが… wwww . . . The context is a tweet about a video game. In Deltarune, there's some flavor text listing music genres. One of them is "religious ska", but it's not super clear in the English version whether that's one or two genres. In the Japanese version, I found it's a lot less confusing, thus finding it funnier. *EN:* I knew it! In the english version of deltarune, this dialogue is unclear. However in (Deltarune's) Japanese version, "Religious Ska" is... lol Thanks! :)
I'm terribly sorry about this, but my processors were not built to handle this kind of human language. I have no idea what you're saying in either English or Japanese. If you would like to give me an example of も / でも in regular English / Japanese, I will be happy to discuss it with you. Once again, I'm terribly sorry about this failing.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49hm.. it's referencing a quote from a specific video game. On Twitter, this was paired with a screenshot of the text box for context. I'm trying to say here that the highlighted line can be confused in the English edition. When coming to the same line of text in the Japanese edition, the humor was more obvious.
In the first part alice is the invisible subject of the white section, but alice gets a wa for the sentence as a whole. I need to figure out when a white section needs its own invisible subject.
Yes. に (as we see from this video) is used to make an adverb of any adjectival noun so 無駄に is acting as an adverbial for できる. 時間を無駄にする means "waste time" - literally "make time useless". できる is the potential form of する so this sentence is literally saying "because (we) can't make time useless, ne". In English we would say "because there's no time to lose!" As you probably know the から here, although literally "because", does not need a specific conclusion as it would in English - it can It can be left to imply the conclusion. E.g. "because there's no time to lose (we'd better hurry), ne".
PS it strikes me that it is easier to look at it this way: While ムダに is acting adverbially (telling more about する) it is probably easier to model this sentence by noting that it is using the regular XXをYYにする = turn XX into YY. ruclips.net/video/sH3iGBkA93w/видео.html In this case we are turning time into 無駄 or uselessness (remembering that every all-kanji word - is a noun and only a noun can take に). できる is the potential form of する so this sentence is literally saying: "because (we) can't turn time into uselessness, ne".
Someone took a look at this and was confused as to why I say that ムダに is adverbial at all and maybe I should have left that out to be simpler. Though I also think it is worth understanding. Japanese is a modular lego-language, as I often say, and it does almost everything outside of the absolute core (A car, B engine) through chain-modification. So, to take the simplified form of the statement: 時間をムダにする This is an act with a direct object marked by を As with all acts there must be an actor, so for completeness we would have to write: ∅が時間をムダにする The core of this sentence is (A) ∅が (B) する All the rest modifies する So, ムダに directly modifies する. Therefore is acting adverbially, _telling us more about_ する. And 時間を is telling us more about ムダにする/ I.e. telling us _what it is_ that ∅ is turning into uselessness.
Is there any particular reason why the story says: しゃべるウサギを見たことがない rather than しゃべられるウサギが見たことがない？ I would think the focus should be on the fact that the rabbit can speak rather than the fact that it does speak (It seems natural to me that rabbits would speak, given that they could. The surprising thing, I would think, is that it CAN speak in the first place).
Were you thinking of the potential? If so the difference is between "She had never seen a talking rabbit" and "She had never seen a rabbit that could talk". Japanese is no different from English - one can say things in many slightly different ways. There is not one formula that is "right", provided we are within the rules of structure. However しゃべる is godan so it would be しゃべれる.
I modified a sentence I wrote a while ago. You said it was correct at the time, but I removed 私は. Does it still mean the same thing? 「初めまして。ゲーム音楽を作曲する。」 "Nice to meet you. I compose game music." For context, this would be a standalone profile bio. I am confident this phrasing is awkward and janky at best, perfectly describing where I'm at in the learning process. haha.
I see my downfall in trying to understand the meanings of the verbs being use as adjectives. I get the concept, but everytime I come in contact with a case like this I always read the meaning completely differently from what it actually means.4:23 my brain read that line as I saw a talking rabbit thing then I tried to think about it more and came up with, the talking rabbit that was seen thing X_X. It's so hard.
The story is in the past tense, so I’m confused as to why it’s not 喋るウサギを見たことがなかった。 Doesn’t the way it’s written mean that Alice has never seen a talking rabbit? Shouldn’t it say the she had never seen one? I know there is no longer anyone there to explain this to me…😢
That's just how it is ことがない is an expression that it means something has never happened, in the past or otherwise, not only that but you will notice it comes AFTER the past tense of the verb too.
The way used here is the way Japanese constructs the concept "have never Xed" - It is literally "fact of having did-X does not exist". Now you are correct that in English-language narrative it is obligatory to cast every part of a past-narrative in the past, but in Japanese narrative this is not the case and it would seem a little stilted. I talk about this more in this video where we see several instances of it ruclips.net/video/g5uyGx5OnuE/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanky you for answering. I realize now that a story can use several tenses, going back and forth between present and past (it happens a lot in children stories in portuguese). But if one wants to stress the fact that up until that point (in the past), nothing like that had ever been seen (as opposed to the present), can the sentence end with なかった? Is it correct?
@@JoseOliveira-kc4tr Yes. The way it is in the story the stress falls more on the absence of ever having seen a talking rabbit and on the immediacy of the experience (we are placing the narrative in that moment). We can also say なかった to change the emphasis. This is a choice that correct English style does not allow (though informal narrative can use this device: "So yesterday I go into this shop").
I rewatched again because as always your videos clear the doubts! Not sure if you have a video about it (if you have it I coudn't find it) explaining about using noun + な. I found that it converts the noun into an adjective that tells something about the name that precedes it. For example in LN i found things like this 魔隷術師な俺と、姫騎士な彼女. I'm still unsure about how to use it correctly... It can be used after all nouns? I coudn't find info about it without counting about na-adjectives. All I know is that it's a complement. I found it on here: jref.com/threads/adding-na-after-noun-adjectives.41081/ For example on this: この店は大変便利ですね --> Here it's an attribute この店は大変便利な店ですね --> Here it's a complement But I'm still confused... In the second one is like repeating the topic twice (how I see it, I'm spanish) so it looks like repeating twice the same info. I'm not sure if I'm correct or not.
This isn't how we use な. It turns and adjectival noun (only) into a noun-modifier. The noun it follows will be marked by a logical particle to show its role in the logical clause. The adjectival noun does not play a role in the logical clause because it is only there to describe another noun. So: 元気な女の子が走っている If we only want to say that the girl is lively, then we put the な・だ on the other side (where it becomes the Engine of the sentence and so must be だ) and say 女の子が元気だ The (non-grammatical) convention of using です after real adjectives comes in to confuse you here I think. That is why I ask you not to use it at this stage. We'll get to that very soon.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thanks for your reply. In your example is clear what's the diff between the two. I'm not sure what that LN tried to say adding な on there (because 術師 is a noun), i get the meaning but it's still strange to see な before a noun.
見たことがない = I haven't ever seen it (fact of seen-it non-existent-is) 見ることがない = seeing it isn't something that happens (fact of seeing-it non-existent-is)
Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly It’s interesting that although the story is in the past tense it uses “がない”. Is this because from Alice’s current perspective (at this point in the past) it was present to her? In other words, saying “がなかった” would be more like saying “she had never seen this until this other time that was in the past from this moment” and therefore pointing to an event in the past relative to this other event that just so happens to be past from now as well? If that makes sense Basically, is it describing her state of never having seen it before this present moment and then placing that moment in the past along with everything else? Because although that may seem slightly confusing at first, that really seems like a more logical way to describe it because it’s being described from Alice’s perspective and only then being placed in the past not in reference to Alice directly but in the context of the narrative. Because to Alice that moment was not lost at the time it was happening. Right?
Can you upload a video of you speaking only in Japanese? Your videos are mostly in English so it's hard to get a feel for what your Japanese speech sounds like. For practice, and curiosity sake.
I don't consider my spoken Japanese to be a model for anyone. I can communicate well enough but it is certainly no less odd than my English (about which I get various complaints). Both languages happily get me where I'm going which is all I ask. But beyond this, I deprecate the whole cult of "personal qualification" that certain people are strongly propagating currently, and I do this for two reasons - first that I think it is invalid in itself, and second because even if it were valid it has no relevance in the case of what I am currently doing. The more general point is, briefly stated: putting forward the claim that the founder of a method has become extremely competent in a language in X amount of time as "proof" that his method is effective is snake-oil talk. Such a claim even if true (and it may well be true) proves nothing whatever. It is no more than single-instance anecdotal evidence. Insofar as the founder or exponent of the method is more than a random single instance of someone who achieved a high level and attributes the fact to a particular method, it is good evidence for the individual's prowess but _counter-evidence for the method_ - we don't want to know that one especially talented (and/or suited to the particular method) found it effective. We want to know whether it is a good method for people in general - for people with no especial ability. The more specific point is that the last thing I want is people "believing in me" because my personal level in the language. I am not touting some method that you need to sink years into and therefore want some proof of the outcome (which the personal prowess of the pitch-man in any case does not provide). I am offering structural information that should "click" within a short period of time. It should produce "aha moments" quickly. If it doesn't, it may well be the wrong approach for you. Please _don't_ take me on trust. I am not a faith healer. Also, I don't teach things like pronunciation (beyond a few very basic tips and tricks for beginners). I would not consider myself competent to do so. It might be nice to be able to do so at some stage, but I know that my English does not sound all that "natural" so I am not sure that my Japanese ever will. I am probably better advised to leave that to you humans. I am sorry for such a long answer to a short question. Actually I wouldn't mind doing a video in Japanese just for fun, but I don't want to be taken as a model for pronunciation, and at this stage at any rate, in the current climate of chest-thumping-as-evidence in some quarters, I think it would very likely introduce a complete irrelevance into what I consider to be an important work. So I will exercise restraint. PS if you are further interested in my views on this matter I did a post on the subject here www.patreon.com/posts/18644117 (it is open to the public).
Thank you very much for all of your videos and lessons. Since I started watching your videos, I suddlendly began to understand how japanese works! Thank you also for your very useful feedback! I think I just realized something... for example we can transform: "inu ga keeki wo tabeta" into "keeki wo tabeta inu", the dog that ate the cake, were "ate the cake" become the adjective. "Hi ga aru" becomes "aru hi" aru is a verb used as an adjective. "nomimono ga atatakai" => "atatakai nomimono" were atatakai is an adjective in the form "warm-is" and "heya ga shizuka da" (is that correct?) becomes "shizuka na heya", because you said "da" can be only in the end of a clause so here we must change it into "na", but this "na" = "da". So that means that "shizuka na heya" is an adjective which presents as "quiet-is" so "noun-verb". in short: "keeki wo tabeta inu" = "noun-wo-verb + inu" "aru hi" = "verb (used as an adjective) + hi" "atatakai nomimono" = "noun-verb + nomimono" (because atatakai = warm-is and not only warm) "shizuka na heya" = "noun-verb + heya" (quiet-is) That means all adjectives in reality can be considered as verbs/clauses that had been put before the noun to modify it?
Yes, this is absolutely correct. This is what I meant in my core video definition of Japanese "adjectives" ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html when I said that what an "adjective" actually is in Japanese is any one of the three engines. Plus anything that belongs with it - so any simple sentence can become an "adjective" and so can a complicated one. We can say: "the I-met-in-Kyoto-last-week-the-day-after-my-dog-ate-the-white-rabbit-that-my-sister-brought-back-from-China person" if we want to. And it happens. Everything except "person" there is one big adjectival (and of course "person" still needs to have a B-engine to turn the whole thing into a sentence). As you see, there are adjectivals within the overall adjectival This is a big part of how Japanese works. Obviously we haven't got that complicated yet in this series, but it all develops perfectly logically from what we already know. We can say that Japanese is a highly "adjectival" language! As to all adjectives being considered verbs. Well really this is a matter of how we choose to model things. We _can_ say that, but I think it is more helpful to think of three engines. It keeps things straight in our minds. The copula (だ) is in fact a form of verb, but it is different from "ordinary" verbs in so many ways that I think it is best to treat it separately. "Adjectives" (meaning 形容詞, or "い--adjectives" - I use the convenience-term "adjective" for these because it is close enough to be useful) are not verbs. They are however very closely related to verbs (which is why I say that there is really no such thing as an adjective in Japanese - or rather any engine or logical clause can be an "adjective"). We could try to simplify the scheme by conflating these with verbs, but again I think it makes things more understandable to preserve the distinction.
thank you for your help!! ^^ I see what you mean! well "the I-met-in-Kyoto-last-week-the-day-after-my-dog-ate-the-white-rabbit-that-my-sister-brought-back-from-China person" is a quite a complicated example! senshuu ni Kyouto oneechan wa chuugoku kara mottekita shiroi usagi wo tabeta inu tsugi no hi ni atta hito... well... It doesn't work... at least I tried
It's a bit complicated isn't it? It runs kind-of in reverse because everything modifying anything has to come immediately before it. Something like this: 私の犬がお姉ちゃんの中国から連れて来たた白いウサギを先週食べた次の日京都に会った人 Watashi-no inu-ga oneechan-no chuugoku-kara tsurete kita shiroi usagi wo senshuu tabeta tsugi-no hi kyouto-ni atta hito. Notes: senshuu doesn't take ni because it is a relative time expression ruclips.net/video/lU5rmrAORDY/видео.htmlm46s (it's more intuitive than it sounds). It is best not to have it at the beginning of the sentence unless the whole action of the sentence is taking place last week (and we don't know what the B engine will be here). Here I have it before tabeta because we don't know when the rabbit came back from China, only when the unfortunate incident occurred. Tsugi no hi is also a relative time expression so we don't need ni for that either. I use no in place of ga after oneechan partly to avoid overusing ga and also because it is her dog and so extra appropriate. I discuss the no/ga switch in adjectival clauses (which is really only an extension of the possessive function of no, as is especially clear here) in this video ruclips.net/video/wxX6poiuyAI/видео.html
I hope you enjoy today's lesson. After a lot of discussion (and holding a poll on my Patreon), I decided to use quite a lot more kanji on the story text. I have tried to make the furigana bigger and bolder. Please don't be nervous of it. You don't need to learn it all at this stage (though it really is worth starting to get used to the simpler ones). To anyone moderately familiar with early kanji the all-kana text can look quite hard to read (it is surprising how quickly one becomes kanji-minded - they really are fundamental to the language). It is because a lot of people found that and asked me to increase the kanji that I have done so, but I am trying to make it approachable to people with and without some basic kanji.
A little story on how "comfortable" kanji quickly become (or how "uncomfortable" being without them gets). In my first year of learning Japanese I picked up an old copy of Pokemon Fire Red (my first Japanese game with an appreciable amount of text). It was in all-hiragana with spaces. I had to give up on it because the lack of kanji made it so difficult to read! It isn't that I am a kanji wizard, and I certainly wasn't one of those people who learn thousands of kanji before I started. I picked them up as I went along but they quickly become part of one's way of "seeing" Japanese.
PS if you like my way of doing things and would like to pick up a basis in kanji, may I recommend my book _Alice in Kanji Land_ learnjapaneseonline.info/alice-
Imagine learning thousands of kanji before learning Japanese... couldn't be me👀
@@DanneoYT It always strikes me as a very strange thing to do!
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I love RTK as it has benefited me greatly as a beginner (Too many to list but I can if anyone wants to know) but I agree it’s not for everyone and I do find myself in a ‘strange’ place right now as I know all these kanji but no vocabulary.
I found that the only way to counter all the downsides of RTK (No readings, abstract, all or nothing) is to speed run it by doing 50 Kanji a day as this will only take just over a month to complete the book.
I actually found out about your channel from doing RTK as I was on KanjiKoohii looking for stories/mnemonics and one of the stories linked to your channel so really, I would of never found you if not for RTK XD
Awesome! I understood why you were leaving kanji out of the earlier lessons. With Alice's story, they'd help a lot with figuring out which words are structural, and which are vocabulary
@@DanneoYT I know right. But you don't need to do the whole book, only the most popular 1000 kanji + 250 primitives. Then you could get it done in 10-15 days ( recognition ) or 15-20 days ( production ). You will pick up the rest from immersion anyways. The point is to reach kanji fluency ( when brain stops seeing them as random scribbles and sees them as made up of elements )
I know she won't see this but I have to say the sound at 10:05 scared the life out of me. I've enjoyed your lessons very much. Thank you. Rest in Peace.
Same lmao, it came out of nowhere. Also enjoying the series as a new viewer.
Rest in peace Dolly-sensei.
Lol she used to do this all the time, poor thing, was probably a little deaf too... she mentioned how she had "malfunctions"
Yeah that woke me up lol
made me shudder even though I read your comment at 9:39
私も怖くだった
I still cannot express how much more I enjoy these videos than Genki. Truly a blessing on this world. RIP Cure Dolly 先生
I cannot say enough how much I appreciate that all these amazing videos are free. This shows Dolly-sensei's genuine passion about the subject and spreading this passion to other people. RIP.
At first I was opposed to lessons based on a story but now I have changed my mind completely.
I am so happy to hear that. A lot of things don't lend themselves to story-lessons but I do think they are useful for introducing some points and also for getting us used to encountering things in context.
The jump into alternate history was quite the experience, 10/10
this is literally a gold mine!! Thank you Dolly Sensei, RIP. Also, I have found that it's taking some time to really learn each lessons and soak it up. I have been making notes in my iPhone notes app and might even go back to watch again. Anyone have study tips they found helpful? I'm also listening to the Nihongo Con Teppei podcast and reading some graded readers between lessons to see where things make more sense... Good luck everyone!!
Wow, she started adding chapters to her lessons on the video timeline, she put so much effort and it shows
Thanks a lot for another enjoyable and informative lesson. Two things I really like about it: first of all - as you‘ve already mentioned - the use of Kanji. It is exactly as you‘ve stated, the use of Kanji makes reading Japanese so much easier! The second thing I like is, you‘re explaining the grammar by using a real novel, not just some easy reading text to explain a singular grammar topic. This is really helpful and interesting. So again, thank you so much for your work. お疲れ様でした！
Thank you so much. I was trying to be beginner-friendly but I think only a minority of viewers are really beginners - and I am trying to make sure that they are still covered. My original intention in upping the kanji was only to use those in _Alice in Kanji Land_ - but as that adheres pretty strictly to first and second grade Japanese kanji I have tinkered a little bit - leaving out a few that look scarily complicated, and including a few that make the kana look too "bald" when they are left out! And of course following usual practice where that is relevant (for example 上がる is usually written with 上, but ~てあげる usually isn't). I'm hoping I have the balance about right.
Well, I think it‘s a about the good old trial and error(^^). When I started learning Japanese, it was already quite challenging to learn all those Kana. But soon I realized that it is much better to start learning Kanji as soon as possible. Yes, at first it looks frightening to a Novize, but as you already mentioned - Kanji are absolutely essential for the study of Japanese. And concerning your audience here, you’re right again. Your lessons are maybe a little bit too elaborate for a real “Newbie”. But for those with some basic knowledge your explanations are really helpful, entertaining and full of good advice. だから頑張って下さい(*☻-☻*)！
Like three things clicked for me in this video. I feel like this is a recurrence with each video I watch from dolly sensei
English is my second language, and my native language doesn't distiguish between adjectives and adverbs, so I always had trouble understanding their place in grammar.
This totally cleared it up.
haha i like that you dont give out the translation right away so i that i have time to challenge myself to try and translate them xD
Oddly enough......in a video explaining も , it finally clicked why は can be a horrible particle compared to が when giving a compliment. I always heard that は can be for contrast, but it finally made sense. This channel is saving me from は vs が!
Yes. "You're looking lovely today" with 今日は sounds like "in contrast to the way you look the rest of the time".
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Yeah. People always said that. They just never explained why. I thought it was just something to memorize, but this break down made me truly understand why. I'm so happy. I immediately bought your book after this.
@@randerhaywood1163 Thank you!
PS - not so odd that it was a も video because も is the opposite twin of は and can enhance a compliment.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 That's fair.
I was confused with the noun + に, I was thinking that it somehow a target of an action but it's not since there's the 穴に...
But when you said that, it acts an adjective, I remembered the pattern of "na-adjectives" that was taught to me!!!
Where I was taught to turn まじめな into まじめに! My past Japanese learning experience really left a huge confusion...
Thank you Cure Dolly Sensei for your contents! I'm really learning very well now!
It is really an adverb rather than and adjective (describing an action rather than a thing). Anything with に attached to it has to be a noun. Usually it marks a target but it can also turn certain kinds of noun into adverbs (now I think this is an extension of the targeting function, but I won't go into that here).
Assimilating な and に is a strange way of teaching, because に is a logical particle and な isn't a particle at all, it's the copula (だ). However it is true that since _very_ large numbers of Japanese words are nouns (every word that came in from Chinese came in as a noun) there are ways to turn nouns into (or better, use them as) verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I am just about to release a new video on this, because I felt it needed to be made clearer. It will be going up in approximately eight hours from now!
It is really an adverb rather than and adjective (describing an action rather than a thing). Anything with に attached to it has to be a noun. Usually it marks a target but it can also turn certain kinds of noun into adverbs (now I think this is an extension of the targeting function, but I won't go into that here).
Assimilating な and に is a strange way of teaching, because に is a logical particle and な isn't a particle at all, it's the copula (だ). However it is true that since _very_ large numbers of Japanese words are nouns (every word that came in from Chinese came in as a noun and still is a noun) there are ways to turn nouns into (or better, use them as) verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I am just about to release a new video on this, because I felt it needed to be made clearer. It will be going up in approximately eight hours from now!
alright! thank you very much! God bless you.
@@wreigh6271 And God bless you too. The video I mentioned is up now and you'll find it here: ruclips.net/video/8AXyP5GeJFg/видео.html
Rewatching this just reminded me: have you made a video on the nuances of using の vs. こと? I recall the nominalizing の video but did you have one yet talking about both? Thanks for this series. Best explanations I've come across. Please keep up the great work.
Mo-chan is so cute
Thank you! おどろいた is in the past tense because it is being used as an adjective for こと. We do this in English too. For example we say "a surprised look" or "a tired smile" - we are using the past tense of the verb "surprise" or "tire" to express that someone is in the state caused by having received the verb. Now admittedly it isn't the こと that was surprised, but this again is a common phenomenon in English. For example we say "a happy accident" when strictly speaking the accident wasn't happy, we were. Same with "a lucky find", "a sad day" etc.etc.
In other words it is quite usual to a) use the past tense of a verb to express the state caused by it and b) to project our subjective feelings onto the thing that causes them (English is less likely to do both at the same time).
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks for the answers, I get it now. As a non native english speaker I never actually realized that the verb used as an adjective was indeed in the past tense. In french (my native tongue), because the word used is an adjective it isn't in any tense.
@@Kokush0 English is the same as Japanese in that it doesn't have any non-tense form. In this they both differ from most West European languages.
As usual video is great and explanations are just perfect!
I have some minor questions: I didn't quite understand, ゆっくり is kinda an exception, and there are only few word like it that are, hm, can we call them natural adverbs? Coz it's not really noun, right? Also I encountered before ゆっくりと, with the same meaning, I haven't found much information about this form, it seems that adding と to an end is just to make word sound better and more formal, without any changing of the meaning?
And about おどろいたことに - as far as I understand it's an expression? It's also given in some vocabularies. I can just remember it as "surprisingly" and can use it in any tense, as we are here talking in past tense, but for present tense it still would be the same, right?
Is ゆっくり a noun? We are here in possibly slightly controversial territory, but only slightly. Even the main J-E dictionaries agree that ゆっくり _is_ a noun among other things. It has to be a noun because we can use ゆっくりだ and ゆっくりな, so the only question is whether it is also anything other than a noun. This question is purely one of terminology, since it clearly works as an adverb. So we can call it an adjectival noun or a pure adverb that is also a noun, and for practical purposes (for foreign learners of Japanese) I think the latter modelling will serve us better.
The dictionaries also call it a suru-verb (in addition to noun and adverb) which I would say it isn't, because ゆっくりする doesn't mean "do ゆっくり", it means "act ゆっくりly". In other words it is still working adverbially, like しずか in しずかにする but dropping the に.
I would class it as "an adverbial noun that is allowed to drop に - and this is actually a small class of nouns, mostly ending in the い sound (not usually the い kana). Now I am not going to try to make a "case" for them being nouns because I don't think a question of accordance with the facts is at stake here (I would make a case against it's being a suru-verb - but note that even if it were, a suru-verb is in fact a noun).
So why do I class it that way? Because a) it is as defensible as any other classification and b) I believe that in modelling Japanese for non-Japanese learners it will prove to be the most useful way to define it. According to my model, most things in Japanese that are not verbs adjectives or particles are in fact species of noun (perhaps in place of "in fact" I should say "can legitimately be seen as and beneficially modeled as").
おどろいたことに I would not call an expression. It is a piece of natural grammar and works with other adjectivals than おどろいた. おどろいた is here working as an adjectival as any verb can ( ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html ) . We can also use this form with adjectival nouns, as in ふしぎなことに or with adjectives, as in うれしいことに.
In all cases the adjectival modifies the noun こと which then usually modifies a complete logical clause by telling us its emotional effect. Interestingly, not only is this ことに the same form as an adverbialized noun, even though it is used to modify a whole clause, but it is used in very nearly the same way as an English adverb-modifier. For example, we can say "surprisingly quickly" but we can also say "surprisingly, she didn't come".
So no, I think "expression", if by that one means something that does not work logically as grammar, is not applicable to this construction.
I am learning Japanese based on your series, and I am finding it very enjoyable and easy to understand.
I was just a bit confused on how "こと" works. I made up my own reasoning for why it can be used this way, I would like to know if it’s a correct assumption.
I imagine it to function like と in the sense that everything before it is "quoted" as the abstract thing.
So: 「しゃべるウサギをみた」ことがない
(0 ga) [Talking rabbit seen] -> thing [abstract]/experience is not exist
Alice had never seen a talking rabbit
I also had an additional question regarding the double "が" implied in this sentence.
If there is 2 が particles which is the actual topic of the sentence / how does it work?
Thanks in advance!
Yes. I talk about putting a clause into the こと-box (or もの-box) we can then treat the loaded もの・こと as a noun.
When there are two がs in one logical clause one of them will be part of a modifying (adjectival) clause ruclips.net/video/HmU2l0pM2gk/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 My bad, for some reason I did not clue in to the explanation. I can't believe I missed it lol.
Thank you for your response!
Hello Cure Dolly,
I am a bit confused about the sentence that appeared at 13:11.
Could you please explain why in "でも、おどろいた ことに ゆっくり ゆっくり 落った", Odoroku is used in the ta-form (Odoroita) instead of just saying odoroku?
(Part of my confusion comes from i-adjectives just following nouns with no modification; e.g. おいしい たべもの)
The thing to note here is that おどろく is a verb being used adjectivally (to describe a こと, or thing). And actually it is doing just what we do in English when we use the verb "surprise" or any similar verb as an adjective. We say an annoyed person, a surprised person etc. I.e. a person in the state of having been) surprised, annoyed etc. So the only question is why do we say the こと is surprised rather than Alice was surprised?
This is a bit different from English but we do often use this kind expression strategy in other cases. We say "It was a happy day" when we, not the day, were happy. Or "her actions were suspicious" when it was we, not her actions that were suspicious. So this adjectival-transfer (from the subjective state to the cause of it) is not unusual and as we will see later is a much bigger part of Japanese than it is in English.
Does this clarify?
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49Yes,
I do find it a little strange how 'おどろく' is a noun instead of verb as it ends in an u-sound, but I'm fairly certain I understand my question now.
Nice lessons and thanks for the explanation.
@@yugawaakeel8372 あぁごめんなさい。That was a slip of the keyboard! I meant to say a verb, which of course it is There's nothing to stop a noun ending with an う-row kana and many do, but this is a verb. Obviously since it is in the past tense here and nouns don't have tenses. I am very prone to typing the wrong word (a small circuitry problem) but I usually catch it and correct it before hitting return. My apologies (corrected now. Thank you for pointing it out)
Hi, thank you for your lessons, they're great.
Can you please explain why it's 早く走って, not 速く走って?
Some quick googling said that the former is related to time and the latter is related to speed.
I've done several videos on words with alternate kanji. In most cases there is one "base" kanji that is learned first (in Japanese schools). Usually one can use this one for all the uses and the others are optional for indicating particular uses. This is true of 早い・速い in which 早い is the base and can be used for "early" and "fast". I generally - especially in the early part of the course - use the most basic kanji as it is the one learners are most likely to be familiar with.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thank you for the quick response and for the explanation.
So, technically, 速く would be the "correct" way to write it?
@@chad7615 Kind of. There are a lot of cases like this. For example if you say you are talking about watching a movie, the "correct" (that is, the more specific) form is 観る but it is not "wrong" - or unusual - to write 見る. _Five_ common variants on 見る here: ruclips.net/video/6Kh1AJx77Ng/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thank you very much!
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for this I was so confused as to why you weren't using 速く and also as to why people use 映画を見た -------- This explains a lot. どうもありがとうございました :))
2年間くらい大学で日本語を勉強していますが、まだ文法の助詞がわかりにくいです。キュアドリー先生は明確な説明をおしえてくれてありがとうございました。
こちらこそありがとうございます。あいにく、分かりにくい説明が多いと思います。普通の教科書は文法の基本的な組み立てを説明しませんから。日本語はすごく論理的できれいな言語だから、正しい説明さえあれば誰にでも分かりやすいではないでしょうか。
Thank you very much for the lesson. As you have explained in the lesson, when we replace i in an i-adjective with ku, we have an adverb. So how about "yoru osoku", "yoru osoku made" ? i have encountered those expressions somewhere (maybe i am wrong). My question is that if osoku in those cases is an adverb ? or "adjective-ku" has another role but you have not covered yet ? or in Japanese , an adverb can stand after a noun ...because i think it shoud be "osoi yoru".
Thank you! In よるおそくまで the おそく is indeed an adverb. It is not modifying the noun よる but the verb. What verb? Well, there has to be a verb. よるおそくまで means "until late at night" which obviously cannot make a sentence on its own. _Something_ must be happening until late at night, and that something is the verb. So in よるおそくまでよんだ "(I) read until late at night", the verb is よんだ, read and おそい is an adverb saying more about the reading (it was late) よる is a modifier (white engine) telling us more about "late" (in-the-night late) and まで gives us "until" but does not interfere with the fact that おそくis an adverb describing よむ. So we can have this sentence with or without まで, meaning either "I read late at night" (without it) or "I read _until_ late at night" (with it), but either way it is telling us more about the reading-verb よむ. The same, of course, goes for whatever else may have been happening late at night or until late at night.
Thank you sensei. But i have also seen "おそくに". In the lesson, Ni is used to turn a noun to an adverb. Why Ni can appear after an adverb ?
This combination, and also はやくに are found quite frequently. The に seems to be redundant but it does serve a purpose. You rarely find it with most adverbs from adjectives such as さむく or あかく, but おそい and はやい have double meanings - late/slow and early/fast. The attachment of に, which is the particle used to position events in time (in absolute time-expressions), makes it clear that we are talking about an event taking place at an early or a late time, rather than happening quickly or slowly.
i've been doing input learning and except for slowing me down, it really stressed me out. So its a good thing that there's also this approach that has no pressure and actually fun at the same time. I feel like if I reached atleast 40 of this guide Im gonna be able to challenge myself at watching anime without subtitles. Alongside this I can now only use Anki for kanji and vocab, what do you think is the best way to be consistent, or things that I need to set in mind? Thanks for your videos Dolly-sensei :))
watch it with japanese subtitles and put the phrases and also individual words into anki to review, then rewatch and rewatch and rewatch and rewatch...and rewatch! (it might take you one month to do your first episode)
Dolly, have you thought about a focused lesson on adverb-adverbs? You mention creating adverbs from nouns with に, and from adjectives with く; but what about the third category, like はっきり or どんどん, some of which take と (and what's that about? How does it relate to と as a quotation marker, or と as a conjunction), and some of which do not.
Is there anything generalizable to be said about these? There seem to be so many of these adverby things and they are (to me) very hard to retain.
I covered these adverbial nouns (which is what they mostly are) here: ruclips.net/video/8AXyP5GeJFg/видео.html (last section)
と is used with some adverbials, especially those that are pseudo-onomatopoeia like どんどん. The original idea is "quoting" the "noise" (although it isn't really a noise) something makes while doing something, as in うさぎがぴょんぴょんと飛んだ。But from here the use has widened considerably in some cases.
Do you have an videos or articles on the subject verbs like おどろ
く (emotion and desire) going to their past tense but still having "present" meaning? You said they "shift very easily from the thing that experiences the emotion to the thing that causes the emotion and back." Here, Alice is experiencing the feeling of being surprised and the hole caused this feeling. Why is おどろいた not written as おどろいて? The experience of being surprised seems to be a continual state and I think that the cause could be past tense or continually "causing" Alice to feel surprised warranting the use of te form. I ask partly because I'm unaware if there is a case where putting おどろ
く(or any verb) in a different tense for the same purpose shown here would be more suitable. Great video by the way as well. I learned some new things!
I'll try my best to tone down on the questions as well. 3 in the past day or so. I feel like I am taking advantage of your kindness
Thank you s much for your kind appreciation. You couldn't use おどろいて here because without いる the て-form does _not_ indicate a a continuous state or action (past or present). In fact in a modifying clause like this it would be completely meaningless. The use of the past tense to express a continuing state (even in the present) is a very common linguistic phenomenon. It happens in English all the time. You don't say "I am surprise", do you? You say "I am surprised". The same with "tired" and other states. These are the past forms (though they are so commonly used in this way that people may forget that). Literally "I am (in a state of having been) surprised (and therefore still am)".
So the only difference from English really is this ability to move the state from the receiver of the experience to the cause of the experience. Even this isn't completely unknown in English (we can say "we were happy that day" or "that was a happy day". The day wasn't experiencing happiness. However it is much commoner and more regular in Japanese and I have talked about that at some length here: ruclips.net/video/X_HlngOAvX8/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for the response. You make it all seem so simple. I can't believe I forgot about いる being the verb that defines something's existence. The past tense usage now makes perfect sense too. I can't count how many times I've come across this in the last month or so in my readings where I just skim over it and say "I'll figure it out the more I read." Thank you!
Thanks for the great lesson, I really enjoy all your videos! I have a question about the third category of adverbs you named, when you were talking about ゆっくり。There seems to be lots of Japanese words that follow this ｘっｘり structure: ぐっすり、がっかり、そっくり、すっかり、はっきり, etc. Is there a name for these kinds of words? i have the most difficult time remembering them and want to learn more about them
They are structurally a class of noun - adverbial nouns - one of the three "super-noun" classes that have each have a property that other nouns lack (in this case being able to drop the に in forming adverbials). I talk about the three super-nouns here: ruclips.net/video/8AXyP5GeJFg/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thanks so much! looking forward to learning more about them
Question about the sentence at 4:36. You explained that we can't make definite statements about the emotions of other people (Lesson 9 i think). Then why is it that we can make a definite statement about what Alice has seen in her life? We can't know for sure what she has seen, just like we can't know for sure what she feels.
The author is allowed to be "inside Alice's head" and to have a universal knowledge of what she has or hasn't seen.
such great lessons! too bad you are no longer with us =/
What about と adverbs? I often see adverbs with 「と」, 「とした」 or 「として」 attached, and I wasn't able to understand the difference between those three and the plain form without anything attached. Some example from a short story: 「その手をそろりそろりと井戸に突っこんだ」, 「ゆっくりと三分の一開けた」, 「ちょうど膝丈ほどまである井戸は、がっしりとした白っぽい岩に囲まれていた」. I'm wondering if with 「とした」 it modifies a noun, but I'm not sure.
I tried skimming your video list but I didn't find a video on this topic, hope I didn't miss anything.
と is the quotation particle and in origin it is "quoting" the way something is done, so it is most regularly used with "onomatopoeia" as they are called in English although it only covers a certain area of these Japanese "likeness" words そろりそろり here is an example. It can also be applied to a wider range of words but still with the root idea that we are "quoting" the manner in which it is done. とした is slightly different in that it is saying how we "take it" to be (literally how we "do" it to be "quoted" - to use a very crude assimilation to English concepts).
Thanks for the explanation! I have a question regarding the た-form + ことに grammatical structure. I understand that the に in this case converts a noun into an adverb. However, currently whenever I see a に in a sentence, I immediately think of the に-car. Do you have an explanation on how the ことに works expressed in the "train"-framework, or are these two separate cases?
こと is what I call a こと-box. We'll meet の and こと boxes later in the course. What they do is put what went before them into a box which is essentially a noun. So it makes whatever is being adverbialized (whatever is modifying the pronoun こと - therefore the content of the こと-box) into a noun that can take the に. So then we have a に-car which works similarly any other に-car noun that is acting as an adverb (such as 静かに). Does this clarify?
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 So, koto is transforming odoroku in a noun so it can go with ni and ni is transforming it into an adverb?
@@Luisa_san Yes, that's essentially what is happening.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you very much for answering! I have such a bad and traumatic experience learning Japanese at uni that when it got to that part of the video and I didn't get it I panicked haha
you are srsly a Japanese structure goddess lol
@@Luisa_san そんなこと・・・
Do you all understand all this from just the previous videos in the playlist? I´m following roughly but difficult to know meanings of everything before she explains it
Thanks for one of many great videos! I haven't watched them all yet so sorry if this has already been answered. In what way can yukkuri be considered a noun? What "noun-like" behaviours does it exhibit? Thanks in beforehand!
First my apologies for a very slow reply - I somehow lost track of your comment. I believe that most Japanese words that don't fall into one of the other main categories are in fact nouns or noun-like entities. This may in some cases be controversial, but even the J-E dictionaries tend to call this one a noun, though they also call it a suru-verb and an adverb (that is to say they say that it can play all three roles).
Now suru-verb seems to me to be completely amiss. It is no more a suru-verb than 静か is, When we ゆっくり(と)する we are not doing the action ゆっくり (there is no such action) but are acting in a やっくり manner just as with 静かにする we are acting in a quiet manner (not doing an action called 静か). Now I think what leads to calling ゆっくり a suru-verb is the fact that it can have する directly attached to it like a suru verb and unlike a noun working adverbially (or, of course an adjective working adverbially, which it clearly isn't). However it doesn't actually do what a suru-verb does. It is working adverbially, even with する.
It is certainly more defensible to call it a pure adverb (at least some of the time) and it is really a matter of how we choose to model it. I find it more useful to model it as a noun acting adverbially, sometimes marked with の but allowed to drop it.
PS - I should add that it it were in fact a suru-verb, that would only reinforce my contention that it is fundamentally a noun since that is precisely what a suru-verb is: a noun that can be "verbalized" by attaching する to it. However I can't see this as a defensible model.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I see. Interpreting most japanese words as nouns has certainly cleared up some confusion for me. Thanks again, I appreciate the answer.
I think it does make things easier to understand and handle and that is why I do it that way. Modelling of language has two criteria in my view - 1 it must be in accord with the facts (the textbooks don't seem to have noticed this one in many cases) and 2 it must be suitable for its purpose. My purpose is to help non-native learners understand Japanese structure so my models may differ in other ways from models with different purposes (for example Japanese-for-Japanese academic models).
In the sentence where Alice fell straight down , アリスはすぐ下に落ちた, is に marking 下 as an adverb that describes how she fell or as a location to where she fell?
Also is すぐ下 one word or two separate nouns.
It would be an adverb because すぐ下 here a direction, not a place (this from context - it was long drop and we don't know the bottom). "One word or two" is really a concept from English/European languages. Japanese has no word spacing for a reason. Words are very fluid. While we can and dictionaries do nail them down for purposes of reference and convenience, one should not take these as absolutes. Interestingly native Japanese grammar has many technical terms for elements of speech, but the concept "word" is not among them..
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 oh ok thank for the explanation
ドリー先生、thank you very much for your lessons! I have a question about だった in the sentence on 12:00. Maybe it's my misunderstanding, but I don't remember if you were talking in your previous videos about this form of... だ、i guess? Is this a past form of だ in the sentence type AがBだ ?
Yes that is exactly what it is.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 ありがとうございます！
Hi, im a bit confused about adjectives becoming adverbs with ku. I've rewatched episode 6 and 7 but im still a bit lost.
So かわいい -> かわいく, this gave me the impression that 早い would become not fast as 早く.
I assume this whole not cute thing only applies with the Nai helper verb? Thanks!
The い becomes く and the adjective is now an adverb. That's all there is to it. If you want to add ない, you can, to any such adverb.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thanks so much!
Thanks for the awesome video as always. I've been following this up to now and just have a question small question in mind.
It's about the word たて穴 Would it translate as standing hole? a combined word of tatsu and ana? I can't seemed to find the word in the dictionary.
Sorry if this is a confusing question, I was under the impression that "te" form is for the sake of combining one verb with another verb. So, it's okay to use the "te" form like this and use it to describe a noun as a form of adjective? on this case, if it's litterally translated, would it be "standing hole"? Am I understanding it correct?
Thanks for the kind response in advance.
This たて is not the て-form of 立つ, "stand" (I suspect that they are etymologically related though the kanji aren't the same). It is the noun たて, which means in this case "vertical dimension" - so the meaning is pit, shaft or vertical hole. The construction is the kind of two-noun combination-word we have seen with words like 本棚 (ほんだな), bookshelf.
thanks for the promt reply. I appriciate that. I guess the reason why it doesnt have a tenten on it is because you cant add it in the kana "あ" in ana for the combination of two nouns.
It isn't an absolute rule that the second noun must take a ten-ten, though it tends to do so most of the time when it starts with an unvoiced consonantal sound or indeed with the は, ひ, ふ, へ, ほ column (so おもちゃ, toy and はこ, box become おもちゃばこ when combined to make toybox. But of course there are many words that either can't take a ten-ten (like あな) or already have one.
PS - no need to worry about "unvoiced consonantal sounds. It's simpler to just remember that if the second noun _can_ take a ten-ten it usually will. And if it can't it won't, of course.
Thanks again for the promt response. I`ll be sure to remember that.
I might be asking a few questions more as I browse your videos. (if I cant find the answers on google or japanese dictionaries or on the comments section.)
Please feel free to do so.
I have a question,please:
regarding mono for concrete thing and koto for abstract, is there any ambiguous cases where the boundary between them is unclear?
I can't recall こと being used for a concrete object, but もの, while mostly applied to concrete things, is flexible to some degree and can sometimes refer to non-concrete things that would more commonly be associated with こと.
Isn’t there always a が particle used in any sentence or did I get something wrong from the first lesson?
To simplify it, there is always が, but not always is it visible. Actually, most of the time it is not visible. The zero が is a theoretical tool to help you with grasping how Japanese think and how the language functions, but since Japanese is not ego-driven language like English, it mostly is not expressed outright except for certain situations where the subject needs to be expressed. So, Dolly sometimes does not show zeroが as being there (when there is no visible が subject marker), but it is there, however in an actual sentence it is not said obviously. English also uses zero articles. Such as with:
I need a bowl of rice. ← indefinite article
I like the rice in this restaurant. ← definite article
I eat (zero article) rice every day. ← ZERO article
Is that adverbial ni still a target?
静かに歩く "Walk targeting silent."
きれいになる "Become targeting pretty."
Or does this not apply here?
I think the way of looking at this is to start by looking at に as marking the target of transformations. Whenever A becomes B, whether Sakura becomes a frog or the day becomes sunny, we use に to mark the B - the target of the transformation. This can also be used with transforming actions. So with 静かに歩く we are saying that our walking should be transformed into quiet walking, or in other words the act of walking (verb), just like a person (noun) can become or be quiet. In this older video lesson ruclips.net/video/p_QWMdZhSvU/видео.html I referred to this as "the target of the transformation of the action", which is a bit cumbersome but is essentially what is happening.
With きれいになる remember that きれい is a noun. An adjectival noun, but adjectival nouns are still nouns. So we are just saying "become pretty" exactly as we might say "become a frog" - the only difference with adjectival nouns is that they represent states rather than separate entities.
And - as a side note - with abstract nouns like 魔法 or 不思議 there is a wide area of overlap between the two, which is explained in the standard texts by calling them "no adjectives" which only causes confusion in my view.
How does すぐand した join together? Is it about the compound noun? and is すぐしたに an adverb?
And why does おどろく need to change to おどろいた
すぐ is an adverbial telling us that the fall was direct. 下に indicates the direction. Between them they mean straight down.
Why do we say "I am frightened" and not "I am frighten"? Same reason.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49do you mean 驚いた act as an adjectival modifier for こと
@@TzeJun-ps9le Yes, exactly.
Does the adverb always modify the closest following verb?
For example, after getting a description of how a country is a natural impregnable fortress, i get this:
永遠に外敵の侵入を許す事は あり得ないかのように見えた。
At first i thought 永遠に was modifying 許す in the relative clause but it feels weird. "It looked like as if forever allowing the invasion of foreign forces was unlikely."
but 永遠に is actually modifying 見えた, and therefore not part of the relative clause. "The invasion of foreign forces, forever looked as if it was unlikely." Is that correct? I hope i am making sense.
Sometimes phrases in all languages are technically ambiguous (more often than we tend to notice in native or well-known languages). We automatically apply rules of likelihood to these and it is an unwritten rule that if you want to say something _unlikely,_ then you need to clarify that by your choice of words. So your reading of this is correct. The other would be possible but unlikely. More on the ambiguity factor in language here: ruclips.net/video/gcbbSW-KuTQ/видео.html
Never seen such a Diamond in the rough.
I suppose I'm an early model, but I'm a bit of a glitch so they may not be making more.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 but they (whoever might it be) did make at least one more!
One thing that I was wondering when you explained the も particle (which btw was very well explained!) is that if も makes it so that the comment on the new topic is the same of the old topic, why do we have to repeat the sentence after saying アリスも? Just curious and I'm sure you'll explain that later in a separate video, just curious.
Not knowing the sentence makes it very hard to reply. Could you please put the sentence here or at least give a time stamp. Thank you.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 oh sorry, my bad! Was referring to the sentences of 08:12 and 08:16.
Nice sound effect at 10:07!
Thank you.
How does odoroku change into odoroita when match with kotoni?
おどろいた is the past form of おどろく - completely regular for any く ending godan verb.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 oh okay I forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me!
I was under the impression that すぐ下に落ちた would mean like "quickly/immediately fell down" instead of falling straight down. Would that be correct as well?
In this case すぐ is modifying 下 rather than 下に落ちた. すぐ下 = directly down/directly under. It could probably be read the other way but I think that with the natural tendency of language to try to remove ambiguities it would be more likely to be すぐに which can only be read as "immediately/quickly". More on the way language in general and Japanese in particular deals with ambiguity here: ruclips.net/video/gcbbSW-KuTQ/видео.html
(It's something that doesn't get taught and should)
the alternate version of alice in wonderland where alice decided not to follow the rabbit and instead went back to her sister and continued her life as normal would have been an absolute bestseller, i'm sure
I'm slightly confused about not grammar this time, but the existence of the rest of the sentence after も. It seems kind of redundant to effectively say "The rabbit jumped into the hole. Alice jumped into the hole." Since も already tells us that the same comment applies to the new topic, wouldn't it be easier to just say "アリスも"? Or does that somehow lead to confusion?
It would be possible and about as unclear as in English. That's to say, you _could_ say "the rabbit jumped into the hole. Alice also". It would sound a bit truncated and might leave some people thinking "Alice also what?"
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Aah, eye sea. I had been thinking it was closer to "Alice did the same." So in the case of longer sentences then, how would we say something shorter like "Alice did the same?" Like if the rabbit had done a list of actions in a particular order, and we didn't want it to be long winded way to say that she copied that list of actions in a particular order.
@@joshualemke9733 Well as in English there is no one answer, but a simple way would be to say するとアリスもそうした.
I was wondering about the sentence
しゃべるウサギを見た事がない。
I would have never thought to just use “しゃべる” in this way. I figured it would have been used like しゃべり if it’s being used as a noun. Since you have it as a verb. For a talking rabbit. Could you have used しゃべり here for this sentence? Does it basically just come down to this is the way things work in the language if you were describing a “talking something( in this case a rabbit).
しゃべる isn't being used as noun. It is being used to modify a noun (ウサギ). All three engines can modify nouns. This was explained back in the lesson on adjectives: ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html - Very important. One of the keystones of the language.
okay, must have misheard the explanation. thanks ill rewatch it may have been going to fast and things blended together. Thank you
@@coheedmonstar33 It's really worth going back over them from time to time. As you gather more information and experience you learn more even from lessons you thought you fully understood - it's a common phenomenon.
I'm sorry to be this late to ask a question - here we go. Are "onomatopeic nouns" the only exception to the ～な／～に rule for trasforming a noun into an adjective/adverb or are there more, even outside of that particular group? Thanks ^^
Obviously not every noun is a candidate for being used as an adverb or adjective (foot, desk are simple examples). Using と is not limited to ones that are obviously "onomatopoeic" - there are some others that prefer と because they are regarded in some way as "quotational" adverbs. It isn't advisable to learn these in the abstract - you will pick them up as you encounter them in immersion.
Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly Understood - Thank you so much for the answer and for the lessons too! You are a blessing ^^
Great ! Just one question: Odoroku and Bikkuri, Are they the same ?
Startled and surprised, are they the same? No word is exactly the same as another. Each has its own shade, its own place on the meaning spectrum. The place to learn the weight and nuance of words is not classes, lists or dictionaries, but immersion in the language: More about the meaning spectrum here: ruclips.net/video/CpiELpGR-VU/видео.html
I am confused how よどろく changes to よどろいた. Is this because it is the past tense form? I thought the past tense only appears once in the sentence, and at the very end.
Lesson 4 on tenses and Lesson 5 on た/て form explain the change (which does make the past tense). Lesson 6 on adjectivals explains how any Engine (verb, adjective or copula) can be used as an adjectival. In this case the adjectival おどろいた (not よどろいた) is acting as an adjectival for the noun こと.
You'll find the relevant lessons here: ruclips.net/p/PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks so much for your help! I'll be sure to rewatch those lessons to make sure I understand/remember. It's so great you are able to answer questions with so many subscribers!
This is one of the toughest points of Japanese to me so far. It came up SO often (same as "passive") in the intermediate text books. Literally every 3rd sentence uses it.
Just to double check I get it...
しゃべる兎を見たことがない is (She) has never seen a talking rabbit.
しゃべる兎を見なかった is (She) had not seen a talking rabbit. This is different in that you are saying at some point in the past she hadn't seen a talking rabbit but may have at some point after that point seen one.
しゃべる兎を見ない is she doesn't see a talking rabbit now or in the future.
Wondering if something like 従来,しゃべるウサギを見ない gets you to the same place?
Basically past and nonpast... neither get at the same this as ことが modified by a verb clause, right?
Yes. Most of the time しゃべるウサギを見なかった is best translated simply as "she didn't see a talking rabbit". しゃべるウサギを見たことがない means literally "the fact (thing/matter) of her having seen a talking rabbit does not exist" and in natural English would be said as "she has never seen a talking rabbit". However rather than thinking of the English it is better to try to see it in Japanese - that ことがない what こと? the しゃべるウサギを見たこと. A big part of the problem with the English teaching of Japanese is that they try to get you to memorize these "grammar points" as magical formulas, when in fact they are just logical speech _if you think about them in Japanese_ and not in English.
The term 従来 really means conventional, normal usual. Often used when talking about a new method of doing something as opposed to the one that has been used up to now. So 従来,しゃべるウサギを見ない would be an instance of Dictionary Dumping learnjapaneseonline.info/2018/08/25/on-dotards-and-dictionary-dumping-getting-japanese-words-right/ That is using words for what they appear to mean in an English-Japanese dictionary without having any familiarity with them as living entities.
I am not gonna lie, I got completely mindfucked by ~takotoni . Its something I did not understand at all before this video but thinking of it in multiple steps helped. こと "noun-ifies" the verb, and に "adverb-ifies" a noun. It really does mean Japanese just fits together like Lego. Its made me think, if I dont understand a sentence in Japanese, I just need to try breaking it down to its absolute most simple parts and piece it together.
Does 直ぐ belong to the same category of words as ゆっくり? In the sense that both are adverbs/nouns?
Yes.
at 13:30 why isnt「おどろいて」used but「おどろいた」in 「おどろいた ことに」? i would have guessed it would be te-form instead of the past tense ta-form to connect two nouns together
There is no て form of the た form so that is not possible. However the use of the past tense to express a state is common in language and happens in English too. In fact. When we say someone is tired or something looks worn we are using the past tense to express a present state. In fact we even do it with the English equivalent of おどろいた when we say "you seem surprised" - once again the past tense is used to express a present state. This is logical because in all these cases the word in question is a verb and the state is the state that prevails because the verb happened (after we tire we are tired, after something wears out, it is worn out, after something surprises us, we are surprised).
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 always with the best sound logic with your replies and lessons! thank you!
Thank you for the lessons! I'm really enjoying these.
I'm struggling trying to understand what is going on with も and ば in this example sentence that I found online.
も～ ば～ も～
このレストランは、値段も安ければ味もいい。
The food in this restaurant is cheap and delicious.
To begin with, I was confused on why も was being used twice, why not just say
このレストランは値段が安くて、味もいい。or something like that.
But by watching this video, and your video on how も works in combinations, I think I've been able to get some sort of understanding. It is because, we want to add more to the comment about the restaurant, right? As for this restaurant, in addition, the prices are cheap, and in addition, taste is good too. Right? It still seems very strange to me to use も, because in my head I think of it as "even", "in addition", "also" or something similar. And saying something like: "This restaurant also has good prices and also the food tastes good", is extremely weird.
But that's not the worst part, も I can kind of understand why it's there, however, I cannot for the life of me understand why 安ければ is used here. There is nothing conditional going on in this sentence! Or at least the english version of it. Is my understanding of ければ completely off? I hope you will be able to shed some light on this piece of grammar for me.
In every language there are "pure idioms" - that is wordings that defy exact logical analysis as to why they mean what they mean - such as "it's up to you" or "a far cry" in English. A non-native English speaker can't work these out from looking up the individual words and understanding the grammar. Japanese doesn't have a large amount of these but of course it has some. The problem is that current Japanese-for-foreigners treats all regular Japanese as if it worked this way and one just had to remember a gobbet of Japanese vs a gobbet of English with a roughly-similar meaning as a "pattern".
In the case you cite we really do have a "pure idiom". We are literally saying:
"As for that restaurant, if the price is also cheap the flavor is also good".
The two もs don't really translate to double-also in English because this is standard in Japanese:
母も父も知っている
= both mother and father know
But we are still left with
"As for that restaurant, if the price is cheap the flavor is also good"
It could be compared, perhaps to Irish-English expressions like "if there was one of them there were a dozen". It can't be put down to an older meaning of the ば conditional because we can do the same thing with なら. There is clearly a colloquial usage "if x also y" meaning "x and also y".
Every language contains "pure idioms" like this, and one really does "just have to learn them". Fortunately, despite what the textbooks teach, this does _not_ apply to 99% of Japanese!
Thank you very much for the reply!
While it is the tiniest bit frustrating to know that there is not much I can do about this, it is comforting to know that it is not my understanding of japanese that's failing me! Perhaps I will try to get a better understanding of this idiom by looking into how it came to be.
Thank you again, and I look forward to your next video!
You are like me - you like everything to tie up logically (you're not an android too are you?) All I can say is that with that kind of mind you definitely came to the right shop, both in this channel and in learning Japanese. Among human languages, Japanese is by far the most logical I have ever encountered. I don't think there is any that doesn't have the odd "inexplicable" quirk - though as you suggest, if you look into it deeply enough it probably _can_ be explained.
My job here is to keep things relatively simple - so some of my more complex explanations literally end up on the virtual cutting-room floor. That is, even after I film them I cut them out because my job is a trade-off between dotting all the i's and keeping things simple and uncluttered.
However if you do find out anything about how the "if x then also y" = "a and also y" idiom came about in Japanese, I would be very grateful if you would pop a comment here. It would certainly satisfy my urge to tie up all the logical knots!
I have a question regarding the に particle I encountered in a sentence. I haven't finished your series yet, so as far as I understand, there are three uses of the に particle: 1) target [physical, purpose, existence, or transformation], 2) attached to a specific time [e.g. 月曜日に], or 3) turning a noun into an adverb.
So in the following sentence what purpose does the に serve?
晩御飯に食べた物を吐いてしまった。
Now, the に doesn't seem to me to serve the "target" function (either physical, purpose, existence, or transformation). So is the 晩御飯 an adverb describing the eating of food or a time (e.g. dinner time)?
Thanks again!
Yes you are right. に is also the absolute time marker that marks the time or period when something happens. I talk about this toward the end of this video: ruclips.net/video/lU5rmrAORDY/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks! So just to clarify, in the above sentence, the に is an absolute time marker? What about in this sentence?: 最近、やっと仕事に慣れました。 I can't quite figure out what the に is doing.
@@niket527 Remember that Japanese has no prepositions. Most of the time where a preposition would be needed in English (essentially showing a less "direct" and object-oriented relation to something one is acting on/in relation to than を) then we will use either に or と. So here the "target" of our becoming used to is marked by に, not を because we are not acting on it directly. For more on these subtler uses of に (and と) please see this video ruclips.net/video/gVqs4TzqySw/видео.html - It is more about human interaction but perhaps helps to understand the range.
Another point here is to recall that while に marks the "target" of the action in "push" sentences, it marks the "source" of the action in "pull" sentences such as those that use the receptive helper or constructions like Xてもらう, so in cases where the action is one that changes us rather than the external entity に is sometimes used because を suggests an other-change action. More on this here (if it is a little advanced feel free to skip it for now) ruclips.net/video/CESFJaFp8FI/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Ah I see, because 慣れる is a self-move verb を wouldn't really make sense. Man it's complex, but when you understand the puzzle pieces it all starts to make sense, slowly but surely!
What about adverbs that use words which aren't adverbs or abverbed (???) in english?
For example: in the sentence 夜の底が白くなった there is 白く
As far as I understand, く makes 白 into adverb. Of course in english we don't say 'whitely' or such.
Now, なった, as I understand means, in this case, became. So does one read this as 'became white'? Because 'becoming in a white manner' sounds quite silly.
Also, the beginning of the sentence is 夜の底が. Does this mean 'bottom of the night' in same way as we say 'bottom of the ocean' ? Am I getting it anywhere near right if I understand the sentence as 'The bottom of the night became white' ?
Really the important thing is to throw English in the trash can. Japanese is not English and we will tie ourselves in endless knots if we (like the textbooks) try to understand it as if it were. An adverb in Japanese modifies a verb (tells us more about it). The core of a Japanese sentence is the subject (A-car) and predicate (B-engine) and everything else in the sentence is telling us more about A or more about B. So in:
夜の底が白くなった
The core is A夜の底が Bなった. The depth of the night became.
The adverb tells us more about the Engine "became". How did it become? It became whitely.
This does not work in English. This is not how English does things. It is how Japanese does things.
Hi cure dolly,
Just wanted to ask a follow up question again about this video.
its about the word 込む. been really confused about this for a while now and I must appologize if this is an obvious question. because it always says "to be crowded" if you search its translations in dictionaries.
if its just the same, i think thats going to be confusing.
like 電車が込んでいた。can be translated as the train became crowded or entered somewhere or remain the same? . . . or would there be a better way to differentiate it?
sorry if this is a confusing question.
thanks for the reply in advance.
This is a good question and not a simple one to answer. The dictionaries have to try to explain in concise English concepts that actually do not exist in English at all. 込む has a number of meanings, all united by the same fundamental concept - I really should do a video on this. In the kind of context you cite the meaning is - put into English "be crowded". However the English is a passive construction while the Japanese is not (Japanese has no passive - not even the receptive helper verb which gets called the "passive conjugation" by the English texts ruclips.net/video/cvV6d-RETs8/видео.html ).
So what is really going on here? In Japanese the train is the agent. It is doing something and what it is doing can really only be translated into English as being crowded, since English is in many cases actually incapable of rendering the more "animist" nature of many Japanese constructions - this is a key point in understanding Japanese which I explained here ruclips.net/video/vk3aKqMQwhM/видео.html
However, in this case we don't need to worry too much about that (though I do recommend following up the videos I linked). And the reason for this is that in this particular construction 込んでいる the core verb (the sentence engine) is in fact いる, which means "exist" and what we are saying is that the train _exists_ in a state of crowded-being (note that I have to use the be/exist concept _twice_ to put this into English - but the Japanese is only using it once).
So if we can understand that 込む is a verb, then 込んでいる simply means "exist in a state of doing that verb". In most cases this is easily understood as the English and Japanese constructions are very similar. For example 歩いている means "exist in a state of walking"; and "is walking" means exactly the same thing (is = exist). 込む is in fact trickier since English cannot express the concept of "being crowded" without turning it passive - but as I say we can probably manage without worrying about that too much. It will start to become clearer with the above videos.
So the only question that remains is why do we use the living-things form of "exist", いる for a non-living thing? Well it is not absolutely true to say that いる only depicts living things. The truth is that it depicts anything that has or appears to have _will_ - and for reasons I have explained in this video ruclips.net/video/cYrqFjPvwSI/видео.html the difference between 〜ている and 〜てある is that the former treats the subject more like a willed being whether it is (from a Western perspective) or not.
A complex answer, I know. But if you really want to understand how these things work (and your question seems to indicate that you do) then we have to re-adjust our thinking to the way Japanese grammar looks at things. Dictionaries of course don't do that. Their job is to give as-near-as-possible brief English definitions. And sometimes as-near-as-possible is - in terms of real structure - nowhere near.
Thanks for going through all that trouble to answer my question. your the best, sensei!! I'll be watching those links now.
havent watched all of your videos yet, so I must appologize if the answer is already there.
You are welcome. I am always happy to see people thinking seriously about structure (not that structure is an end in itself but it is so helpful to understanding). I haven't answered the exact question you asked. But what do aim to do is to build up all the elements people need for answering questions for themselves. This is the fundamental difference between the textbook approach and the structural approach. Textbooks like the Kanzen Master 文法 books, at the higher levels, devolve into long, long lists of "grammar points" with lists of 接続 (how they connect into sentences). If we learn the structure a lot of this becomes unnecessary. We can see for ourselves what things mean and why and (consequently) how they must connect into sentences. Asking questions helps with this process.
There is still a lot to explain (that's why I keep making videos) - a language is a pretty big and complex affair - it has to express the whole range of human experience. But more and more my videos keep cross-referencing each other and right from the start my aim is to present information that makes people think not, "another twenty facts to memorize", but "another swathe of Japanese that falls into place and makes sense".
Which is an over-lengthy answer to your point about whether the answer was already there. It isn't, but the elements needed to find it are. And helping you to find and apply those elements is part of what I do.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 sorry, been really busy with holidays which is why i couldnt get back sooner. but, you actually did answer my question. based on my understanding, we cant go ahead and translate things word per word. dictionaries arent perfect, and meaning of a word will change depending on the sentence.
in 電車が込んでいる sentence. いる was used, it is talking about the crowd of people(A does B). but if aru was used, then its talking about the train. i.e. entering into a tunnel. (A is B) . in the end, the engine is iru. 込む is just a carriage so it just tells us more about the sentence and not exactly running it.
込む i believe is internsitive, other move, so. . . . I dont know, theres a lot to consider in this sentence. (￣ー￣) (i`ll get back on this after watching all your videos)
It just became confusing for me because 込む is considered one of the most common verb in japanese. but hey, how often do you say does a place even become crowded?
but on the video here where alice enters into the tunnel, you use とび込んだ so it shed some light on me that 込む have a lot of uses.
its just a big headache that some dictionaries doesnt show those other meaning but always highlight "being crowded" instead.
Can I ask your help for this sentence? "珍しく色々起こる日だよ". 珍しく should be an adverb but how does it works in this sentence? How does it modify the meaning of 色々? I guess it should literally mean "Today new and various things will happen", right? I can get that by intuition.
I think it means "Unusually many/various things will happen this day" 珍しく, being an adverbial is of course not modifying a noun, but the verb next door to it 起こる. If we dispense with natural English it is more like various things will unusually occur today. Probably implying both that it is unusual for it to happen and that the occurences are unusual in themselves.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 そう考えたことがありませんでした。アンドロイドは素晴らしいですよね! 頭がいいな (I hope this is right ahahah)
10:05 I dont want to swear but I got spooked af.
Congratulations on not swearing and sorry for the spook.
Great video as always. Personally I prefer the normal lessons, but that's mainly because I am still a beginner and have a very small vocabulary. Would it be okay for you to check if these sentences are correct? (they might be weird but I don't know many words so that's all I can make).
桜が美しく歌った。Sakura sang beautifully.
犬がやんちゃなに走っていなかった。The dog was not running naughtily.
Thanks!
They are both correct although the implication of the second is more "the dog was naughtily not running" (i.e. failing to run constituted the mischief).
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Great thank you!
Up to this point in my slow japanese learning journey I have mostly been using the Japanese from zero book series, but your lessons are very informative. I decided to try your books: unlocking Japanese and Alice in kanji land. What are your thoughts on the from zero series? Greetings from Norway.
I haven't read it extensively but it seems to be (and most things are) yet another presentation of conventional Western "Japanese grammar".
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Well i liked it because it doesn't overload me with to much text and explanations in each lesson, it has dedicated workbook areas and the author also has a long running video series on RUclips where he goes through the lessons. That being said, after watching your lessons up to now I can also see that it uses some conventional Western "Japanese grammar".
I am confused why 上がる is used over 上げる in relation to jump. From my little experience with Japanese grammar, I learned that 上げる is transitive, where you do the action of raising something, and 上がる is intransitive where the action of rising happens on its own.
Since Alice is doing the jumping, why then does Japanese use the intransitive to attach to jump?
I realize I can just memorize that it is used in this way, but I want to understand the reason for it happening this way.
Thanks again for a great video!
Because Alice in jumping is raising herself and not something else. I think the terms self-move and other-move (which translate what these types of word actually are in Japanese) are much clearer than the English terms intransitive and transitive (which don't fit Japanese all the time anyway). The lesson on that is here: ruclips.net/video/ELk1dqaEmyk/видео.html . If we use these terms I think it is clear that jumping up is a self-move action.
Oh you address that in lesson 15. I plan to watch the entire series in the order it is presented anyway, so I will get to it in a few minutes. I started yesterday, and plan to finish the series today.
Thanks for clearing that up!
どういたしまして。Watching the lessons in sequence is the best way as each one builds on the ones before it. Glad you are enjoying the series!
I just want to add to this that this series is actually helping me to understand English grammar better as well. I'm not a native English speaker and sometimes the different terminology can be confusing, but your comparisons to how things are in English make things "click" not only in Japanese but in English as well.
I wish there was an "Organic English" course too, haha.
Well, that's an unexpected side-effect. I am happy to hear that you are getting "two for the price of one"೭੧(❛▿❛✿)੭೨
I'm confused about why 驚いたことに is using past tense. Does adverbs running off こと always reflect the normal past vs non-past tense rules?
Interestingly, the past tense is used in English to express a state, for example, as in this case: "surprised" is the past tense of the verb "surprise". It is also used to express the state of being surprised, as in "I am surprised".
That is exactly what 驚いた is doing here. So near-literally (literal translation is impossible here) 驚いたことに means something like "(it was a) a surprised thing (that...)".
Why "surprised thing" rather than "surprising thing"? This is similar to English "It was a happy day".
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Ah, so when attaching adjectives or adverbs to reflect the state something is in (in this case, what type of thing falling slowly would be) I use past tense, just as past tense is used to describe present states in English.
I assume this is similar to how many things that are verbs in English are declaring states or things in Japanese?
This is quite interesting, considering Japanese doesn't use past tense when declaring somethings state. It does feel like a slight inconsistency.
@@fearedjames Slight inconsistencies exist in all languages. Japanese is more logical than most languages but it is not machine code.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks anyway sensei. Sometimes after your explainations it does feel mysteriously like machine code.
@@fearedjames
It often is. But we mustn't be beguiled by that into forgetting that it is a living language with living nuances.
Brilliant!
Thank you!
H i, thank you for making these. Im currently struggling with the stem system. I was wondering what I could do to grasp it better. I think i might need more exposure. Thanks!
Might this help? ruclips.net/video/ElDZE_BmFVc/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanks!
Do you mind linking that specific version of Alice used in the video? I want to buy it, but can't seem to find this version.
I'm afraid I cobbled it together out of several old versions partly for copyright reasons and partly to make sure it included points I wanted to teach.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 No problem. It was only that I found the illustrations alongside the text provided good context.
@@elmhurstenglish5938 The illustrations are copyright-free older ones from all over the Internet, in some cases edited by my sister (no, I'm not human. She's a doll).
Sensei,
"めったに... ない" is usually explained and traslanted as "Rarely ~something happens~", the dictionary says that めった can also mean "Usual" (I don't really know if this is true), so wouldn't be more logical treat this little construction as something like "Usually ~somethings does not happen", the overall idea is the same, but at least in my head it makes more sense since the verb in japenese is in its negative form.
The thing about めった is that it has a number of meaning including reckless or careless - but they are not very commonly used any more. So めったに・・・ない is almost a fossil. But I think you are right about the origin.
Is there a difference between this 早い or that 速い?
The first can be used for both meanings, "early" and "fast". The second emphasizes "fast".
I have a confusions with takusan, in genki why both "mizu-o takusan nomu & takusan mizu-o nomu" mean "drink a lot of water"?, is takusan modify mizu or nomu ?
And have you created a video for using counter in japanese senteces,
like "i eat 3 apple 3 times" this is confusing me
In Japanese modifiers modify what they directly precede (video here: ruclips.net/video/T5PD1lORiwk/видео.html/ ) so in ther first sentence たくさん is modifying 飲む (のむ) but in the second it is modifying 水 (みず). This is useful because the meaning is slightly different - in many cases it doesn't make much difference but sometimes it can.
I haven't done a video on counters yet, but I think it might be a good idea so thank you for the suggestion.
Thanks for another great video.
I just started reading native material and came across this sentence:
こういうこと急いでるときに限る
Is everything preceding 限る the target of that verb or is it an adverb describing 限る? All I can make of it is something like, "(zero-pronoun) restrict like this is-hurrying time" which makes little sense to me.
Sentences out of context are very often impossible to interpret correctly because Japanese is a very context-dependent language. However this sentence is not grammatical. It is using somewhat truncated particle-dropping speech. It is also likely referring to an ∅が subject that would be clear from context. Xにかげる means X is the best thing for/in Y circumstance and the circumstance seems to be hurrying over Z.
For just starting native material it might be better to try something less colloquial. If you would like to tell me what the material is I might be able to comment further. To comment further on the sentence I would need more context.
Thank you so much for replying.
The line is said when a friend breaks her tableware and they all help to clean up just before school starts. I uploaded the clip here: ruclips.net/video/2KJt8jxWW9w/видео.html
The full sentence appears at 0:35 in that clip. I cut out only the first clause (changing 限って to 限る).
@@Yunotchi Really you must never, never take less than a sentence as your unit of meaning. What you quoted could have been a sentence but we have something entirely different here. I looked at your link and here is what she actually said:
こういうこと急いでるときに限ってやっちゃうんだよね
First let's strip out the んだ structure which is explained in this video: ruclips.net/video/lYvIOi8Q3I8/видео.html and the sentence-ender particles
The basic sentence is:
こういうこと (を) 急いでるときに限ってやっちゃう
I think it is clear what the engine is now. It is the verb やる - plus ちゃう = てしまう - see this video for that: ruclips.net/video/q6vDkjv4ac0/видео.html
What is the structure of this? Obviously there is a zeroed A-car:
∅がこういうこと (を) 急いでるときに限ってやっちゃう
There are two ways to interpret this - they come to much the same thing. We can read やっちゃう as a way of saying "mess up" or we can read it as an abbreviation of something like そんなことをやっちゃう "you go and do that kind of thing".
So overall the sentence means "It's exactly when you rush this kind of thing that you do (end up doing) something like that".
The "end up doing" here is a way of rendering the ちゃう.
People sometimes recommend this kind of anime as simple - and in a way it is. But it is very colloquial, which may cause its own problems.
Thank you very much again. Your explanation makes sense to me.
Also I just subscribed to your Patreon and am ashamed to see my question being used as a bad example! haha
So, I will instead watch something (hopefully) less colloquial: Cardcaptor Sakura
@@Yunotchi Oh dear! This is not a criticism of you! We don't know how to look at sentences until we do know. And part of the trouble caused by conventional teaching is that it really doesn't teach us how to do it.
I added a bit to the Patreon post if you have read it already, this adds one more piece of information I didn't give in my original answer:
The zero A-car here is the general "you" or in more formal English "one" - this use is covered in this video: ruclips.net/video/GN_tGX0W-LE/видео.html
Does the adverb also modifies an adjective?
Yes. The English term "adverb" is a little misleading but in English as in Japanese it means "a word that modifies verbs and/or adjectives". For example we can say "she sang beautifully" (verb modifier) or "it was beautifully sunny" (adjective modifier). The Japanese word 副詞 means a verb/adjective modifier without the implication of solely "verb-modifier", however I used the English term since it actually means verb/adjective modifier and is better known to learners.
What about 少し ?
Is sukoshi an adverbial nouns ?
Yes. It's what I call a foxy noun with the foxy-power. I did a video about different noun-types here: ruclips.net/video/8AXyP5GeJFg/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49
Thank you sensei
10:03 that sound scared me duide. I was at max volume for my IEMS
先生, is there any reason to make the 見る in 見たことない the past form?
can't we say しゃべるウサギを見ることなかった?
come to think of it
I think my question should be reworded
is there any reason why しゃべるウサギを見たことなかい is in present form instead of past like the other sentences?
The answer to your question is that the English rule that a past tense narrative must have every sentence in the past tense does not apply to Japanese. In past tense narrative present tense sentences are often thrown in for various stylistic reasons (greater sense of immediacy etc.) I talk about this in this video: ruclips.net/video/g5uyGx5OnuE/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 ahhh, そうか
thank you so much! your reply means a lot to me
Hi :) Thank you for the video! It was very educational and eye-opening, as always :) I have a question about the ni - particle and how it turns nouns into adverbs. If you take 急 for example, this is a noun in Japanese, correct? Then that means that 急 has to mean "suddenness" and not "sudden" in English, right? Then how would one break down 急に? "To suddenness"? "With suddenness"? "From suddenness"? Or am I just completely bicycling in the park on a Sunday afternoon, as the saying goes in Swedish...?笑笑 Anyway, thank you in advance for any type of answer!
Good question. 急 is indeed a noun and the nearest English equivalent would indeed be "suddenness". However, "suddenness" is not an exact and accurate translation of 急 and can't be because Japanese isn't English and doesn't work in exactly the same way. So, for example きれい (綺麗) is also a noun, and so means "prettiness" more than it means "pretty". But what it actually means is something between the two. When we say さくらがきれいだ we aren't saying "Sakura is prettiness" we are saying that she _manifests_ prettiness, or that prettiness is one aspect of what she is.
We do this in English too but in a less consistent way. "Magic" is a noun. But if I say "that's a magic hat", or "don't put on that hat, it's magic", I am not saying that the hat is the phenomenon called magic, but that it it _magical_ which is the adjectival form of magic - but isn't necessary for turning "magic" into an adjective.
Similarly we can say "that ring is gold". The adjectival form of "gold" is "golden", but we don't need to use it in order to turn gold into an adjective.
Japanese does this in a more consistent way with its adjectival nouns. They (mostly) don't have real adjectival (い) forms but work like the "adjectival nouns", "gold" and "magic" in the examples above.
So, to the に-question.
We know that we can say カエルになる turn into a frog. We can also say きれいになる become pretty (turn into pretty-being) and we can also say きれいに歌う which means "sing in a turned-pretty way".
Bearing in mind that Japanese is much more prone than English to describe states in terms of "becoming"-type verbals such as お腹が空いた (tummy became empty) for "hungry", we can see that this is very much in line with the overall logic of Japanese.
These things are a little hard to explain because rather than pretending that Japanese works like English (which gives easy-feeling explanations that don't really work), our aim is to use English as a poorly-designed (but usable) tool for showing how Japanese really does work.
I described this adjective-forming function as に marking "the target of the transformation of the action" in an older video lesson on に ruclips.net/video/p_QWMdZhSvU/видео.html - a rather cumbersome definition, but I think it usefully shows what is happening.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for the explanation! Do you also have a video on the nouns and na-adjectives that goes more in depth into on these "adjectival nouns"? :)
@@evertgoran Although it is very basic I would recommend the very first lesson in this series ruclips.net/video/pSvH9vH60Ig/видео.html and then the one specifically on adjectivals ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html - the first one because it clarifies the three basic engines of the language, which is fundamental to everything and not made clear elsewhere and the second because this shows how the whole "adjectival" concept works in Japanese. This is crucial to the structure of any even slightly complex sentence, whether it would be "adjectival" in English or not.
I am planning a video about the "noun-heavy" structure of Japanese - how a majority of words that are not either verbs, adjectives ("い-adjectives" as they get called in English) or particles are in fact functionally nouns. This is a big and pretty radical topic so I am taking my time in refining the thesis and finding ways to make it easily understandable. This idea is crucial to the deeper train-modelling of Japanese and will probably clarify many issues. I have introduced parts of this piecemeal in other videos - including the current one. However for the information you want I recommend the two I linked above, in that order.
KawaJapa CureDolly Thank you!!!
どういたしまして೭੧(❛▿❛✿)੭೨
So, let me get the 驚いたことに straight. Let's compare the two expression 「驚いたことに」 and "surprisingly". As I see it, if something, so to speak, "happens surprisingly", it means that the action unfolds so as to make me feel surprise, so in a sense it is a characteristic of said action affecting me; that is, I'm on the receiving end of the interaction.
On the other hand, 「何かが驚いたことに起こる」means that something happens in such a way so that I've experienced the fact of being surprised, but that feeling started from within myself, or that I was-doing surprised (in the sense that I am on the starting end of the interaction, if that makes sense), if I understood correctly the difference between 他動詞 and 自動詞 ; I was wondering if in this regard is possible to substitute 「こと」with 「状態」in this particular construction, in the sense that being surprised was (and still is) my condition.
Don't know if any of this made sense but still, よろしくお願いします。
何かが驚いたことに起こる isn't usually the way we would use 驚いたことに, and that is because the こと changes it from a direct adverb - like 静かに to a comment on the こと - the event or circumstance. So 驚いたことに is usually applied to an entire event (logical clause) rather than an isolated verb. So we might say 驚いたことに何かが起こった - "surprisingly something happened" (when we weren't expecting anything to) but wouldn't really say 何かが驚いたことに起こった - it sounds a little "off".
This is interestingly similar to English "surprisingly" where we can say "surprisingly she ate it" but "she ate it surprisingly" is a bit "off" (at least without a comma which essentially throws the "surprisingly" back into being a comment on the whole statement:
She ate it, surprisingly.
I tried using the も particle for the first time. I think this makes sense, but I don't trust anyone else to correct structure, honestly. (Except perhaps a native speaker who knows a little english)
*JP:* 知っていた！DELTARUNEの英語版では この対話が 紛らわしい、の日本語版でも 「教会音楽のスカ」とが… wwww
. . .
The context is a tweet about a video game. In Deltarune, there's some flavor text listing music genres. One of them is "religious ska", but it's not super clear in the English version whether that's one or two genres. In the Japanese version, I found it's a lot less confusing, thus finding it funnier.
*EN:* I knew it! In the english version of deltarune, this dialogue is unclear. However in (Deltarune's) Japanese version, "Religious Ska" is... lol
Thanks! :)
I'm terribly sorry about this, but my processors were not built to handle this kind of human language. I have no idea what you're saying in either English or Japanese. If you would like to give me an example of も / でも in regular English / Japanese, I will be happy to discuss it with you. Once again, I'm terribly sorry about this failing.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49hm.. it's referencing a quote from a specific video game. On Twitter, this was paired with a screenshot of the text box for context. I'm trying to say here that the highlighted line can be confused in the English edition. When coming to the same line of text in the Japanese edition, the humor was more obvious.
In the first part alice is the invisible subject of the white section, but alice gets a wa for the sentence as a whole. I need to figure out when a white section needs its own invisible subject.
are there any restrictions with the noun+に = adjective? does this apply to のnoun and なnouns the same?
The only restrictions are whether it makes sense or not. Obviously it doesn't work with nouns like テーブル.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 okay, I understand.
It seems simple but I can't figure out the grammar in this sentence "時間を無駄にできないからね" . Can you explain the use of "無駄に" ?
Yes. に (as we see from this video) is used to make an adverb of any adjectival noun so 無駄に is acting as an adverbial for できる. 時間を無駄にする means "waste time" - literally "make time useless". できる is the potential form of する so this sentence is literally saying "because (we) can't make time useless, ne". In English we would say "because there's no time to lose!"
As you probably know the から here, although literally "because", does not need a specific conclusion as it would in English - it can It can be left to imply the conclusion. E.g. "because there's no time to lose (we'd better hurry), ne".
PS it strikes me that it is easier to look at it this way:
While ムダに is acting adverbially (telling more about する) it is probably easier to model this sentence by noting that it is using the regular XXをYYにする = turn XX into YY. ruclips.net/video/sH3iGBkA93w/видео.html
In this case we are turning time into 無駄 or uselessness (remembering that every all-kanji word - is a noun and only a noun can take に).
できる is the potential form of する so this sentence is literally saying:
"because (we) can't turn time into uselessness, ne".
Someone took a look at this and was confused as to why I say that ムダに is adverbial at all and maybe I should have left that out to be simpler. Though I also think it is worth understanding.
Japanese is a modular lego-language, as I often say, and it does almost everything outside of the absolute core (A car, B engine) through chain-modification.
So, to take the simplified form of the statement:
時間をムダにする
This is an act with a direct object marked by を
As with all acts there must be an actor, so for completeness we would have to write:
∅が時間をムダにする
The core of this sentence is
(A) ∅が (B) する
All the rest modifies する
So, ムダに directly modifies する. Therefore is acting adverbially, _telling us more about_ する.
And 時間を is telling us more about ムダにする/ I.e. telling us _what it is_ that ∅ is turning into uselessness.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you!!!! I have been stuck on this for days. I understand now.
Is there any particular reason why the story says:
しゃべるウサギを見たことがない
rather than
しゃべられるウサギが見たことがない？
I would think the focus should be on the fact that the rabbit can speak rather than the fact that it does speak (It seems natural to me that rabbits would speak, given that they could. The surprising thing, I would think, is that it CAN speak in the first place).
Were you thinking of the potential? If so the difference is between "She had never seen a talking rabbit" and "She had never seen a rabbit that could talk". Japanese is no different from English - one can say things in many slightly different ways. There is not one formula that is "right", provided we are within the rules of structure. However しゃべる is godan so it would be しゃべれる.
I modified a sentence I wrote a while ago. You said it was correct at the time, but I removed 私は. Does it still mean the same thing?
「初めまして。ゲーム音楽を作曲する。」
"Nice to meet you. I compose game music."
For context, this would be a standalone profile bio. I am confident this phrasing is awkward and janky at best, perfectly describing where I'm at in the learning process. haha.
It is correct, but it sounds a bit bald. You should introduce your name first. (Even if it is known from the heading/handle etc)
I see my downfall in trying to understand the meanings of the verbs being use as adjectives. I get the concept, but everytime I come in contact with a case like this I always read the meaning completely differently from what it actually means.4:23 my brain read that line as I saw a talking rabbit thing then I tried to think about it more and came up with, the talking rabbit that was seen thing X_X. It's so hard.
Ah we need to notice the ない at the end which shows it will be a negative.
Done
The story is in the past tense, so I’m confused as to why it’s not 喋るウサギを見たことがなかった。 Doesn’t the way it’s written mean that Alice has never seen a talking rabbit? Shouldn’t it say the she had never seen one?
I know there is no longer anyone there to explain this to me…😢
That's just how it is ことがない is an expression that it means something has never happened, in the past or otherwise, not only that but you will notice it comes AFTER the past tense of the verb too.
When I finally learn all the fricken grammer there's always more
Take it slow, that’s the fun of it :)
2:57 Wouldn't it be more natural to say 「しゃべるウサギを見たことがなかった」, "A talking rabbit had never been seen"?
The way used here is the way Japanese constructs the concept "have never Xed" - It is literally "fact of having did-X does not exist". Now you are correct that in English-language narrative it is obligatory to cast every part of a past-narrative in the past, but in Japanese narrative this is not the case and it would seem a little stilted. I talk about this more in this video where we see several instances of it ruclips.net/video/g5uyGx5OnuE/видео.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thanky you for answering. I realize now that a story can use several tenses, going back and forth between present and past (it happens a lot in children stories in portuguese). But if one wants to stress the fact that up until that point (in the past), nothing like that had ever been seen (as opposed to the present), can the sentence end with なかった? Is it correct?
@@JoseOliveira-kc4tr Yes. The way it is in the story the stress falls more on the absence of ever having seen a talking rabbit and on the immediacy of the experience (we are placing the narrative in that moment). We can also say なかった to change the emphasis. This is a choice that correct English style does not allow (though informal narrative can use this device: "So yesterday I go into this shop").
I rewatched again because as always your videos clear the doubts! Not sure if you have a video about it (if you have it I coudn't find it) explaining about using noun + な. I found that it converts the noun into an adjective that tells something about the name that precedes it. For example in LN i found things like this 魔隷術師な俺と、姫騎士な彼女.
I'm still unsure about how to use it correctly... It can be used after all nouns? I coudn't find info about it without counting about na-adjectives. All I know is that it's a complement. I found it on here: jref.com/threads/adding-na-after-noun-adjectives.41081/
For example on this:
この店は大変便利ですね --> Here it's an attribute
この店は大変便利な店ですね --> Here it's a complement
But I'm still confused... In the second one is like repeating the topic twice (how I see it, I'm spanish) so it looks like repeating twice the same info. I'm not sure if I'm correct or not.
This isn't how we use な. It turns and adjectival noun (only) into a noun-modifier. The noun it follows will be marked by a logical particle to show its role in the logical clause. The adjectival noun does not play a role in the logical clause because it is only there to describe another noun. So:
元気な女の子が走っている
If we only want to say that the girl is lively, then we put the な・だ on the other side (where it becomes the Engine of the sentence and so must be だ) and say
女の子が元気だ
The (non-grammatical) convention of using です after real adjectives comes in to confuse you here I think. That is why I ask you not to use it at this stage. We'll get to that very soon.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thanks for your reply. In your example is clear what's the diff between the two. I'm not sure what that LN tried to say adding な on there (because 術師 is a noun), i get the meaning but it's still strange to see な before a noun.
I don't know if anyone's still reading comments at this point, but why does it say "miTAkotoga nai" and not "miRUkotoga nai"?
見たことがない = I haven't ever seen it (fact of seen-it non-existent-is) 見ることがない = seeing it isn't something that happens (fact of seeing-it non-existent-is)
"she *has* never seen it before"
"she *had* never seen it before"
Are these two expressions rendered in the same way in Japanese?
彼女は見たことがない
In relation to her the fact of saw-it does not exist
彼女は見たことがなかった
in relation to her the fact of saw-it did not exist
Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly
It’s interesting that although the story is in the past tense it uses “がない”. Is this because from Alice’s current perspective (at this point in the past) it was present to her? In other words, saying “がなかった” would be more like saying “she had never seen this until this other time that was in the past from this moment” and therefore pointing to an event in the past relative to this other event that just so happens to be past from now as well? If that makes sense
Basically, is it describing her state of never having seen it before this present moment and then placing that moment in the past along with everything else? Because although that may seem slightly confusing at first, that really seems like a more logical way to describe it because it’s being described from Alice’s perspective and only then being placed in the past not in reference to Alice directly but in the context of the narrative. Because to Alice that moment was not lost at the time it was happening. Right?
> *ALL* about adverbs
> Doesn't mention ず adverbs
Can you upload a video of you speaking only in Japanese? Your videos are mostly in English so it's hard to get a feel for what your Japanese speech sounds like. For practice, and curiosity sake.
I don't consider my spoken Japanese to be a model for anyone. I can communicate well enough but it is certainly no less odd than my English (about which I get various complaints). Both languages happily get me where I'm going which is all I ask. But beyond this, I deprecate the whole cult of "personal qualification" that certain people are strongly propagating currently, and I do this for two reasons - first that I think it is invalid in itself, and second because even if it were valid it has no relevance in the case of what I am currently doing.
The more general point is, briefly stated: putting forward the claim that the founder of a method has become extremely competent in a language in X amount of time as "proof" that his method is effective is snake-oil talk. Such a claim even if true (and it may well be true) proves nothing whatever. It is no more than single-instance anecdotal evidence. Insofar as the founder or exponent of the method is more than a random single instance of someone who achieved a high level and attributes the fact to a particular method, it is good evidence for the individual's prowess but _counter-evidence for the method_ - we don't want to know that one especially talented (and/or suited to the particular method) found it effective. We want to know whether it is a good method for people in general - for people with no especial ability.
The more specific point is that the last thing I want is people "believing in me" because my personal level in the language. I am not touting some method that you need to sink years into and therefore want some proof of the outcome (which the personal prowess of the pitch-man in any case does not provide). I am offering structural information that should "click" within a short period of time. It should produce "aha moments" quickly. If it doesn't, it may well be the wrong approach for you. Please _don't_ take me on trust. I am not a faith healer.
Also, I don't teach things like pronunciation (beyond a few very basic tips and tricks for beginners). I would not consider myself competent to do so. It might be nice to be able to do so at some stage, but I know that my English does not sound all that "natural" so I am not sure that my Japanese ever will. I am probably better advised to leave that to you humans.
I am sorry for such a long answer to a short question. Actually I wouldn't mind doing a video in Japanese just for fun, but I don't want to be taken as a model for pronunciation, and at this stage at any rate, in the current climate of chest-thumping-as-evidence in some quarters, I think it would very likely introduce a complete irrelevance into what I consider to be an important work. So I will exercise restraint.
PS if you are further interested in my views on this matter I did a post on the subject here www.patreon.com/posts/18644117 (it is open to the public).
Thank you very much for all of your videos and lessons. Since I started watching your videos, I suddlendly began to understand how japanese works!
Thank you also for your very useful feedback!
I think I just realized something...
for example we can transform: "inu ga keeki wo tabeta" into "keeki wo tabeta inu", the dog that ate the cake, were "ate the cake" become the adjective.
"Hi ga aru" becomes "aru hi" aru is a verb used as an adjective.
"nomimono ga atatakai" => "atatakai nomimono" were atatakai is an adjective in the form "warm-is"
and "heya ga shizuka da" (is that correct?) becomes "shizuka na heya", because you said "da" can be only in the end of a clause so here we must change it into "na", but this "na" = "da".
So that means that "shizuka na heya" is an adjective which presents as "quiet-is" so "noun-verb".
in short:
"keeki wo tabeta inu" = "noun-wo-verb + inu"
"aru hi" = "verb (used as an adjective) + hi"
"atatakai nomimono" = "noun-verb + nomimono" (because atatakai = warm-is and not only warm)
"shizuka na heya" = "noun-verb + heya" (quiet-is)
That means all adjectives in reality can be considered as verbs/clauses that had been put before the noun to modify it?
Yes, this is absolutely correct. This is what I meant in my core video definition of Japanese "adjectives" ruclips.net/video/iyVZlaEqU24/видео.html when I said that what an "adjective" actually is in Japanese is any one of the three engines. Plus anything that belongs with it - so any simple sentence can become an "adjective" and so can a complicated one. We can say:
"the I-met-in-Kyoto-last-week-the-day-after-my-dog-ate-the-white-rabbit-that-my-sister-brought-back-from-China person"
if we want to. And it happens. Everything except "person" there is one big adjectival (and of course "person" still needs to have a B-engine to turn the whole thing into a sentence). As you see, there are adjectivals within the overall adjectival This is a big part of how Japanese works. Obviously we haven't got that complicated yet in this series, but it all develops perfectly logically from what we already know.
We can say that Japanese is a highly "adjectival" language!
As to all adjectives being considered verbs. Well really this is a matter of how we choose to model things. We _can_ say that, but I think it is more helpful to think of three engines. It keeps things straight in our minds. The copula (だ) is in fact a form of verb, but it is different from "ordinary" verbs in so many ways that I think it is best to treat it separately.
"Adjectives" (meaning 形容詞, or "い--adjectives" - I use the convenience-term "adjective" for these because it is close enough to be useful) are not verbs. They are however very closely related to verbs (which is why I say that there is really no such thing as an adjective in Japanese - or rather any engine or logical clause can be an "adjective"). We could try to simplify the scheme by conflating these with verbs, but again I think it makes things more understandable to preserve the distinction.
thank you for your help!! ^^ I see what you mean!
well "the I-met-in-Kyoto-last-week-the-day-after-my-dog-ate-the-white-rabbit-that-my-sister-brought-back-from-China person" is a quite a complicated example!
senshuu ni Kyouto oneechan wa chuugoku kara mottekita shiroi usagi wo tabeta inu tsugi no hi ni atta hito...
well... It doesn't work... at least I tried
It's a bit complicated isn't it? It runs kind-of in reverse because everything modifying anything has to come immediately before it. Something like this:
私の犬がお姉ちゃんの中国から連れて来たた白いウサギを先週食べた次の日京都に会った人
Watashi-no inu-ga oneechan-no chuugoku-kara tsurete kita shiroi usagi wo senshuu tabeta tsugi-no hi kyouto-ni atta hito.
Notes: senshuu doesn't take ni because it is a relative time expression ruclips.net/video/lU5rmrAORDY/видео.htmlm46s (it's more intuitive than it sounds). It is best not to have it at the beginning of the sentence unless the whole action of the sentence is taking place last week (and we don't know what the B engine will be here). Here I have it before tabeta because we don't know when the rabbit came back from China, only when the unfortunate incident occurred. Tsugi no hi is also a relative time expression so we don't need ni for that either.
I use no in place of ga after oneechan partly to avoid overusing ga and also because it is her dog and so extra appropriate. I discuss the no/ga switch in adjectival clauses (which is really only an extension of the possessive function of no, as is especially clear here) in this video ruclips.net/video/wxX6poiuyAI/видео.html