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Dec 17 |
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Usage of Japanese counters @TsuyoshiIto and Tim: the OP is asking in what cases a number and a counter combine and contract, like いち + さつ = いっさつ (or obtain irregular readings, like 一人). In particular, they are trying to verify their intuition that (1) the only numbers that can combine in this way with a counter are numbers that end in いち, に, ..., じゅう, and so ひゃく, せん, まん, etc. are always left uncontracted, and that (2) if いち contracts with a counter, then any number ending with いち will combine in the same way, and likewise for any other number that combines in this way. This is a perfectly clear question to me. |
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Dec 17 |
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Usage of Japanese counters @TsuyoshiIto They are perfectly valid yes/no questions. If anything, I'd say this shows evidence of research. Please don't be so pompous as to criticise the style in which the question was asked. The meaning is clear. |
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Dec 16 |
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Is みんな being used as a “counter”? @Tim: Is it possible that you just misunderstood the meaning of cypher's second sentence? The 皆 there is 'referring to' the cheese, not people. I think you wanted to write 皆が, not 皆に. |
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Dec 16 |
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Is みんな being used as a “counter”? I think the point is just that みんな can be used either as a noun or as an adverb/counter-type thing. (Just like すべて, which can be both of these things.) |
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Dec 5 |
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How to call a wait pointer in Japanese? I've certainly never heard of either "wait pointer" or "wait cursor" in English, and I consider myself very computer-literate, so I'm inclined to believe it's not very popular except amongst people who have read that documentation. (More flippantly, but equally sincerely, I imagine that in practice the Japanese at least use the same sort of language we do to describe it, such as "beach ball of death" or "oh for ****'s sake that stupid ******* egg timer ******* again".) |
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Nov 27 |
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i-adjectives used as na-adjectives: is there a difference? (e.g. 大きい versus 大きな) I suspect your question 2 can't be answered, and this is just a small list of exceptions (unless you want a historical reason why they accidentally arose as exceptions). As for the difference in use: it seems to me that 大きい is the declarative adjective (e.g. その建物は大きい（です）ね！, but not * その建物は大きだ（/です）ね！), and 大きな is preferred as an attributive adjective (e.g. それは大きな建物ですね is preferred over それは大きい建物ですね). |
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Nov 24 |
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Is しまった an appropriate translation for “Oops”? @silvermaple: Sure, that kind of thing. Doesn't really feel appropriate for "oops!" here. :) |
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Nov 23 |
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Is しまった an appropriate translation for “Oops”? I always understood しまった as meaning something more like "damn!", but milder. How about おっと? |
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Nov 21 |
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Which forms of a verb do I need to memorize to distinguish ichidan from godan? @cypher: 要る・入る, but 居る, is another common one. (To be precise - because it's obvious to me what you mean, but not necessarily to others: whether it's an ichidan or a godan verb doesn't "depend on the kanji" as such. Rather, whether it's an ichidan or a godan verb depends on the meaning of the verb, and the kanji used depends on the meaning of the verb. So of course you can work out whether it's ichidan or godan depending on the kanji, but there's no direct relation between how you write a given word and how you conjugate it. They both come from another source.) |
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Nov 21 |
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Typo or am I missing something? 「ドイツ語も勉強しないとですね。」 @Maccath: In particular, while と can sometimes mean 'if', it's the wrong kind of 'if' to make sense here. と is never used in this sense. My intuition on this is fairly weak, but I think "if you're not learning German" would be something like 「ドイツ語を勉強しない のなら 」. Similar sorts of things are expressed by しなかったら and しなければ, but they sound a little odd to me here. |
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Nov 21 |
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Insertion of “y” sound between vowels @alexandrec: To be honest, I find your answer harder to understand - not least because I wouldn't expect to find a glottal stop before words starting with e and o in English. I'm not sure I know of a dialect that reliably does that, and it mostly comes down to how careful the speaker is. |
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Nov 17 |
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a natural and short way to say I'm currently learning Japanese, and it isn't very good? I'd definitely recommend polite form and no slang, as in istrasci's post. Plain form and slang come across as rather blunt (rather than e.g. friendly, which you might have been intending). You'll find some Japanese people using plain forms and slang, but not all, and you should assume that they know better - polite form, even online, especially amongst people you don't know, is always safe, whereas plain form is a bit more subtle. |
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Nov 15 |
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Etymology of それはそうと @istrasci: But と is never used to mean that sort of (conjunctive) 'and'. |
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Oct 30 |
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Is 感じる {かんじる} transitive or intransitive? Which particle to use? My intuition aligns with istrasci's. If you feel a certain way, you should use an adverb (i.e. い-adjective modified to end in ～く, or な-adjective with に plonked on the end). An example of this: 「体がすごく重く感じるよ！」 (stolen from alc). If you feel (aka sense) an object, then you should use a noun with を. |
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Oct 30 |
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Do people use まい？ @TsuyoshiIto Your translation sounds the same as ssb's translation to me (though ssb's is a little more colloquial). (The "like" in ssb's sentence and the "as if" in yours don't have the same meaning, if that's the source of your confusion?) |
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Oct 30 |
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Addressing children in Japanese Current answer seems to be attracting about as many upvotes as downvotes, so I'm reluctant to accept it - can anyone else clarify, please? |
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Oct 23 |
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Is there a reliable translation of the kangxi radicals? "translations of the radicals" This is because radicals do not always have consistent inherent meaning. They don't have translations - at best they have vague historical (maybe now extinct) connotations. Something that might be potentially interesting and useful is this kanji etymology dictionary: kanjinetworks.com/eng/kanji-dictionary/… . Try entering both 癶 and istrasci's example 発, and you'll see that modern meanings of kanji and original meanings of radicals are only very tenuously and vaguely related. |
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Oct 23 |
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“Would ____?” -のだろう or -おう/-こう/etc But requests and suggestions are different things, even in English! You're going to have to give us some full example sentences. But in addition to dainichi's suggestions, here are a couple more. For requests, you might want to consider 「（食べて）くださいませんか？」 (a polite "would you mind (=do me the favour of) eating?"). For suggestions, "let's eat!" is 「食べましょう！」. You can soften this by adding a ね onto the end, or turning it into a question ("shall we eat?" 「食べましょうか？」). You can make all of these more informal by replacing the polite-form 食べましょう with the plain-form 食べよう. |
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Oct 22 |
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“Would ____?” -のだろう or -おう/-こう/etc What do you mean by "would you...?" or "why don't you...?"? These feel like two different things to me. Can you give a couple of example sentences? To me, 「食べようか？」 sounds like "shall we eat(, then)?", and 「食べるのだろうか？」 sounds like "(I wonder whether) he (or whoever) eats?". |
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Oct 22 |
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Addressing children in Japanese Thanks for the answer! But my curiosity compels me: what do you mean by "the children know it and they won't forgive you"?! |
