Billy

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May 14	comment	への対へ/に-Difference between への and へ/に If you like - I was simply drawing a distinction between "an utterance that felt incomplete" and "an utterance that felt complete". That is, あなたへの私の愛 is not trying to be a sentence, but あなたに私の愛 is trying to be a sentence (and is failing). I suppose you said it better. ;)
May 14	comment	Questions with some usages of でで, in all of these circumstances, feels to me like the て form of the copula. I'm sure a grammar book would do a better job of telling you what that is than I would, but yes, all of the で sound the same to me.
May 14	comment	Why is 〜に受かる used to mean “to pass”? (There's also the use of に as marking a cause (e.g. 暑さに音を上げたのは人間だけでない, it's not only humans who suffered from the heat - taken from Kaiser et al's "Japanese - a comprehensive grammar"). I doubt this too though, but this is purely my intuition.)
May 14	comment	Why is 〜に受かる used to mean “to pass”? It's difficult to answer questions like "why is it に?". (Perhaps it just is, and there's no reason Japanese case particles should be explicable within an English frame of mind.) Grammatically, it's に simply because 落ちる is intransitive. Be careful with the literal meaning: 恋に落ちる means "to fall in love", and 地面に落ちる means "to fall onto the ground". If you want to think of it as "falling onto a test", feel free, but my guess is that this is not how Japanese people think of it.
Feb 9	comment	What is the English equivalent of「ひとこと欄」? I guess just "comment box"? It's worth pointing out that 欄 is a pretty common word for text fields (e.g. in browsers), like 名前欄 (box into which you put your name). I saw someone refer to some box on Twitter as 「お気に入り」欄 ('favourites' section). The Facebook status update box is 近況欄.
Feb 9	comment	What does ドン引き mean? Even if you can't read Japanese well, my dictionary gives "talking or acting in such a way as to make those around you draw away". WWWJDIC says "drawing away from someone because of their speech or actions; having the mood ruined". It gives an example sentence, in which ドン引き is translated as "you creeper!". Seems clear to me.
Dec 22	comment	What does “クズな” mean? Google shows lots of results for both 屑な and クズな.　Is it possible that the word has only recently become popular as a な-adjective?
Dec 19	comment	Double subject construction? Thanks very much, @snailplane (and dainichi). I'll accept this answer simply because it's a bit more detailed than Flaw's. :)
Dec 19	comment	Double subject construction? Thanks - appreciated. :)
Dec 19	comment	Double subject construction? Oh - perhaps the name is more transparent than it seemed at first glance. The "exclusive-listing" meaning of が is the one that renders "YがX" as meaning "the (only) thing with property X (in the world / in consideration / in the scope of this discussion) is Y", is that right?
Dec 19	comment	Double subject construction? Can you explain exactly what you mean by "exclusive-listing", please? (I could perhaps reverse-engineer a definition from your XのはY sentences, but I'm wondering what it means in general, without reference to this double-が nonsense.)
Dec 18	comment	Double subject construction? @istrasci Oh, I didn't know HTML was allowed here. Thanks.
Dec 18	comment	Double subject construction? So can I say 郊外が家賃が安い? (That is, can I change the subject?)
Dec 18	comment	Double subject construction? Ack, my formatting messed up. I don't really know how to fix that, because it looks fine on the edit screen...
Dec 17	comment	Usage of Japanese counters @TsuyoshiIto Thanks.
Dec 17	comment	Usage of Japanese counters (And, now that I've clarified the question, could it be clarified in the OP / reopened / answered, please?)
Dec 17	comment	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.
Dec 17	comment	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.
Dec 16	comment	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.
Dec 16	comment	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.)