This piece arose from an answer to a question on the nominalizing no and perhaps explains this particular aspect a little more clearly than in the video The Japanese nominalizing no particle.
Japanese school textbooks for Japanese children explain the nominalizing no as being short for “no mono” and I think that is pretty accurate in describing how it works.
To put it another way, no in “aoi no” meaning “the blue one” is indeed the no that is roughly equivalent to “mono” or “koto”. And when we want to place a possessive no before this no (they are closely related as I show in the nominalizing no video) we don’t double the no, but let one stand for both.
So if we want to say “Sakura’s one” we don’t say “sakura no no”, we just say “sakura no”, as in “sakura no ga suki da” (I like Sakura’s one).
We do something very similar in English. For example, we may say
“Sakura’s is red, Mary’s is blue”
which would exactly correspond to
“Sakura no ga akai , Mearii no ga aoi”
rather than
“Sakura’s one is red and Mary’s one is blue”
which, literally rendered, would be
X “Sakura no no ga akai, Mearii no no ga aoi”
The cross is to show that this sentence is not correct Japanese.
In English we can conflate the ‘s and the one but in Japanese we must conflate the no that is ‘s and the no that is one.
Originally published on Cure Dolly’s Patreon on Apr 4, 2018
Self-learning A.I. android Cure Dolly reveals the reason why most foreign learners of Japanese end up non-competent in the language – and what you can do to make sure you aren’t one of them.
This is a subject that comes up from time to time. I recently had the following question:
Do you think people who didn’t get fluent just through listening can fix/”remove” their accent? Or will they have it forever?
Here is my answer:
I think we need a little perspective here.
American universities attract the best minds from all over the world to teach there. Nearly all of them, unless they came very young, speak English with an accent that indicates where they came from. Nobody cares about this or thinks any the less of them for it.
Speaking a language learned beyond infancy with no accent is unusual. It can be done, but the question to ask is: is there actually any good reason to do it, or would the effort be better spent on something more useful?
The answer is different in different cases. If you want to be a voice actor in Japan, for example, it is very important. If you want to impress people – well, it will certainly impress native speakers for a few days after you first meet them*. Non-native speakers mostly won’t be able to hear the difference.
But apart from certain occupations where it is critical, it really is little more than a party trick.
There are certain internet personalities who appear to regard learning Japanese as a kind of testosterone-driven spitting contest, who will say that you “suck” if you can’t talk without an accent.
Presumably they think Einstein “sucked” because his English was always accented.
You may find that your own priorities are a little more grown-up.
To my processor, Einstein had the ability to communicate what he wanted to communicate in English (and that was by no means simple). That is what language is for.
It is a means of communication, not a competitive sport.
Polish-born Josef Conrad, whose command of English was so good that he is considered to be one of the great novelists of English literary history, spoke with a strong Polish accent all his life. I don’t suppose the matter was of the smallest concern to him or to anyone he knew.
To be clear, if speaking without an accent is a challenge you want to undertake, I have no criticism whatever. Humans do all kinds of things – climb mountains, sail oceans in a tub. All of it is admirable and if that seems like a good use of your time absolutely go for it.
All I suggest is that you make your own assessment of whether this is in fact an important goal and not take too much notice of people who suggest that it is a necessary component of becoming proficient at Japanese. It isn’t.
However, to answer your question. Should you at any point decide to try to eliminate all trace of non-native accent, you can do so if 1) your ear is good enough and 2) you want to devote the time and effort to doing it.
Learning by pure listening would give you a head start. But without real (24/7) immersion that is not very easy unless you have a special talent for that kind of learning. Some people do. Most people don’t. It isn’t a sign of general intelligence, just a facility some people have – like being able to bend their pinky backwards.
PS – to clarify – obviously you want to be able to enunciate clearly and correctly enough to be easily understood. That is a very different matter from eliminating all accent.
Japanese people usually tell me that I am easy to understand – and prove it by understanding me the first time, despite the fact that I think I have a pretty strong accent (I suspect that my Japanese sounds notably weirder than my English). They also tell me that they have trouble understanding most foreigners.
Pronunciation is not unimportant and there are a number of things that are crucial. I think one of the commonest problems is failing to sufficiently distinguish single from double vowels and failing to pronounce the small っ break (or putting it in where it doesn’t exist). I have had trouble understanding foreigners myself for this kind of reason.
So please understand that I am not arguing against accurate pronunciation. I am suggesting that the much bigger task of eliminating all accent should be considered on its merits in each individual case, and in most cases is unnecessary.
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This article first appeared on my Patreon feed and patron Kamui-sama commented:
There is so much else I have to learn and understand first before I will worry about my accent. Besides, accents usually are charming and I like hearing them.
This I think is very true.
When I used to do language exchange I had more than one Japanese lady with the cutest accent saying (in English) “how do I lose my accent?” And privately I was thinking “What would you want to do that for? I hope you don’t lose it!”
This experience did influence me, as I realized that it was probably the same the other way around.
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* It won’t impress strangers in Japan because they will probably assume that you were born there or lived there as a child – they will be more impressed by excellent but accented Japanese.
Having said this, there are cases where Japanese people not infrequently use expressions like 目をあく which is incorrect (a little like English speakers saying “they was there” – though I get the impression that it is less uneducated-sounding than that).
Naturally you will stick with grammatical use – not only because it is correct but also because there are only some cases where it is commonly misused and you don’t want to start learning lists of themʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
Now, in the large cross-over area where あく and ひらく are both (legitimately) used as self-move there is a difference, but there is a large cross-over within the cross-over.
However, the basic difference is very straightforward:
あくwill be used for a bottle opening (or being open), ひらく for a flower opening.
Things that spread open like a flower or a book are ひらく. If you love children’s songs, you may know むすんで・ひらいて. Again it is natural that the action of spreading the fingers to open the hand is called ひらいて and not あいて. Books and umbrellas** are also ひらく.
So something that “opens out” is ひらく and something where a lid or a stopper is removed completely to allow access will definitely be あく. However, for a wide range of things – like French doors, eyes, mouth – either can be used.
The actual other-move version of あく is あける and that, just as we would expect, gives us the other-move form of the things that are more あく-like than ひらく-like (ひらくbeing its own other-move version, as it were).
There are occasions when this is less obvious, but the same logic still applies. For example:
店をひらく
Open a shop in the sense of establish it and begin trading.
店をあける
Open the shop for the day. Open the doors.
As you see, in the first the idea is that the shop is made to open out like a flower and begin, in the second it is just a question of unblocking the doorway so the customers can come in.
A supplementary question was:
Thank you for the detailed explanation. Seems like the kind of thing you just have to get used to with exposure. It’s very helpful to know the underlying principles behind them, though. How does ひらける fit into this? Is it just the potential form of ひらく again or is it a separate verb?
Here is my answer:
It isn’t really too difficult. There are things that are clearly あく and things that are clearly ひらく and then some that are less definite. These ones even Japanese people use freely in either form, so you can too.
In reading, you can read either in ambiguous cases. If the writer considers it important she will use furigana since there are small differences of nuance (ドアがひらいた for example tends to emphasize the idea of the door opening wide).
ひらける is not (usually) the potential form of ひらく, it is a derivative of ひらく and seems actually to be its self-move form (several Japanese sources say so).
Now this may seem confusing since ひらく is already both other-move and self-move but I think we need to see it in terms of moving the self-move side of ひらく further over to the ある side of the ある/する map.
Important note – if you don’t understand what I mean by the ある/する map please watch the video as this is a vital foundation of Japanese that never gets taught.
So ひらける means more “being in a state of having-opened-out” than simply opening-out – or at least lays more stress on the opened-out state. This is a kind of sliding-scale since ひらく can also have that implication (especially in the past tense) but ひらける lays more stress on ある-ness, if that makes sense.
* Naturally there is no confusion over these misuses when hearing/reading them because if someone is using を then they are clearly using the word as other-move.
** But remember that using an open umbrella is usually 差す (さす) and this extends to opening it, so this is what you encounter most commonly unless specific attention is being drawn to the process of its unfolding. Though of course, since す-ending 差す is naturally other-move, we would say ひらく to describe what the umbrella itself does.
This article first appeared on my private Patreon feed
Japanese punctuation is easy, but to understand it we need to know a few things.
Most Japanese punctuation was adopted from the West relatively late, so it is not so integral to Japanese as European punctuation is to European languages.
The main functions of periods (。)and commas (、) are directly based on the equivalent European functions and the main difference is that the rules are less clearly established.
Commas are pretty much thrown in whenever someone feels like it (kind of like Internet English). There aren’t definite rules for their use as in (real) English or German. I have heard of Japanese schoolchildren being criticized for overuse of commas* but this is simply a stylistic question and there is no general agreement on comma style. Essentially, if you want to show a natural pause you can use a comma. Concepts like comma-ing off a subordinate clause are not present in Japanese.
The various parentheses are used pretty much as anyone wants to use them too. Some publications or sites will establish their own rules, but there are few general ones.
「 」 are very straightforward. They work like English quotation marks. The only difference I can think of is that in some cases the closing 」can replace a period. Again this is a matter of style. Some publishers do this in their books and some don’t.
『 』 are mostly used for quotes within quotes – rather like single and double quotation marks in English, only the other way around (but English punctuation can be less consistent in this than Japanese punctuation).
〒 is used to mark a postal code in postal addresses and sometimes used as a symbol for (physical) mail in general.
々 is called the 同の字点 (どうのじてん) “same-character mark”. It simply indicates that a kanji is repeated. So words like 木木 (きぎ =trees) or 細細 (こまごま =detailed) are more often written 木々 and 細々.
I have never seen anything like the string of hash to represent foul language. This is probably because foul language is not a thing in Japan the way it is in European languages. That is, there are very few “taboo words” and they are not used in anything like the same manner they are used in European languages. There are of course many ways of being vulgar in Japanese, but the concentration around (and fascination with) a few particular words does not exist.
Some Western otaku types are so attached to Western dirty-word culture that they try to make out that it exists in some form in Japanese but it really doesn’t.
A postscript is called 追伸 (ついしん) and is sometimes used.
Hyphenation is not used in Japanese punctuation because that function really belongs to a word-spaced language – Western languages have separate words (good night) and joined words (goodnight) and sometimes want something between the two (good-night). But this question clearly doesn’t arise in Japanese where the entire concept “word” (as I sometimes try to convey) is actually very different from the western concept – much more fluid and lego-like. (This is why it would not be a good idea to introduce word-spacing into Japanese).
Overall, Japanese punctuation is easier than European punctuation because it is a recent add-on with few rules.
The question-mark is a case in point. Some people wonder when Japanese people insert a ? and the answer is pretty much “when they want to”. It is actually an extremely useful innovation because what it really does is mark intonation.
If we use the か marker in formal speech we don’t need it, but if we want to show that a normal-level sentence uses a rising pitch indicating a question we can pop one in. If it is clear from context we might not bother.
One curious piece of Japanese punctuation that may be puzzling (it puzzled me for a while) is that in books you will sometimes see little marks (rather like Japanese commas or occasionally dots) beside each letter of a word or a group of words in vertical text.
These are either for emphasis or picking out a special use of a word. In practice they work pretty much exactly like italicization in English and were probably based on that and originally introduced for translating Western books. The fact that you can’t type them easily and they seem restricted mainly to books reinforces that idea.
In fact, several things were brought into Japanese during the Meiji Era specifically to facilitate the translation of European novels into Japanese. One example of this is the gendered third-person pronouns 彼 (かれ) and 彼女 (かのじょ), which, believe it or not, did not exist before they were introduced for that purpose.
Note on Japanese punctuation in education
(Purely geeky and about Japanese punctuation in children’s education. Feel free to ignore)
* I think the criticism of comma-use in schools is not based on an ideal of “correct comma use” the way it is in European languages. I think it centers on the question of using commas as a “crutch” to clarify one’s meaning rather than making oneself clear by the use of precise Japanese.
The underlying thought here, I think, is that since commas are not a part of Japanese structure with a clearly defined usage, while they may be used as stylistic embellishments to indicate pauses etc., the obvious dictum is:
If it isn’t clear without the commas, then it isn’t good Japanese.
But that isn’t something we need to worry about – this is primarily about the way Japanese children learn Japanese.
This article first appeared on my private Patreon feed
A question today concerns 思われる, the receptive form of 思う. It is a good question because I think this is something that can be confusing, partly because of the way the receptive is explained as passive (which works – as a loose translation – part of the time but not all of it and completely messes up the structure) and partly because Japanese just puts things a little differently from English:
Maybe it’s silly, but I have a hard time differentiating between the receptive form of 思う and the verb 思われる. They seem similar to me. In which cases would you use the former, and in which cases would you use the latter?
Here is my reply:
This really isn’t silly at all because it can seem confusing at first and doesn’t get well explained.
Since 思う means “think”, 思われる means “receive being thought”, which works out in English as “seem” or “appear”. Funnily, English sometimes puts it the other way up: “give the impression”, whereas Japanese puts it “receive the perception”.
At times its meaning is very close to 思う for obvious reasons. “It seems (to me) to be a lemon” is much the same in practice as “(I) think it’s a lemon”. And as in English, the 思われる “it seems (to me)…” version is less direct/assertive than the 思う “(I) think…” version.
However, at other times 思われる does not imply “me” as the originator of the received thought at all and just means “It is thought to be”:
バクテリアの種類と思われる
“It is thought to be a species of bacteria.”
Here the English passive is the most natural translation and is fine provided we don’t let it affect our perception of the particles.
The と links the idea or perception (that it is a species of bacteria) to 思う, which has the implicit subject of “people in general” (French “on”). The subject of れる is whatever “it” is that is thought to be a species of bacteria.
Some dictionaries list 思われる meaning “seems” as a separate word from the receptive form of 思う but I think it is clear that it is always actually receptive 思う.
The dictionaries are not actually “wrong” in this. Whether we call something “a different word” or not is simply a matter of cross-language explanation strategy and the strategy of a dictionary is somewhat different from the strategy of teaching/learning structure.
A dictionary’s proper aim is to give people, in a reasonably concise way, a picture of what a word might mean (in English) in a particular circumstance. The implied user is someone reading a piece of text and wanting to know how it would read in English.
The strategy of structure-study is to see what is actually going on in the Japanese, and the implied user is someone who wants to become proficient at understanding the language – not just at putting it into the nearest available English.
In general, the question of “same word” and “different word” in cases like this is a non-question. It implies that Japanese cuts up into units called words that could theoretically be spaced off from each other as in European languages.
This is not in fact the case, and if you read Japanese school grammars (for Japanese children) you will see that Japanese employs a number of terms for the most granular units of the language, but “word” or any close equivalent is not one of them.
This is not an eccentric manner of description but reflects the reality that Japanese lexical units are much more amoeba-like than European words.
We should also note that the confusion between the “two” uses arises because person having the thought that is being received is different in the two cases. This person, if explicitly mentioned would be marked by に as the “giver” of the received action always is.
So
バクテリアの種類と思われる
= ∅が∅に バクテリアの種類と思われる
The が-marked ∅ is of course the thing thought to be a species of bacteria, and the に-marked ∅ is “people in general” – the usage is exactly equivalent to French on pense (one thinks = people think or in the more usual passive English “it is thought”).
When “I” is the implicit に-marked thinker, the visible structure is of course identical and we have to understand which it is from context.
A while back, someone (who seems to have the idea that I am a language-wonk android) asked me if I could throw light on the word “dotard”.
When I asked why, this person sent a message explaining that Supreme Leader of a certain Asian country had made a speech referring to the President of an extremely prominent Western country as a “dotard”.
Apparently Google was alive with people searching the word, wondering why that particular one was chosen. Could I explain it?
Yes, I believe I can.
Unless I am much mistaken the reason for the choice of this word is that there is a Dictionary Dumper working in translation service of this particular Asian country.
What is “dictionary dumping”? Well, a good (rather sweet) example is when I was doing some coaching in Japanese and got one of those Russian viruses that make me sick, a student sent me a message that included the expression:
もうしわけありません
What this literally means is “there is no excuse (I can humbly make)”. It is a formal apology.
What she wanted to say is I am sorry (to hear that you are sick). The dictionary told her that もうしわけありません means “I’m sorry”. So she used it.
This is a very simple example of Dictionary Dumping. For a beginner, taking words you have never seen before and dropping them into a sentence based on their dictionary meaning.
For a more advanced user (like our official translator friend), it means taking a phrase in one’s native language and then scouring the dictionaries to find something that expresses the same thing.
The problem at this more advanced level is that while you will probably get it technically “right”, you still don’t know if the word is just going to sound odd and obscure rather than being a natural and stinging insult.
A recent question on YouTube raises the same issue:
Rewatching this lesson made me wonder a lot the translation of the title “ふしぎの国のアリス”. I can see why “wonderland” was translated as “ふしぎのの国” but I can’t figure out why it’s “のアリス”. Is it not supposed to be a literal translation? If so, if it was supposed to be literal, would something like “ふしぎの国にアリス” be correct?
This was my reply:
You are certainly right that the Japanese title is not a literal translation of the English title. That is because Japanese often doesn’t express things in quite the same way as English.
In this case の is the most usual way of expressing a relationship of this kind and that is the most usual way of putting it (which is why Japanese titles so often have の in them).
Literally the Japanese title means “Alice of the country of wonders”.
ふしぎの国にアリス isn’t quite natural Japanese, but we could say 不思議の国にいるアリス which is grammatical, and does pretty much literally translate the English title, but it wouldn’t have the same feeling in Japanese at all.
If such a phrase were used it would sound something like “the Alice that is in the country of wonders” (as opposed, perhaps, to some other Alice who isn’t).
This opens up a larger and more important consideration if one is writing Japanese. One cannot assume that getting an exact literal rendering of something one would say in English – even if grammatically correct – will have the same implication.
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So essentially my answer was addressing the question of Dictionary Dumping in a slightly more sophisticated form – not exactly dumping words from the dictionary, but translating English expressions literally and assuming that they will have the same meaning and implications in Japanese.
So how should a beginner avoid Dictionary Dumping?
I wrote an article on this a long time ago, rather presumptuously titled How to Write Correct, Natural Japanese and the advice still stands. Though I ought to update the recommended sentence banks. Weblio is very good.
Essentially using one of these databases of Japanese/English sentences you need to research whether the way you want to express something is actually used in Japanese and has the meaning you thought it did.
Slightly めんどくさい, I know, but I highly recommend communicating in written Japanese and using this method because one instance of trying to express something and working out how to do it is (in my experience) worth ten experiences of simply seeing or hearing it expressed correctly.
This way we become aware of specific issues of expression and their solution. It takes a long time to get this passively.
Though passive listening is very good for helping us get an ear for what “rings right”.
This article first appeared on my private Patreon feed.
Using Japanese definitions of Japanese words scares the blue binklethwaites out of a lot of people.
And I’m not surprised.
The “Japanese as a marine assault-course” school have an approach to J-J that would scare Jack the Ripper.
After doing a certain portion of your obligatory ten-thousand Anki sentences, you must go cold-turkey into all-Japanese.
Any words you don’t understand in the definition you must look up in Japanese. And if you don’t understand the words in the definitions guess what…
You have to look those up in Japanese too.
So you can be engaged in 50-deep dictionary dives just to define one word.
It’s good for you, boy. Like iced baths and 100 push-ups before breakfast. Are you a man or a mouse?
Well, neither. I’m AI. Not much brawn, so I have to rely on the other thing.
So the point is, this is what gets J-J a bad name.
This is why people think “J-J – I can’t do that!”
Well, if that was what J-J had to mean I wouldn’t even recommend that you try.
You have better things to do with your time than spend it in 50-deep dictionary-dives.
Like – you know – actual immersion. Reading a bit of real Japanese.
So what do I mean by starting J-J early?
I mean pragmatically introducing it into your learning in easy, assimilable increments, without pressuring yourself and without wasting unnecessary time.
Not because I think pressure is always bad but because if you have any to spare there are better places to apply it.
But getting used to thinking of Japanese in Japanese terms from as early a stage as possible – not cold-turkey but bit by bit – just a toe in the water at first.
Here are some of the ways I got started.
1. Use a known word!
This is the most obvious. So obvious that it is easy to overlook.
If you already know another Japanese word, use it for your definition.
So even at a very early stage you might know でも and encounter けど or けれど they mean practically the same so you can use でも as your definition.
2. The sound trick
For me, the sound trick is all-important.
What is it? Very simple. For Japanese definitions and example sentences I always TTS them so I hear them aloud. This is really simple in Anki (you must install Awesome TTS – and it really is). Just a couple of clicks to have anything spoken aloud by a robot that talks almost as well as I.
I do my Anki primarily by ear. I look at the front and then listen to the back (usually – for kana words I listen to the front too). I only look at the back if I get it wrong or there is something I want to remind myself of (if I’m on the go I use earphones).
By this method, at an early stage you can put English notes on the back. For example, you can, if you want, note that けど and けれど tend to be placed at the end of the clause you are conjoining contrastively while でも tends to be placed at the beginning (it’s not a rule but a strong tendency).
Now you have a quick, easy, instant audio definition and you can look at the notes if you want to, or not if you don’t.
3. The Katakana Trick
If there is a katakana loan-word from English then use it for a definition.
Isn’t this a cheat?
No. First of all, it is a very easy way to get an understandable definition in Japanese and it reminds you that the katakana word exists. Not every English word can be katakana-ized, so you are killing two birds with one stone.
The audio will probably help it stay in your mind and you can use it on the fly when it takes a few seconds too long to dredge up the fully-Japanese word from memory. It will be pronounced like a katakana-word too – and it’s important to get the feel of non-English-influenced katakana pronunciation (one of the underestimated vocabulary problems of native English speakers).
Examples:
嬉しい ハッピー (yes, it’s a common word)
対称 シンメトリー (it’s not just me. This is in the Sanseido dictionary’s J-J definition)
3. Here is a very useful trick – especially in those difficult early days of immersion when you hit sentences with multiple unknowns.
Make a card for each word and paste the sentence that caused you trouble onto the back of the card. TTS it (you can just paste the sentence and TTS together across cards).
Every time you review one of the words you hear that same sentence, which also reminds you of the others. If you have trouble remembering, this will help a lot. If not, it will move those words out of the learning stage even faster.
You can use English definitions in the notes, but for the audio you might want to just have the sentence. That should remind you of the word in question as well as the others but if not…
As usual, adjust freely where necessary.
And finally some good news – I think!
At present (since the death of Rikaisama) there is no easy, out-of-the-box, non-grey-area, way to get instant J-J definitions into Anki – and no way at all to get the kind of concise definitions we want for immersion-support cards.
But that looks as if it is changing. I am currently testing RikaiRebuilt. I told the developer that if he put in Sanseido mode I was very interested, and he has.
It’s still a bit early and buggy, but looking very promising. So very soon (or now if you don’t mind using a beta-ish version) we will have an easy, free way to get instant, concise and simple J-J definitions of anything on any web-page and pump them straight into Anki, making up J-J cards with a single keypress (plus the TTS-ing if you use my method).
This piece arose from an answer to a question on the nominalizing no and perhaps explains this particular aspect a little more clearly than in the video The Japanese nominalizing no particle.
This is the support-page for the Japanese self-immersion video “Taking the Plunge” (you can find it further down the page).
