ごめんなさい、今は話せません。トイレへ直行しているところなのです。— Can you read this sentence and understand what it means? I’ll give you some hints, and we’ll work our way to the answer.
Vocab
ごめんなさい: A phrase to apologize. “I’m sorry.”
今 LV. 3: Now.
話す LV. 8: To Speak. 話せません is the negative potential form of 話す, so it’s “can’t speak”
トイレ: Bathroom. (The pronunciation comes from “toilet.”)
直行 LV. 6: Nonstop. 直行 itself is a noun, but often used with する (-suru) as a verb meaning “going directly.”
Let’s break it down!
For the first sentence, if you put the vocab pieces together, you can figure out it means:
ごめんなさい、今は話せません。
I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now.
トイレへ
The particle “へ” specifies the direction. So トイレへ means “toward the bathroom.”
______しているところ(なの)です。
This shows the present continuous tense.
So it means “I’m in the middle of doing ______.”
The answer:
ごめんなさい、今は話せません。トイレへ直行しているところなのです。
I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now. I’m on a non-stop trip to the bathroom.
What’s your usual excuse to avoid a conversation with someone?
(Well…this is mine, obviously )
I’m happy I could understand it, and I’m even more happy that you’ve created this! Is this going to be something you’re going to be doing on a normal basis?
I must have RBF or something because no one comes to talk to me, thus I never have to avoid conversations.
so i guess my answer would be… 休息中雌犬の顔
or umm レストイングビチュフェース
let’s be honest, I don’t know how to say that in Japanese =P
Yay, さすがレベル60
I’d be posting this regularly here and on our Twitter so keep an eye out!
…mmmm, RBF is hard to translate!
Actually, in Japanese, “bitch (ビッチ)” is used to mean “slut”. Probably they got the meaning wrong as it happens to many loanwords in Japan. Anyway, people use the word ビッチ to チャラい girls, not simply to “mean” or “annoying” girls.
If I describe this face in Japanese …
I think I’d say something like 「近寄るなっていう顔」(“Don’t even get close to me now” face ) or「話しかけるなっていう顔」(“Don’t talk to me” face)…in case you have a chance to use it in the future
It’s actually that loans tend to take on more specific meanings than the language they’re loaned from. For example “Salsa.”
However, English definitely has this as well, no one knows why Kombucha is called that even though it’s not こんぶ茶 but きのこの紅茶
@Bowtron If you’re seeing a different Kanji for 直る or something like that it is because of Han Unification and you are displaying Chinese fonts as default, this is a common bug.
Probably also worth mentioning that なの here is usually spoken by females, an aspect of Japanese that is not really present in English so a bit hard to grasp.
I was able to guess pretty close… I didn’t understand the ending for sure, and I kind of thought 直行 in this context might have something to do with the toilet overflowing. I wasn’t sure if the meaning would be that silly
This is a great post @TofuguKanae, awesome bite sized practice. I hope you do more like this!
Hm, my guess was close enough. Even though I must admit that the meaning of 直 has more or less vanished from my memory
I love this kind of practice! Especially since my grammar is … not very good. That‘s an understatement.
I notice I still have the bad habit (carried over from English) of assuming that the noun that comes before the verb is the subject, as in with “トイレへ直行している” thinking トイレ was the subject even though it was clearly marked with へ making it the object.
It’s like I understand mechanically how Japanese grammar works, at least on a basic level, but word order is so important for parsing English sentences that my brain overrides my Japanese learning when I’m trying to understand a Japanese one and ends up leaving the meaning topsy-turvy. So that’s something I need to work on as I read more Japanese.
Yeah… it must be confusing — also nouns, verbs are usually longer than particles (particles are only one or a couple hiragana) so they would catch your eyes and particles can be more easily dismissed. But, if you start paying more attention to particles, they tell you a lot of things. Even advanced learners miss those things sometimes, so don’t give up and keep trying! 一緒に頑張りましょう！
)
If I describe this face in Japanese …
一緒に頑張りましょう！