🐱 にゃんにゃん探偵団 🕵️‍♀ Kitty Detectives 2 Home Thread!

I think it is because the involvement/busyness is ongoing…?

I believe (but haven’t the time just now to find references) that the て is actually a contraction of いて - from the verb to be / animated, so here it expresses an ongoing state (of being busy) not a conjunction.

Will sit down w books in an hr if no one more learned has responded…

2 Likes

Aaaargh! Yes! I’ve learnt this as しまう (as in しまった!) and so don’t recognise it when it is ちゃう! Thank you so much ChristopherFritz, and for the link too. I don’t think I’ve seen that particular video before, and will watch it now! Thank you!

Ah ha! Thank you @Rowena!

In this case, it’s the て form of the verb 忙しい. When an “い-adjective” (most adjectives ending in い) conjugates into the て form, the final い is replaced with くて. This gives a meaning such as “busy and”.

3 Likes

Here’s the bit from Tae Kim’s Japanese Grammar Guide that addresses the dropping of the い in ~ている for enduring states that I was thinking applied here:

Tae Kim 4.5

So:-
Adj 忙しい ➞ Adv 忙しく modifying いて (being) with the い dropped as per TK4.5 = いそがしくて

But I’m just learning too and could be wrong… :worried:

From what I’ve since read, to use the enduring state (which uses the verb いる) of an adjective, you must change the adjective into its adverbial form. For い-adjectives, you replace the final い with く to form an adverb. (For な-adjectives, you simply append に.)

  • 忙しい = adjective (describes a noun)
  • 忙しく = adverb (describes a verb)

Then you append the verb する followed by the enduring いる. (I guess いる needs to append to the て form of a verb, and する is your general use “to do”.) Mind that you have to conjugate する into its て form to connect it with いる. The result is:

  • 忙しくしている = to be being busy (enduring state of busy)
  • 忙しくしてる = same, but dropped い

Further reading:

I feel I learned a lot (and re-learned things I’d forgotten) reading up on this. I’m going to be on the watch for adjectives in the enduring state from now on.

2 Likes

:stuck_out_tongue:

Sorry I didn’t post it last night - ordinarily I’ll aim to get the threads up the night before (my time) for the sake of those further East. I didn’t want to post the first one and go straight to bed though.


We have started!

The first discussion thread is here:

You’ll notice we now have a vocabulary sheet, so please do feel free to start filling that in :blush: try to keep to dictionary form rather than inputting all sorts of different conjugations.

I’ll tidy up the home thread here once I get a minute at work :wink:

5 Likes

Ok, so there’s more than one language in which I have difficulty reading… :flushed:

2 Likes

Ahaha :joy: I’m just glad to see somebody is keen and commenting :grin:

2 Likes

I’m fairly sure that @ChristopherFritz was right and that he’s just trailing off, which is a very common thing to do in Japanese. “Well, you see, I’ve been caught up in this strange case and I’ve been very busy and …”

The te-iru form would need another ending, such as いそがしてる or いそがしてて.

3 Likes

It’s my fault for getting this week’s discussion started here, but could any further replies please be posted in the weekly thread:

Kitty Detectives! | Week 1 Discussion

2 Likes

A question for everyone here for whom reading this book is a bit of detective work in itself: what tools and methods are you using to figure things out?

Sharing how we go about this with each other could help make things easier all around.

I’m using jisho mainly, but it works best if you already know how to parse the sentence. It is ok with verbs and can usually detect if the word you type in is the conjugated form of verb, but it won’t tell you the nuances of meaning of the conjugated form.

I’ve also recently started using ichi.moe (thanks to ChristopherFritz for the tip-off), which can break down phrases and sentences, telling you all the parts of speech with a brief meaning, though it is not infallible - it seems to have trouble with irregular verbs.

When desperate, I will even use Google translate - it’s fairly useless word for word, but can be illuminating on whole sentences (on p 8 it helped me figure out the ‘whether or not’ bit that I had not been able to parse myself).

So sleuths, how do you go about it? :smiley_cat::open_book::mag_right:

7 Likes

In some cases, you can actually correct for this! After entering text and selecting the “Submit” button, the entered text appears below the input box. Select this for possible other parsings:

6 Likes

Thanks for the above - I don’t imagine having found that function on my own.

It still wouldn’t have helped last night as I quietly screamed and growled at the computer and my book - it kept telling me that こな was ‘meal; flour’:

1 Like

Same, actually! Jisho, ichi.moe and in cases where I don’t have any clue at all - Google translate. And of course the vocab sheet and book club/thread as well as, for nyan nyan 2, the notes you’ve posted :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes

Does anyone know of a Japanese-verb-conjugations-and-what-they-mean-in-English resource??

1 Like

Here are the resources I commonly use:

  • As others have mentioned, I have yet to find a better online dictionary than jisho.org. Their inclusion of many common phrases as separate entries and the ability to use wildcards has proven extremely useful

  • Children books tend to have a lot of onomatopoeic words. When I run into those and jisho doesn’t give me any clues, I usually turn to The Jaded Network. I used this extensively when I read Zenitendou with the Beginner’s book club because I’d run into onomatopoeic words every other sentence…

  • When I seem to find meanings for all the words, but they don’t seem to mesh together, I start to suspect I might have run into a grammar construct I am not familiar with. In those cases, BunPro has a great search function that has helped me immensely in figuring out grammar. The only downside is that you need to create an account for this. Free accounts can do searches, though, so no need to pay anything.

  • When Jisho fails me, I sometimes bite the bullet and check a J-J dictionary, mostly goo. I have rarely needed to do this, and it is sometimes a lot of extra work to parse the definition, but it is a helpful last resort.

I have mostly stopped checking Google Translate because quite a few times it sent me in a completely wrong direction and it was really frustrating.

4 Likes

I haven’t used BunPro, but I thought it was just SRS flashcards - I hadn’t considered it having searchability, cheers! Would this then help me to understand the different meanings of a verb’s different conjugations??

Sadly, J-J dictionaries are beyond me for the time being, but I’ll add the link to my Japanese booksmarks for the future. :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes

I’ve just learned from Bunpro that なければ means ‘must’ - thank you so much!!

2 Likes

Yes, it’s main function is to reinforce your grammar with SRS, but it’s grammar search function is really nice. For example, suppose you run into a sentence that ends with 忘れてしまう. When you see a verb in て-form followed by something that has no kanji, you can start to suspect that it might be an specific grammar construct. So you go to BunPro and look for てしまう and:

image

You discover that it means “to do something by accident”. Clicking on the grammar point, BunPro gives you more details, and even links to free sites with further explanation (like Tae-Kim or Maggie Sensei and many others).

Hmmm while BunPro does have many conjugations as grammar points, I don’t feel it is the best resource if you want to concentrate specifically on conjugations. For that I think it is better to check either a grammar textbook, or maybe Tae-Kim’s grammar guide if you want a free alternative.

Aside from those, in case you haven’t seen this yet, jisho has an option to check all conjugations of a verb by clicking the “Show all inflections” option after searching for a verb:

After you have read the explanations of the different conjugations, something like Aeron Buchanan’s Verb Chart might be useful until you get completely used to them. It is a compact way to look up quickly how a specific conjugation looks like.

Yeah, I find them really intimidating still. Hopefully one day I’ll find it natural to resort to them directly, but it still feels very far away…

9 Likes

That looks brilliant, thank you!

1 Like