にゃんにゃん - Kitty Detectives - Vol. 1

That actually sounds like a neat idea.

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の can also be a nominalizer there.
知っている is normally preceded by a noun + を or は.

彼女の住所を知っていますか Do you know her address?
この辺はよく知っている I am well acquainted [familiar] with this neighborhood.

If the part before しっている is not a noun, it is turned into a noun using こと or の

彼が病気なことは知っている I know that he is ill.
私は彼女がうそをついていることを知っている I know she is lying.

The p11 sentence looks similar, but uses の as a nominalizer and replaces は/を by a comma.

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Page 11

Wow! Thank you so much! I am seriously impressed by both your knowledge and your skill in explaining! Really, I’m very grateful. Thank you!

And I had no idea before today just how important commas are in Japanese sentences!

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Do you mean each time we post (yes, great idea, I’ve been trying to do that all along and will continue to do so), or do you mean the title of the entire thread? If the latter, isn’t that just a bit too rigid and mightn’t it put people off from posting? But if you think it’ll be useful, then of course it’s worth a try!

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That’s what I kinda thought, too. But it can only nominalize a plain form verb so if おきてる is plain form, then yes.

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I wanted to say: the “ない” in じゃない is also the negative form of ある。
(and not the negative ending of some verb)

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I agree with the use of の as nominalizer in ths sentence, also interpreted it this way. And thank you @trout for the nice explanatin earlier!

おきてる is indeed the plain form, where the い of いる is omitted :slight_smile:

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It’s still not absolutely clear to me what constitutes plain form. I know it doesn’t include the -masu form which is formal. So does that mean everything else is plain form?

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Take a look at this: How to Use the Plain Forms of Japanese Verbs

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Thanks for the article.

I’m not qualified to say as I’m still a total beginner at grammar, but it strikes me that there are a lot of different ways to conjugate verbs! But the plain form is where it all begins! Once you have the plain (dictionary) form, you can start conjugating from there. The masu form is a conjugation of the plain form, isn’t it?

Edit: I guess maybe I answered my own question. Learn something new today :grin:

I don’t know! I hope someone comes along who does!

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I personally think it’ll be better, suppose a person visits this thread after a few days and doesn’t know which page is being discussed, he/she will have to go through some posts to figure out which page is being discussed and if we still haven’t reached the page he/she wanted to ask something from, the time spent on figuring out is wasted.

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And here i thought it meant “black hat” which also kind of made sense because of his hair - forgot that ぼうし (hat) has that う in it and didn’t even look at the kanji there :sweat_smile:
Thanks for clearing that up for me :smile::+1:

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Ah, I guess the confusion is here because there are two meanings of “plain”:

Firstly, we have the “plain” form of a verb which is also called “dictionary” form. That’s the form each verb has when you look it up in a dictionary. When you write the verb in romaji, this form always ends with “u” (e.g. ~る、~う、~く and so on). If you use the verb in this form, it denotes present/future tense and it is not polite. (One would use this with friends and family.)

Secondly, we have “plain” politeness level as opposed to “polite” politeness level. This exists for many conjugations, e.g.

いくvs. 行きます (“go” in plain & polite form)
行かない vs. 行きません (“not go” in plain & polite form)

and so on.

I hope this helps shed a light on the “plain” issue?

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Yes, thank you. It’s starting to clear up in my brain. I guess I didn’t put enough thought into it until now.:v:

Edit: I guess I wasn’t sure if the progressive form ~ている was plain form because I was thinking only “dictionary form” was plain form but now I get it. And ~ている is plain form vs. ています which is not.

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I perceive ~ている not as a distinct conjugation form but rather as a combination of te-form + verb いる.
いる is in a dictionary form, so it can be followed by nominalizer の.

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It certainly did for me! Thank you! I learnt that “dictionary form” is not equivalent to “plain form” and suddenly a light bulb goes on! Thank you so much @NicoleIsEnough! Great post!

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Looks like I’m already falling a bit behind, lol.

Page 8

I’m confused about the ending of the first sentence, everything after the quote:

「ABC殺人事件」ていう本のまねっこだわ。I think someone mentioned the て is a quotation ending particle, but after that, I don’t really know what the rest of the sentence means, and jisho isn’t helping much.

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