Well, in one of the level 1 lessons, there is this example sentence:
かれの二つめのあくぎょうは、かえるのあんさつだ。
His second evil deed was the frog’s assassination.
I understand that あくぎょうis ‘misdoing’, and ‘二つ’ is two things, so I assumed ‘めの’ must be a counter, but I couldn’t figure what, from wikipedia or jisho.org. Can someone help me with this one? And if wikipedia is insuffisient, is there a great big list of chinese/japanese counter words on the net somewhere?
It just occurred to me, shouldn’t that sentence be in present tense since “だ” is used? (or maybe this translation is more natural this way in English?)
Well, the past is implied, certainly. If he has one evil deed, and then another, then he already has two, which means he already did it. The だ makes sense in Japanese, but I guess it would be ok using だった as well, honestly.
Sort of like how, in English, present perfect is used to talk about past things, despite using the present tense for the auxiliary and having “present” in its goddamn name.