一週間フレンズ | Week 1 Discussion

Japanese Language Reading
#41

IMHO the meaning is something like “as you see fit”, but it’s vague, as よう is vague in general. Grammatically, I think the only possible parse is いい (good) + よう + に (adverbial copula). よう has two basic (and sometimes indistinguishable) meanings: as ~, and so that (it is as) ~. Thus, “in a way that is fine (with you)”, “so as to agree with what is fine with you”, or “so that it is good (for you)”, but since what is いい is implicit, the expression remains equivocal.

@Ditto20

Off-topic

Well, I just wanted to point out that we shouldn’t automatically assume that people who read translations don’t read a lot or, to put it bluntly, are somehow “less educated”, at least w.r.t. languages. :slight_smile:

I was going to digress further into reminiscences, but I’ll settle for a simpler explanation: I think, quite plainly, that… I have better tastes in French? :sweat_smile: More seriously, I feel that my appreciation of the language is quite a bit superior when reading in French than it is when reading in any other language, including English. My sense of what is good prose, beautiful style, is better, or at least better-defined (since whether others would agree with my judgement is probably a matter of taste). So, even if the translation is subpar (and there are subpar translations in French as there are in other languages, assuredly)… at least I would better feel how subpar it is. :smiley:

As regards translations, well, maybe if indeed your reading history is very skewed towards English, as seems to be your case. Otherwise, I’d think that the native speaker advantage would just give you an overwhelming headstart in judging whether the resulting prose sounds good or not.

Anyway, this as well is just my opinion.

Yes, in fact some linguists are starting to wonder if it will become standard at some point, being reinterpreted as a bound conjugation てる in the same way てあり contracted to たり and then to た.

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#42
Slightly off-topic

Oh, yeah, I guess I can see how what I said could have been interpreted that way :sweat_smile: Don’t worry, that’s not what I was going for, there’s totally not anything wrong with people choosing to read translations. I was thinking of the things someone said earlier about people asking why someone would want to read stuff in the original language, and what I meant to say was that it seemed likely that someone who asked that doesn’t have much experience with reading in other languages since I figured they’d probably know themselves then, but it was late and I may not have put it the best way. Those people are probably good at other things that I have no interest in though, and I’m sure there would be questions I could ask them they would find at least as weird :sweat:

What I didn’t mention then is also that they may just not be interested in the kinds of things that don’t have good translations, and then it’d make sense that they wouldn’t consider it particularly beneficial to learn the language,

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#43

Okay, cool - thank you very much! That makes sense to me now.

Oh, that’s super interesting. I find it weird in retrospect that I’d never encountered this contraction before starting to read native material, given that it’s so ubiquitous.

#44

Most learner’s material is focused on teaching ‘proper spelling’, so to say, rather than the common spoken language. :man_shrugging:

Though genki at least has a note in the grammar section on ている that it is commonly shortened and the ways it can be shortened.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

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#45

One interesting consequence of the elision of い in ている is that it merges some auxiliary forms, i.e., -iやがる is sometimes listed as “following both the i-stem and the te-form” and sometimes listed as following the infinitive only, with てやがる being a contraction from ていやがる. I can imagine how this might contribute to a kind of levelling where forms that used to attach only to the infinitive end up attaching to both, through some kind of confusion. Since both forms serve approximately the same role in terms of attaching auxiliaries. :man_shrugging:

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#46

Thanks! That’s also my own understanding of what he said (based on context), but the word’s just bothering me. Is it usually written in kana?

EDIT: Based on jisho, it is usually in kana :sweat_smile:

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#47

This is why I like reading maggiesensei.com; a lot of colloquial Japanese is covered there.

According to “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar”, 「ように言う」 is defined as expressing “Tell someone in such a way that he will do something.” It suggests English counterparts as “Tell ~ to ~” and “say ~ in such a way”.

Because of that, I take this to mean “say ~ in a good (いい) way”, kind of like “can you put in a good word for me?” Or specifically to this line, Won’t you put in a good word with the teacher for me (so I won’t get in trouble for it later)? (parenthesis implied by ておく).

I could be off base here, though.

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#49

Dang I didn’t expect they would do that >_<

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#50

I am having some trouble with what Shougo says on the second row in what I think is Page 6: 「藤宮がいいとかお前ってもの好きだよね」 Does this sentence mean Fujimiya is fine, and you said you like it/her…
I’m having trouble differentiating when いい means the dictionary form = good, fine etc. and when it’s more nuanced.
And the whole ってもの好き。I assume the って to be the quoting particle… But I just feel like I am
not getting the essence of the sentence :sweat_smile:

#51

I can see they use って a lot on this panel, is it just used as a colloquial topic introducer instead of quotation marker?

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#52

It’s 物好き = having strange tastes. “Fujimiya is nice[, you say]? [new sentence] You sure have strange tastes”

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#53

Actually, yes! Good guess.
Technically って is generally short either for と or という or というのは
Going off the というのは, って is sometimes used more or less simply like は.

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一週間フレンズ | Week 2 Discussion
#54

Thank you! That makes so much more sense now

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#55

I asked a native about this panel, and they thought it meant “in a good way” as in “in a way that embellishes the reality of my having plainly forgotten my notebook”. So maybe something more in line with the so-called mutative に, “make it sound good and tell the teacher” (though it stays within the realm of the two basic meanings I gave above). I guess I got the “for whom (it is good)” part wrong—as I said it was just my humble opinion. :woman_shrugging:

PS: Regarding the analysis as an indirect imperative form, IMHO it’s just a specialised use of meaning 2 “so that”, but usually found in an actual imperative sense only with verbs as far as I know. In this case, my native contact also said they thought the meaning was close to 上手に言う so it’s not really specific to ように as a grammar point, it’s just interpretation, really.

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#56

Just getting into this today. I spent my lunch break going through the first page. Came here with questions but saw they were all answered, and it cleared up some confusion. Not sure if this is above my grammar level or not. In school I went through Genki I and II, but the whole first page took longer than I thought (and there was grammar I hadn’t seen or maybe don’t remember). I still think it’s a good practice, but page 5 looks a lot more dense so I don’t know if I can keep pace.

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#57

I think you should be fine with that level - there’s always going to be new grammar you encounter. It is a bit dense to start out, but I found it eased off around page 9/10, so your last few pages will probably be quicker. If you can make it through the first couple of weeks you’ll speed up considerably :blush: do use the vocab sheet!

@ everyone, how are people finding the reading difficulty- / pace-wise so far? There’s still a good few days left in the week!

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#58

I have to say the large amount of colloquial speech and very little context at the beginning was quite surprising, it took a little while to get used to. In a book you would have some sort of exposition and little no colloquial speech in the narration, which usually makes it easier to get oriented. But once I got what’s going on, and who the main characters were, it went much smoother, and I accidentally already read some of next week’s part.

It’s a bit inconvenient that the chapters are so long, and the ebook doesn’t have page numbers on the pages, which means I am often going back and forth for questions and trying to find where I was.

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#59

Whenever I swap from a book to a manga or vice versa I feel like I’m reading Greek or something for a bit. Well, less so now, but yeah, it can take a bit to switch gears.

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#60

That’s why you should always read both all the time. :stuck_out_tongue:

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#61

Or just read so much that it’s no longer as much of a problem

:slightly_smiling_face:

Though… I guess that could take a while, and I can’t give any guarantees it’ll work perfectly, so maybe your solution is better

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