lol@ “girly speech” though
Some people really don’t like LLMs and that’s totally fine. And I understand that they can still fully hallucinate and not everything can be blindly accepted. And I do know and use ichi.moe; but, for me, it’s not helpful to see every meaning for each word (when there are potentially many) when there’s clearly a specific purpose or meaning in the context of the sentence. If it were better at parsing out which meaning was being used and only including or at least moving it to the top or highlighting it somehow, that would be great.
To that end, ChatGPT’s vocab list serves me well here since its parsing out the usage in context of the sentence
Regarding your reference that の only serves as a nominalizer and not adding emphasis, here’s how bunpro explains のです
In these sentences, we can think of the ん, or の as simply adding emphasis to the statement. Due to の adding emphasis, this expression will be heard very frequently in explanations
With that in mind, I think it’s fair to say that the ChatGPT marking as “explanatory particle” isn’t a complete hallucination, it’s just missing the nuance of something serving a specific purpose vs what something is called (or in this case, not called). It should probably just be a single vocab item of 「のじゃ」…
Here’s another definition with an example without the です at the end.
The 「の」 particle attached at the end of the last clause of a sentence can also convey an explanatory tone to your sentence.
今は忙しいの。
The thing is that (I’m) busy now
But to be fair, I did find one site that specifically explains の as being the nominalizer function: Tofugu’s explanation for のです with verbs.
Most other sites just consider のです as a singular grammar point without explaining the nuance between what purpose の and です each serve.
Also checked A Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners and A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar, both make no mention of の as a nominalizer.
Anyways, I’m not trying to make a big debate about the whole thing, everyone should use the tool that works for you. (And Ichi.moe is a great one!) We’re all learning together and this stuff is difficult!
Looking forward to continued discussion!
Thanks for posting this, because I realized I missed something in the opening prelude.
So in the line “四人の光の戦士 現れん”, I don’t think I realized what the ん was doing, and reading it in the faq made me check the spreadsheet to see if it was the same in the modern releases, which is where I noticed the jisho link about it. Jisho.org: Japanese Dictionary
I think this is my first time running into this archaism, but I’m craving more information beyond the dictionary entry. Does anyone know a good link that goes into detail about it?
I tried researching but it is super strange. I can’t find mention of it meaning “probably” anywhere else. It is probably a contraction. Since this uses archaic speech, the references to ん that are archaic seem to be as a contraction of ない and ぬ. I don’t think this was intended to say “the warriors won’t appear”, so it probably isn’t the first.
We talked about ぬ elsewhere, and I think it is supposed to be both an archaic version of ない, which we already discounted, and also as a very literary way to to say “X has happened”. In other words, if ん is a contraction of ぬ, the sentence could be translated as “The Four Warriors of Light have appeared”. Without the ぬ, it actually seems like it would translate more like “… appear” or “… will appear”. The fact that the script translates it as “will appear” makes me doubt this a little. The bit that this appears in seems to be a quote of the prophecy, so “will appear” makes sense. However, I still think this archaic use of ぬ・ん is interesting, so I’m gonna keep telling you what I learned today, even if it isn’t correct.
Reference for ん as contraction of ぬ, generally: ん - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
The title of “The Wind Rises”, the Miyazaki film, is 風立ちぬ. You can tell ぬ here isn’t a form of ない, because it would be 立たない → 立たぬ. Instead it is 立ちぬ, and I think it is thus supposed to mean “The wind has risen”. What I’m talking about here is the Perfect form, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect\_(grammar) .
Unlike 立つ, 現れる is an ichidan verb, so the negative form uses the same stem as the perfect. You can’t actually tell the difference between 現れぬ (negative) and 現れぬ (perfect), except by context. Still, I’m pretty sure the story isn’t telling us about how the heroes will not appear.
Finally, it is technically possible for it to be んです, contracted to just ん.
I added the note to the spreadsheet because I was equally confused at first (I’m used to these ん verb endings being a casual contraction of ない, but it’s clearly not that here) and this jisho definition is the only thing that made sense.
I also briefly tried to find more, but I don’t think I found anything or I would have added it to the spreadsheet.
Sounds like some Classical Japanese shenanigans.
Although note that jisho says that it’s also spelled む, and not ぬ.
Well actually you were close but note this bit:
The volitional usage of ん (-n) is a colloquial form of む (mu), and this is usually used to impart a literary style in modern Japanese.
This is potentially ambiguous with the negative ん as both attach to the irrealis, so the intended meaning must be discerned from context.
In modern Japanese, this is more commonly realized as the う (-u > -ō) or よう (-yō) volitional verb ending. See the etymology of suffix よう (-yō) for more.
This word is morphologically an inflectional suffix. It is classified as 助動詞 (jodōshi, “auxiliary verb”) in traditional Japanese grammar.
So it’s actually more closely related to the volitional than the negative.
Note that the volitional can be used more broadly in Japanese for “unreal” things like the common 〜ようとする construction, so it all adds up IMO.
Wow this thread has exploded while I wasn’t paying attention (and then I took a couple days to catch up…)
I have been slacking in my Wanikani since I went on vacation last week, BUT I have played some Final Fantasy! As long as I’m keeping up with Japanese somehow…
I’m not sure if I have the best methodology or not, but so far it’s at least making it go relatively smoothly. Basically I transcribe the text into a notepad (I’m playing the Famicom version so its all kana) then copy it so it shows up in JL and I can easily see potential translations for each word and kind of step through to see if I can make sense of the sentence.
This method has some drawbacks… It might be easier to copy the text directly into something like ichi.moe (which I didn’t know about before) but I’m not sure how it will handle all kana. My original intention with downloading JL was that I was going to use the text hooker tool in fceux to copy the text directly without any transcription. I tried this about a month or so ago with Dragon Quest 1 and it was a pain to set up (I had to learn how to make a table file that mapped the kana to the bytes in the rom) and then… DQ didn’t even work properly with the texthooker lmao. I might still give it a try for FF1 but the texthooker is cumbersome enough that I wonder if it would even save much effort. I’m tempted to give it up and move to retroarch and get some nice CRT filters. Transcribing is also good kana practice.
So far I’ve had decent luck with understanding short simple sentences, but longer ones tend to lose me lol. Since I’ve played this part of the game before I’m not too phased by missing some dialogue though. I trust that I will be able to stumble forward based on memory and help from this thread.
My bigger concern is perhaps if this is actually a helpful learning method or not. It’s not like I’m speeding through, I’m taking the time to step over every word and put together a meaning. But when I don’t know most of the words in a sentence, I’m not sure how well I’m internalizing the new words? And in cases where the grammar proves too complicated, it sort of remains a mystery. I guess that’s why this thread exists though, to ask questions about complicated grammar. I do hesitate to bog things down with every little question though lol. And for the vocab, I guess I could finally start using anki for that (although I doubt I’d be able to keep on top of both wanikani and anki, so I’m a bit hesitant).
I ended up running into this link after I posted and that seems to be the right answer.
Definitely not something I am familiar with, and I’m not sure today is the day I’m going to jump into the Classical Japanese rabbit-hole, but I’m glad to vaguely know what’s going on.
It’s true that when I’m confronted to an avalanche of unknown vocab and grammar, I don’t end up memorizing much. I remember that when I started using videogames for Japanese practice the big value for me wasn’t so much learning new stuff but rather practicing and anchoring things I learned on WaniKani and in textbooks. Putting all that theoretical knowledge into practice.
You’re more likely to remember things when you can associate them with something you care about. You will also get a note nuanced understanding of the term of construction and how it’s used.
I definitely think that it was valuable for me.
It’s not so much that I missed it - I did read that section. It’s more that I don’t have a good grasp of the volitional in modern Japanese, so I didn’t even remotely feel qualified to bring it up. I mean, I can use it to say “let’s …”, and maybe “I should …”, but sometimes I see the volitional and have no idea what they’re intending it to mean. Like, in that sentence… does adding the volitional mean something like “they intend to appear”? Do you just translate it identically to the non-past “they will appear”, but with a nuance of intentionality? I’m just not sure how to translate it when used in third person. Anyway, 行こう！
Dude, I’m an EXPERT on reading the word 設定 since I started playing videogames in JP. Also, オプション.
It is really fun to see words that seem “theoretical” until you see them right there in the game. For some reason, the language feels more real to me when I see it being used in a game. It helps that games are more likely to use some of the more obscure words you learn in WK. I picked up よつばと and was totally lost, because every other word is some casual, spoken slang contraction that I’ve never seen before.
Wait, so this む can mean “I have my doubts that X will happen”, but also can mean the speaker “intends for X to happen” or “I want (someone) to X”. Good riddance, classical japanese. In the end, I suspect the translator ignored the ん entirely. Probably had no idea what it meant.
I suspect that it doesn’t really mean anything here, it just gives the sentence a literary/archaic feel. It’s not like modern Japanese speakers would be very at ease with classical Japanese auxiliaries either.
That’s true! I can definitely feel it cementing some things that I already knew. It honestly just feels good to play a game in Japanese, even if I’m spending half my time looking at translations, every time I don’t have to feels really nice.
I remember voicing the same sort of concern years back because, when puzzling through every little bit of every line, I’d find myself looking up the same word over and over and over and it felt annoyingly new every time, simply too much mental overhead. In the end I can’t parse out the exact impact of each thing I did, I was using Anki and whatnot too (but yeah since you’re already on WK I think it’d work out to stick with that until you think you’ve gotten enough from WK, then move to anki after if you want). But over time it really does sort itself out. Some things repeat SO much you’ll still get them, and broadly you’re building up your ability, even if it doesn’t feel like it for quite a while, to handle the basics. Word memorization ease will come with time after you get more comfort reading.
In my opinion native material is not about learning new words or grammar (at least not in the beginner/intermediate stages) but practising deciphering japanese text or audio. Even if I have to look up every single word of a sentence and forget all of them 3 seconds later, I practiced piecing a sentence together, which is way more important to me. I learn vocab and grammar every day anyway, so look ups will slowly decrease. But without having learned to interpret japanese sentences, you can have learned 一万 words and still can’t understand what you are reading.
So read everything you can get into your hands, even if you have tons of lookups and don’t remember the words afterwards, cause you are building your reading skills right now, not your vocab.
Don’t think of native material as a way to learn new vocabulary and grammar that will stick.
If you (for example) try to learn every word you encounter, placing every word into Anki, you’d be reviewing cards for very common words that you’ll see constantly in native material and very uncommon words that you may not encounter again for several years, or maybe never.
My recommendation for an unknown sentence is to look up the grammar to the point that you can understand the sentence. Don’t worry about thoroughly understanding the grammar. Over time, you’ll notice the same grammar coming up as you’re encountering the same explanations repeatedly, and you’ll get to know it better.
You’ll also pick up the most common vocabulary that shows up. But there is a trick to helping yourself learn vocabulary:
If you’re reading native material that has a vocabulary frequency list available somewhere, create flash cards for the top highest frequency vocabulary words you don’t know before you start reading the material. Review them for maybe a week, then start reading the native material (while keeping up your reviews).
When you encounter the word during reading (deciphering) native material, rather than translating the word to English then forgetting it soon after, your brain may pick up that it’s a word you’ve encountered before (via flash card reviews). That helps your brain create a connection that this is something important to know, helping you recall it better in the future.
I imagine many learners have had this happen by accident. I recall when I first learned the word 命 (いのち), suddenly I saw it while watching an episode of an anime series, and I noticed it come up in a SNES RPG I was playing, and I’m sure I saw it somewhere else after that, all within a short time period.
If I hadn’t pre-learned the word, I would have completely missed it in the anime (as I was watching with English subtitles), and it would not have stood out as anything special in the RPG (which lacked kanji, making all words feel “the same”).
This is a key point. You may opt to learn grammar and vocabulary outside of consuming native material. Or you may learn grammar based on the native material and utilize frequency lists for said material. Regardless, the more you learn, the fewer lookups you will have.
With that in mind, constant lookup must be considered the norm when starting out. Just ensure you have a method for learning grammar and vocabulary at the same time.
Well your comment paid off… In a different game:
