Wow I can’t believe how helpful even the first few entries are. There are so many new angles to points I’ve read about before. Not to mention, I can practically feel the leeches evaporate with how many “a-ha” moments I had.
Like あいだ(に) → 間(に): I knew the Kanji, and I knew the grammar point (somewhat through intuition), but had not put 2 and 2 together because I hadn’t seen the more granular meaning for the grammar point before. So that’s why it’s read that way!
It is still on Spotify. I love to listen to it when I take a nap. Her voice is so soft and calm that after a few minutes I just fall asleep. (I also love to listen to it more carefully 
).
I wanted to put a link to the episode you may refer to, but somehow the link doesn’t work. It is episode 93.
Read 間(に) today and I remember studying this grammar before, and trying to remember if I’ve seen it while reading (recent-ish)… I need to read more books, lol. Because it doesn’t seem that common in manga and VNs. xD
Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever seen 間 used without に, and had no idea (or didn’t remember) there was a difference. I wonder if that will ever come up as relevant. (Maybe in a murder mystery as a clue? xD)
Lastly, I keep being surprised that the main clause is often the second clause in a sentence. In Swedish (my native language), we usually start with the main clause and subordinate clauses comes after (at least that is what I think, I don’t remember formal grammar studies for this), and I think I might need to make an effort to start identifying which clause is the main clause, because intuitively I am getting this wrong all the time because I’m using intuition from another language. 
Isn’t the main clause always last in Japanese? At least, I can’t think of an exception right now (ignoring conversational inverted sentences and constructions like て-form which link two clauses of equal weight so neither is more ‘main’ than the other)… I kind of think of this as lining up with all the other ways Japanese puts the important thing last (verb at end, modified word after modifiers, etc).
Well, I don’t know because I’ve never looked at it for Japanese. But if it is always last (except for inverted sentences or equal weight ones) that would make it easy to memorize.
Where I was thinking the main clause might be different was for one of those ので or から (I can’t remember which one), because I think one (or more of them) put the emphasis on the first clause, while another puts it on the later. But maybe that has nothing to do with which one is the main clause? Although then I’d be confused why one was labeled main clause and the other was emphasized, that would make no sense to me.
The Dictionary says ‘main last’ for both ので and the ‘because’ から, FWIW.
I really should grab a block of sticky notes and put them over the romaji. My brain instantly goes “look, easy”, and darts over to the romaji text instead of reading the Japanese, like an overexcited golden retriever.
Yes I feel like I’m picking up bad habits too 
Week 5 starts now: ば to だろう
Of course, any comments and such for earlier (or later) entries in A-D is still welcome, encouraged even.
I gotta say, I’m liking this better than I thought I would so far, but it is early days yet. 
PS: When you finish week 4, you can track your progress of that in the second poll in the OP. So if you have to skip a week, or fall behind, you can tick off each box as you finish a week. Also if it isn’t helpful or useful to you, feel free to ignore it. I just thought I’d remind people of it, in case someone had forgotten about it who wanted to use it.
Read ある2 and あとで.
For ある2, I thought I’d have some clarifications needed, but it turned out the vague points are actually with て-おく, so since it was related I did read it too, and I look forward to another review when we get all the way to O!
For あとで, the only notable thing for me was being reminded that X-あとで denotes any time after X, not necessarily directly after. If I was producing, I’d probably have to think more about the difference from て-から when it comes to whether the main clause is controllable or not, but since I’m learning Japanese to read (almost exclusively), this is a distinction I don’t think I have to memorize. ^^
Although I feel I generally understand the use of ば, my brain doesn’t really want to take in the info in the section. I don’t know if I’m tired or it’s a bit abstract.
I usually check each grammar point on Bunpro because they link to further reading (and some explanations there make more sense). Sometimes one grammar point is several on Bunpro, sometimes several are under one. It can be difficult to find the equivalent grammar points, so here’s a list where I tried to connect the two resources.
I saw that someone alreay made a crossreference for aDoBJG, a Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns, and A Dictionary of Japanese Particles, so maybe these links will also be similarly helpful.
Please let me know if I link the wrong grammar points!
| aDoBJG | Bunpro | - |
|---|---|---|
| ~出す | 出す | |
| で1 | で (at, in) | |
| で2 | で (with, by) | |
| で3 | ので | |
| で4 | で (at, in) ??? | |
| でも | ても | でも |
| どう | ??? |
From all I’ve seen and read, Japanese is pretty consistently structured such that the modifier precedes the modified. That means, adjective before noun, arguments before verb, subordinate clauses before main clause or noun phrase, etc. Because the modifier can itself be modified… and because this can be done recursively, this pattern is often called “left-branching”.
By contrast, English is a bit more mixed, subordinate sentences follow whatever they’re modifying, but adjectives precede nouns.
Some observations from my reading:
I’m not sure I like the “viewpoint” explanation they’re giving to explain how あげる works. I find it easier to just think about in-group vs. out-group.
I understand the explanation behind 間 vs. 間に but this is probably gonna be one of those things that is easy to forget and easy to get wrong.
I was surprised that 私には子どもが３人ある is a valid sentence and I’m not sure I 100% grasp when this could be used, so maybe I’m thinking I should just ignore this and use いる consistently for people.
あとで is easy enough but the nuances between that and similar constructions… I guess I kind of understand but again, could be tricky to never mix things up
Not sure if it will confuse you even more or not, but I remember reading an explanation of why 私に子供がいる/ある are both ok but 私に親がいる／*ある is not (ある is wrong) and it was quite different from what the DoBJG say:
The verb ‘to exist’ […] A minimal pair of sentences (3a) and (3b):
(3) a. 公園に子供がいる/*ある。
There are children in the park.
b. 公園に噴水が *いる/ある。
There is a fountain in the park.
Strictly speaking, however, the distinction between aru and iru is fundamentally a matter of the subject being static or dynamic, so that either form can be used. For example, in (4a) aru may be used with a human subject and in (5) iru may be used with an inanimate subject, depending on the intended meanings:
(4) a. 私に子供がいる/ある。
I have children.
(4) b. 今日子どもが家にいる/*ある。
Children are at home today. (They didn’t go to school.)
(5) パトカーがいる/ある。
There is a police car around.
The subject referent kodomo ’children’ in (4a) is human, but the inanimate form of ‘exist’ aru can be also used, when it conveys the static meaning of the permanent relationship that children hold to their parents. The animate form of iru is used, if the intended meaning is the physical existence of the children (i.e. dynamic). In contrast, aru cannot be used for (4b) and (3a), where the physical existence of the subject is the only possible reference. Similarly, the animate form iru can be used for an inanimate subject. In (5), aru is used to describe the material existence of the car. On the other hand, iru is used when ‘police car’ is metonymically used to represent police officers in the car, and the speaker is describing a car that is there at the time of speaking.
Interestingly in comparison to (4a), the same option does not hold when parents are the referents:
(6) 私に親がいる／*ある。
My parents are (still) alive.
This difference may be due to the fact that there are people who do not have children, so that either iru or aru can be used, depending on the intention of the statement. On the other hand, there are no people who do not have parents, so that a sentence only concerns the physical existence of parents, hence it disallows the use of aru in (6). It is also the general experience in our world knowledge that parents die before their children, so that the physical existence of children is usually permanent during the life of the parents, whereas from the perspective of children, their statements only concern whether or not parents are (still) alive, and ‘having parents’, i.e. the use of aru, is not an issue but a matter of course.
That’s interesting but… still confusing somehow. How is the physical existence of something “dynamic”? The example of the car being used metonymically for the officers inside is interesting though.
If I understand correctly, it’s dynamic in the sense they can be physically there or no there. They can be there at home or no there at school, or they can be there (alive) or not there (already dead), so it’s dynamic.
The ある represent a permanent static connection between person, like looking at a genealogy tree and say Person X had Child Y, it’s a permanent fact, even if it was hundreds of year ago and everybody is already dead, it’s not dynamic.
And like they say, ある is not used in that sense with parent, because asking “Do person X had children?” (ある) is a valid question, some people have children, some have not, but it’s doesn’t make any sense to ask if person X had parents (ある) because duh of course they have, everybody have.
ばかり is one of those words with multiple different patterns. I knew almost all of these but had forgotten about Vinf.nonpast + ばかり to mean “the only thing left to do is V” (though I suspect it wouldn’t trip me up if I encountered it in context in a book).
Side note: the construct V.te + ばかり+いる (eg 遊んでばかりいる) is the one that convinced me back in the day that Vている really is Vて + aux verb いる, not just “an inflection of V”, which is how textbooks seem to tend to teach it. (Though as a simplified starting point I don’t disagree with the latter as a teaching approach.)
Not sure that I buy that explanation, since you can go from not having children to having children. But that’s probably the kind of nuance that is easier to pick up from context.
I feel like I see it a lot, but maybe it’s dependent on the series.
For example, it frequently shows up in Detective Conan. But not so much in other series I’ve read. Considering how much Detective Conan I’ve read so far in 2023, it makes sense that it feels more common than it is…
In this case, Rin is suggesting Ayumu will be lonely while waiting for the club president at a local festival, so Rin can hang out with him during that time.
The two clauses (waiting and being lonely) overlap, so it matches DoBJG saying sans-に is for when there is a perfect overlap.
In order to determine who was where leading up to a murder, Yukiko asks if anyone left the room while she was in the bath.
The lack of に matches up with her asking about a perfectly overlapping time frame.
Relatively uncommon, overall, in the manga that I read.
Thanks for doing the work, I was considering doing something like that!