Meeee, definitely not planning to read all of it in one go. I know approximately zero fancypants grammar terms and I feel like if I read them quickly it’ll be in one ear and out the other. …I might forget them anyway, but at least I’ll have tried I don’t really have a set number per day in mind, more just going by when my brain feels it needs a moment to digest all the grammar jargon.
This is an aside but it’s nice to know that there are some people who aren’t reading everything on the first day, I feel like everyone always comments so quickly on book club threads in general Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but more just leaves me like how has everyone read the whole thing already
If that’s the intention, then that is IMHO not al all clear from the preceding context, and it also seems odd to place them there. One would expect examples of clearly transitive verbs.
Also I could still quibble about 分かる, there’s enough people who would claim that it’s actually transitive, but who knows how they define it in this book.
I guess the more important point is that this is more of a brush-up section and so possibly hasn’t seen the same care as the rest of the book. IIRC, it also describes embedded sentences twice, once with another name (subordinated maybe?).
Is it though? ある is intransitive and so is exist. Though the rest seem to at least be possible to be transitive in English (maybe verbs in English can be both transitive and intransitive of course). If that was their intent they certainly could have made it clearer.
I think the general consensus is still that 分かる is intransitive. There do seem to be occasional usages of を分かる (from a search of all my books), but it’s far less common than が分かる. I wonder if this technical makes it transitive though, or if it’s more like how が好き can sometimes become を好き to tweak the nuance.
The transitive English verb in the first example sentence is “have”. They all have the format “Japanese using intransitive verb; English literal translation; English natural translation using transitive english verb”.
If you assume that “transitive” means “takes a direct object” and that a direct object doesn’t necessarily have to be indicated by を, such as in double が constructions, then 分かる can be considered transitive. It’s definitely not something that everybody agrees with, but it isn’t exactly rare among linguists (e.g. Susumo Kuno).
Maybe my preferred way of seeing it, though, is that the classical transitive/intransitive distinction makes sense for verbs like 殺す and 死ぬ, or the classical transitive/intransitive pairs, but there’s weirder constructions like 分かる or potential verbs that defy classification a bit. Whether you consider the phenomenon to be one of “secondary subjects” or of “が objects” probably depends on what exactly you’re looking at.
It’s entirely possible that the people who have read everything on the first day of a book club thread didn’t actually start reading on that exact day
I know I’ve certainly started reading earlier in the past when I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up, or when I was too excited about the book to wait.
This is definitely going to be my method as well! I don’t have too much experience with grammar, particularly when it comes to the more detailed and technical explanations. I have a feeling that it’ll be important for me to spread sections out each week in order for me to really understand things. I started going through the terms today and I’m finding it can take me a few read throughs sometimes to grasp what’s going on with the terms in the context of the sentences. I guess I’ll figure out as we go along what’ll work best for splitting them up during the week. We’ve got this!
So everyone just got super excited about grammar and couldn’t wait/had to binge, got it I’m kidding but if someone was actually that excited I’m happy for them and I wish I shared their enthusiasm for grammar
I’m new to ‘book clubs’ on WK in general, and just started reading this book.
I have to admit that right off the bat I’ve been getting blindsided by unexpected developments in the plot (which might be OK in a mystery story, but it’s a bit jarring when it occurs in the introduction to a basic grammar treatise - it serves as a harsh reminder that I’m extremely weak on grammar in general, but that’s why I’m here after all).
But as I’ve seen in several prior comments about Auxiliary Adjective, I guess that I’m not alone in my reaction of “Is that really considered to be an adjective? Really? Really?”.
Hey, misery loves company - and I’ll get over it (I’d expect, anyway).
BTW, apologies in advance if this sounds too snide, but by my count, reading pages 1 - 15 gives a total of 15 pages in this section, not 16.
@Akashelia
I stumbled on the same example sentence and asked myself the same question. Then I explained it to myself as Akiko crying ‘against’ Taro. In a sense Taro was ‘cried at’ (and is therefore annoyed).
I’m glad there are more people like me who are planing to read a bit every day (more or less). And yeah, I’ll definitely do that for the main entries too. So many of you replied to my post that I’m not even sure I’d be allowed to tag you all (max 10 tags per post) so thanks everyone for sharing how you’re reading this part!
Definitely why I posted because there were so many that just blazed through it. I’ll probably be more blaze-y next week and the week after since I’m a bit more solid on basic Japanese grammar (when we have the more prose-y explanations) than I am at grammar terms. xD
No worries. I must not have been paying much attention. xD The formula to get the right word count for a spread of x - y is to do y-x+1, but somehow I guess I forgot to take away the 1 or something. It happens.
Feel free to point out when I have mistakes in the OP. I’d much rather fix it than have it eternally be seen by everyone who stumbled on the thread in the future.
Honestly, some of you guys reading this have a much better grasp on grammar terms than I’ll ever even aspire to.
I saw auxiliary adjective and was like sure “okay, adjective attached at the end to something, check”. Although I also raised my eyebrow at よう but then figured it kinda works like a な adjective since it takes な and not の when attaching to things (yes, I’m ignoring の adjectives right now…). So whether it is actually a noun or adjective didn’t feel that important to me.
Basically I’m looking for their logic in how they present the grammar. As long as I kinda understand why they call something X, it doesn’t matter to me whether it is X or Y or Z (in grammar terms), as long as I understand what it means when I see it while using the language.
So… Maybe, we have to approach this is like the authors of this dictionary are using these terms in these specific ways. Not saying we can’t discuss if we think they are wrong—have at it! We’ll learn things from it—but at least since we’re learning how the authors think of the terms, it won’t blindside us later. ^^
Note: Only read up to coordinate conjunction so far because I had no time to read yesterday. I played the Diablo 4 beta with friends instead. So maybe I’ll come and complain about a later one too. xD
I got held up on this for a few minutes too. Rareru5’s example (飲まれた) made perfect sense to me, personally found 泣かれた much harder to wrap my head around though. But that’s a very good way to explain it.
I just finished the pages of this week. It was nice to learn terms used to refer to things I already known with examples or things I didn’t know.
I will probably re-read it multiple times before the end of the week so that I remember the terms that will probably be used a lot in the coming weeks.
I didn’t participate in the discussions above, but it was a really nice read. Having people debating things is really great and sometimes bring more information on the table to understand some grammar points.
This was an excellent review of grammatical terms, especially for things like ‘Appositive Clause’ where I knew the German term for it, but not the English one.
Maybe I’ll look for German examples to all these for fun if I have a bit of free time over the week.
The distinction between i-adjectives was also new to me. I often have trouble with vocab that end in -しい, so this might help me remind me to not drop the i.
I feel like my impression just from what we’ve seen so far is that this book very much uses western grammar concepts applied to Japanese (which may not necessarily be a bad thing if that’s what you grew up learning and what makes the most sense to you).
Like with the whole transitive verbs section people have been discussing already: I would assume most Japanese people wouldn’t necessarily make a distinction of ある being both an intransitive verb meaning “to be” and a transitive verb meaning “to have”, they would just consider it a single verb.
Same with を not always indicating a direct object as in 「公園を歩く」. I think Japanese people probably would consider that to be a direct object e.g. “walk the park”, or would consider the が in 「私は車がある」to be indicating a grammatical subject because that’s what those particles exist to indicate.
I don’t know though, I’m not good enough yet to be able to read actual Japanese writing on this subject and I’m sure there’s debate on the topic anyway.
I don’t really have a set number per day in mind, more just going by when my brain feels it needs a moment to digest all the grammar jargon. 
We’ll learn things from it—but at least since we’re learning how the authors think of the terms, it won’t blindside us later. ^^