I’ve been busy and have had to prioritize my translation workload over this club (I currently have like 8.5k characters and counting to translate from shows this month that I still haven’t touched…), but at least real life stuff seems to have quieted down a bit, so I’m able to finally crack open this dictionary again!
られる1
No Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling examples for this one because it’s too much of a pain to search for.
I think my experience with this is similar to most learners. I’ve found the direct passive to be pretty straightforward, and the indirect passive quite a bit harder to wrap my brain around, and it’ll trip me up occasionally.
Something that somehow hadn’t occurred to me before is the bit in note 1 that direct passive sentences are always transitive.
The によって note was also interesting (bit of a sneak preview for an intermediate dictionary grammar point, haha) since I’d never really considered using this with the passive before, and as soon as I saw the examples in 4, they felt intuitively strange to me, so maybe I’ve internalized more about one or both of these grammar points than I’d realized.
The note about から is also interesting, with the agent and source distinction rendering it acceptable in some circumstances, but unacceptable in others. It makes sense after reading the から entry previously.
It’s interesting that the so-called “suffering passive” isn’t always negative for the person marked as the topic. I’m not sure I knew that.
And the double にs in the example given in note 8, haha! I guess that’s one case where the sentence order has to be a bit more rigid than usual to prevent ambiguity…
Wow, all of those possible ambiguities in the related expression section. I’ve definitely encountered ambiguous examples with the passive and potential forms before. I totally forgot that the honorific can also be a possibility sometimes in those cases! I haven’t run into that a whole lot with the kind of media I tend to watch/read.
られる2
The way the dictionary labeled the passive and potential forms as “られる” was honestly a bit confusing for me, haha 
. I think I’d struggle a lot if I was a beginner trying to look up one of those things in here… I wouldn’t think to look in the R’s.
The point in note 2 about the degree of volition influencing the choice between を or が is interesting. I always think about this form with が, though I’m sure I’ve seen を examples that I’ve totally overlooked, haha. It’s interesting that できる requires が.
Note 4 makes a good case for why distinguishing between different をs is important. I feel like that’s a topic that repeatedly comes up as a question on this forum… I was confused by it describing を3 as the “detachment を” (alongside the “spacial を”, which is を2). I always think of it as a “starting point” but looking at that を entry again, they distinguish を as referring to a point of detachment and から as a starting point, and I guess I’m still not fully sure what the difference is…
I sometimes forget about the verbs that don’t have potential forms, like the examples in note 6. Still struggling a bit with wrapping my brain around what’s a “non-volitional verb” and what isn’t.
Note 10 snuck in something I’d never heard of before! It says that there is another potential form for Group 2 verbs (example: 食べる→食べれる), but this form is only used in informal conversation. Have I been seeing this in native media and totally not noticing??
らしい
Funnily enough, I think my textbooks kind of skipped over this one? Maybe it fell through the cracks between Minna no Nihongo and Tobira, haha. At least, I remember first seeing it in Tobira and having to look it up on my own (referencing this very entry, actually), because I had no memory of studying it before.
I definitely haven’t got down the precise nuances of all of the conjecture expressions, though I have a general idea. I suppose I’ll read about them again in the related expressions section of the ようだ entry once we get there… My impression of らしい is that it’s pretty similar to そうだ, like note 2 talks about, so I think most of the times I remember seeing it in my textbook fit that usage.
The use described in note 4 has definitely tripped me up before, haha, because it took me a bit to learn that both of these were possibilities. I think Tobira did have exercises for this one, because I remember practicing it.
Here are a couple らしいs from the last Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling translation that I finished, which was from their 2023.08.26 show, which featured some normal matches and a few with unusual opponents and/or different stipulations, haha:
No video link for this because it’s from Yuki Aino’s post-match comments when she and her team closed out the show after winning the main event.
愛野「みなさん、今日は暑い中お集まりいただきありがとうございます！ いつも来てくださっている方、今日初めて来たって人もいると思うんですけど、今日はいつもらしい、東京女子らしい試合もあれば、とんでもない試合もあったりとか。色々あったと思うんですけど、今日みなさん楽しめましたか？」
Aino: “Everyone, thank you for coming today in the midst of this heat! Some of you come all the time, and some of you are here for the first time today. Today we had some matches like the ones that we always have, that are typical TJPW, and we also had some that were a bit out of the box. There was a lot happening, but did you all have fun today?”
I’d say that this use is probably the most common use that I see in this setting.
Relative clause
Oh boy, lots of notes in this one! Most of it was pretty straightforward, though. I had to read note 4 slowly to understand what it was saying, but when I got to the examples, I understood the point it was making.
Note 5’s appositive clause is a new one for me, though… I had to look up appositives to get a better idea of what that even means. Here’s Purdue OWL’s explanation.
I also didn’t understand what note 6 meant by restrictive use and non-restrictive use, though I think the examples cleared that up well enough for me to understand the point at least.
Relative clauses an absolute pain to search for in my translations, but thankfully you don’t have to search very far at all to find examples of this in Japanese . Here’s a non-TJPW example that I saw today when reading New Japan Pro Wrestling’s book for teaching English to Japanese wrestling fans.
This is totally different than all of the examples I've shared previously because these are Japanese translations of sentences that were said in English originally. Look at the translation of the second sentence here for a great relative clause:
That “I speak the language of violence” line from Mox is one of my favorites of his (he repeats it in multiple interviews), though I was actually disappointed with how they translated it here, because I don’t think “バイオレンスという言語” quite captures “language of violence”. Or at least, the sense is weaker here. He’s not saying he speaks the language called violence, but the language that belongs to violence (in my opinion, at least).
I probably would’ve split the two halves of this sentence up to preserve the weight of “I speak the language of violence” instead of tacking on that part as a relative clause, but I’m not a native speaker, haha, so maybe the way they translated it is fine?
And with that, I’m finally onto the S’s!