I encountered a sentence in a graded reader (level 1) which greatly confused me about the usage of the で particle. I suspect this is a fundamental mistake in understanding this particle, so I’ll write down my reasoning first. The full sentence is “みんなでなわとびたのしいね” which I then broke down into;
みんなで: with everyone
なわとび: jumping rope
たのしいね: fun, isn’t it?
So the full translation is something like “Jumping rope with everyone is fun, isn’t it?”. Now about my confusion; で is the contextual particle, and all the examples I found say to replace it by “by way of” as a shorthand. This however totally does not fit in my mind. Do I need to think of the で as just additional information that has no direction and is not a target of the verb? That however would also imply you can use multiple で in a sentence, is that true? I also don’t know if this reasoning will cause confusion with other particles I haven’t seen yet.
After reading what I wrote I am maybe very close to the actual use of the particle, but I find it difficult to find something that answers my exact questions, so please bear with me .
“by way of” => maybe add also “in the context of”
That however would also imply you can use multiple で in a sentence, is that true? => yup
eg (みんなで)(酒場でのむ)(たのしいね) “In the context of with everyone” “drinking at the bar (emphasis on drinking being an action specific to do at the bar)” “fun, isn’t it?”
An even longer example of how you could compose (but don’t believe my inexperience)
(みんなで)(酒場でのむ)(たのしいね)(か、)(ひとりで)(酒場でのむ)(さびしいね)。
“Drinking with everyone is fun, but drinking alone is lonely”.
Oh yea I think しかし would roughly mean “but/however”. I’ll be sure to keep in mind that the か particle used there is probably not how someone would naturally do it.
This sounds like a suggestion that is trying to give you a single literal translation of a particle which does jobs which aren’t neatly gathered together under a single English word. Personally I would suggest you forget it, and instead study some sentences which use で in different ways to see what it means in them, without attempting word-by-word translation.
In particular you can use で for:
location of an action, e.g. 私は部屋で寝る “I sleep in my room”
a means or method, e.g. 車で空港へ行く “I go to the airport by car”
showing that you did something in a group, e.g. 家族でハワイへ行った “I went to Hawaii with my family”
and “by way of” is a pretty poor match for all of those: even when it kind of fits it makes the sentence sound much more roundabout than it actually is.
I think it works better to think about the particles as “they can be used for these various kinds of jobs”. に is another which you will find has a lot of jobs it can do.
In a Japanese sentence the particles all indicate the connection between the noun/noun phrase they follow and the verb/adjective that’s later in the sentence that they attach to. In this case it’s saying that the jumping rope is being done by everybody together.
I first was, “no I’m not doing that”, but giving it a moment, yea I think you are right. I am definitely trying to relate it to something I already know, but in a way that is causing my confusion, and the core part of the issue.
The interesting thing is that I accepted this for particles like は, but for some reason just threw that out for the other particles. I suspect that is the case because I heard quite a lot that は cannot be literally translated, but never was told this in context for the other particles.
I really appreciate your input! I think you pointed out the core issue, but it definitely has some getting used to for me. I’ll need to ask first “what does the particle do” instead of “what does the particle translate to”.
Mmm. I think I would say that the difference is that for は it’s hard to translate it to anything naturally (“as for ~” is the classic attempt but it doesn’t work very well), whereas the others typically can be straightforwardly translated – just not to the same single thing every time. で might end up as “in” or “with” or “by” or “using”, or sometimes no word is needed.
Thank you for sharing that book/link! I am definitely going to take my time to go read through that, it contains a lot of examples I also like that it adds comparisons to other particles, something I did not ask about (yet), but was wondering about how it would be!
For everyone also using the link, the section about で is from page 17 to 26.
I marked the answer from pm215 as an answer, because I want that to be found first when someone searches for this. I do appreciate all the other answers because all of them assisted! So make sure to read all the other posts if you find this
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, I will read it a few more times over, but I am glad you confirmed my reasoning wasn’t very far off! 