Does this sentence make sense 食べるのは良い

does 食べるのは良い make sense??? I assume it means something like “As for the thing that eats, it is good” or “The thing that eats is good” Please correct me because I’m probably wrong.

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の turns the verb into a noun, so it translates to “eating is good”.

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It means “eating is good”.

Side note, you don’t use だ on the end of い-adjectives in plain form.

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I think “the thing that eats is good” would be translated as 食べるものはいい, or 食べる人はいい if its a person. I’m not super sure about the 物 part but i dont know what else could be used instead

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It’s… a bit of an odd statement to make. And I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to convey. So “does it make sense” - ehhhh, not so sure.

The use of の can nominalize a verb (eat → the act of eating), but it can also be used to referred to the person doing a thing. E.g. from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “In A Grove” there’s a line:

あの死骸を見つけたのは私に違いございません。

The one who found that corpse was me, without a doubt.”

If you were trying to convey “Eating is good for you” I think you’d use a different construct. For example in the well-known song 魚天国 we have the line (edited for brevity):

さかなを食べると、あたまが良くなる

Which is roughly “Eating fish makes you smart.” So you might likewise have something like 体が良くなる、体が強くなる

There’s also the question of using は vs. が, which can always be a bit murky. Sometimes just stating something with a は implies there’s some contrasting thing that you’re alluding to but not outright stating. Like “Eating is good (…but something else isn’t)”

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Yes, it does, and it’s also very true! :yum:

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As has been covered by one other reply here, it could mean that.

But without context, anyone would read the subject as being the act of eating itself, coming out “eating is good.”

I’m not sure when this would ever come up, but if you wanted to make it more clear that you were offering that, generally, things that eat are good, I second “食べるものはいい.” Though that also runs the risk of being interpreted as “things to eat are good,” so really you’d probably want to be more specific.

The 食べるの construction would probably only ever be used for the meaning in the OP in a situation where, say, you’ve shown someone some food and then say, “Hey, and what eats this food is pretty cool too,” which … is really, really specific.

It’s probably also worth noting that what makes that pronoun usage of の the immediate reading there even stripped of informational context is the past-tense verb, since you can’t nominalize the past tense.

Grammatically, it can be used that way in present-tense too, but without context the more immediate reading will always be that it’s nominalizing the action.

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Yes, it makes sense.

It means “Eating is good”, in case you are unsure about the translation.

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It just still strikes me as an odd or unnatural thing to say regardless.

I could see something like…

  • 食べるのが好き (I like to eat)
  • 食べると体が良くなる/食べるのは体に良いこと (Eating is good for you)
  • 食べてもいい (It’s okay/fine if we eat)

But 食べるのは良い just seems like a weird statement to make. Even if OP wanted to convey what they thought their translation was (“The thing that eats is good”) it’s like… what does that even mean?

Would be interesting to hear what the original intent was.

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Yeah, I’m having a hard time imagining the context of “the thing that eats is good.” It sounds like some kind of fabricated or fictional proverb or adage.

I definitely don’t think anyone would ever interpret the OP’s example that way (“the thing that eats is good”), especially since the sentiment itself is so strange.

It’s just a stretch grammatical possibility, to be needlessly picky about the roles verb+の might fulfill.

I can think of, like, stretch situations when you might actually want to say that eating itself is good. A weird thing to say so bluntly like that, but not impossible, and it would come out as 食べるの/食べること(は\が)いい.

Sure, 食べるのはいい, completely isolated is a bit of a weird statement, but I think we can alter it very slightly and make some natural sentences with the same core grammar, like ゆっくり食べるのはいい or 3食しっかり食べるのはいい

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