I’ve tried searching my grammar resources, but I can’t make sense of:
東京名物の東京ばななをおみやげにもらいました
Why is it ‘omiyage ni moraimashita?’ I can’t understand what the ‘ni’ is in reference to. As i understand it, the ‘wo’ refers to what is received, which is the tokyo banana.
Thanks!
The に comes after おみやげ, so that’s what it’s marking. I’m pretty sure it just means that the banana is being received as an omiyage.
Yeah, it’s basically “I was given a banana for / as a souvenir” where に is “for”
How would this work if you also wanted to specify who you were receiving from? Just use に again?
バナナをお土産に母にもらいました
E: I suppose you could use から to avoid repeating に
You could also change the perspective, so it’s くれる instead of もらう
Also, for anyone wondering, it’s not literally a banana:
Quick thought in order to help you unify this with other uses of に (this is something I like to do so all my knowledge is linked and I don’t need to run around wracking my brains for relevant information. You are of course free to ignore this if it’s not helpful for you – my best friend studies in Japan and is fluent, and he doesn’t do this):
に is what you might call a ‘pointing’ particle. Of course, this isn’t the only sort of thing it does, seeing as it also does things like indicating the agent of a passive verb, but I think it’s a good summary of a lot of its meanings. に often points out directions or targets, and this concept can be extended figuratively to concepts such as purpose. Notice, for example, how 〜ため simply means ‘because of ~’ when expressing causation, whereas 〜ために means ‘for the purpose of ~’. The simple addition of some extra direction due to に is sufficient to shift the nuance.
This idea of purpose, I believe, is the relevant nuance here. The ‘purpose’ (I’ll admit this might not be quite the right word here) that the Tokyo Banana serves here is that of being an おみやげ, and as such, it was received ‘as’ a souvenir.
Thank you everyone for the help! I am realizing that there are still gaps in my understanding of ‘ni,’ but how would you make sense of the following:
物は言いようなんだから、馬か正直にならすに、美人ですねって言っておけばよかったんだよ。
Specifically the: 馬か正直にならすに
I understand what “馬か正直にならす” means something roughly translating as “to say with foolish honesty,” but the “ni” throws me off again. Particularly because it is following a verb in its present-future form.
The various uses of “ni” that i have read about in the dictionary didn’t indicate what it would mean if following a verb.
Thanks!
To be honest, I’m not even sure what the whole sentence means, because I’m still wondering what 言いよう means: I’ve never seen it before. Also, I’ve never see ばか written as 馬か before: in my experience, it’s almost always katakana only or kanji only. I’ll try to see if I can give this a more serious look over the next few days, but for now… ならすに strikes me as very strange, especially because none of the ならす’s I can find in the dictionary seem to fit the bill. Could I trouble you to check if there are missing dakuten (the double dots on certain kana), or to provide us with the source of this sentence? に can come after a dictionary form to express purpose (=in order to…), but I don’t know if it’s allowed for all verbs, and the meaning doesn’t seem to line up with everything else. I personally have a feeling that it was supposed to be ならずに. Once again, sorry I can’t give a straight answer right now, but could you just check if the sentence is correct and/or provide a source? Thanks. Meanwhile, I’ll see what others have to say.
Is there any chance you’ve made a typo? I’d be willing to posit that ならすに should actually be ならずに which is basically the same as ならないで.
Edit: Aha, @Jonapedia, it’s one of the example sentences for 美人.
物は言いよう looks to be a expression. I got this on Weblio:
Monolingual source as well:
I tried uploading the images. I found “iiyou” in jisho.org as an entry, means way of saying.
The other imagine I tried uploading was for the wanikani context sentence for bijin, or beautiful woman. So it’s from the wanikani website
OK, many thanks. I think I’m overly sensitive to stuff like ‘is it written with kanji or kana?’, especially okurigana, because I have a tendency to write things with all their kanji or entirely in kana, and nothing in between. In other words, I tend to write them as they appear in the dictionary. However, now I think about it, WK probably doesn’t do that in example sentences because there are bound to be kanji that haven’t been learnt yet. Anyway, my point is… I interpreted 言いよう as 言う-masu-stem + よう, the grammatical object used to mean ‘the manner/appearance of’, just as I thought 馬か was some weird form for 馬 with a special reading requiring か as okurigana. I now understand that we’re just dealing with 言い様, which transparently (to me, someone who’s used to kanji) means 言い方=manner of speaking. I understand now. @Belthazar Thanks for the information. Right then…
Ok, I did a few searches, and nothing meaningful came up for 「ならすに」. In fact, when I tried searching 「にならすに」, the most convincing suggestion I got was a song title, and it turned out to be an incorrect version of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, with す instead of ず. If someone else has another idea, I’ll be glad to hear it, but I’m personally sticking with the belief that this is a typo, and that it should read ならずに (literally ‘without becoming’). You can think of に as being there to give it an adverbial quality, as is often the case. I’m not qualified to explain the grammar (more reading needed), but if you’re curious, ず is the 連用形 (declinable-word connector form) of ぬ, an old form of ない. Also, while this probably isn’t what’s happening here, in modern Japanese, masu-stem + に = ‘in order to [verb]’, which gives you another way of thinking about this. Either way, you get ‘without becoming stupidly honest’, literally speaking. The rest of the sentence uses a common structure for giving advice/talking about what (good things) could have been after the fact (ば…よかった). That’s basically it. Does that help?
PS: could someone ask the WK team to check if there’s an error? IDK how because I’m only here for the forums.
Thanks. I’ve sent an email asking them to take a look. I’ll update this thread if I get a reply.
So, I got a reply, and yes, there was an error:
You’re right! It should be “ならずに” here. We’ll work on getting that fixed soon. Thanks so much for bringing it to our attention
.
There we are. Mystery solved! 
Thank you for all your help!
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