Help understanding this sentence from Toradora

Japanese Language Grammar
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Im watching Toradora with Japanese subtitles, and the first line has me a bit stumped

この世界の誰一人 - “not anyone of this world”

見たことがないものがある seen this..... is not ..... then im not sure …

I understand the individual components here, I just don’t understand how they all work together
(maybe I don’t quite understand what ‘ないもの’ is, as far as I can tell it just means “not a thing” or “there isn’t”

If someone could walk me through this, i would be so greatful!

For reference, It happens to be the first line in the first episode.

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I wish I could be of some help but I’ll leave that to the experts :slight_smile: I just wanted to welcome you to the community as I see this is your first post!

giphy

Everyone here is so helpful to me, so I’m sure you’ll get the help you need!

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I’d break it down like this

見たことがない
something not seen before

ものがある
to have something

→ = to have something not seen before

Well, you can break it down further. But, the important thing here is to see 見たことがない as a whole to parse.

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ooh I see! thank you! I was trying to parse ないもの as a single unit

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Yeah, the ending “nai” is the ending negative form/negation here. :slight_smile:

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Oh so this whole thing must mean

“there is a thing, nobody in this world has ever seen”
(literal translation nobody in this world has never seen {double negatives are confusing hehe})

THank you!!

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The way to parse it is to look at the whole この世界の誰一人見たことがない which is all modifying the もの.

In this case it’s simply “there is”.

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= not a single person.

So, I guess my translation would be, “There is something, not a single person in this world has ever seen” - to make it more natural…

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For sure…I was just parsing the second part separately.

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Ah thank you :slight_smile: !! I’m going to have to modify that anki card … :stuck_out_tongue:

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I would like to add that it helps to recognise that 〜たことがある is a grammar point. In this sentence, it’s just the negative form, 〜たことがない.

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Pointless question that can be ignored cos I misread the kanji 😅🙃😅

I think I’m missing something here - where are you getting the negative from? I’ve always seen 唯一 as something like ‘unique, single’ so would have assumed that 唯一人 was just ‘a single person’, rather than ‘not a single person’.

It still makes sense as a whole phrase (like @morteASD set out) the way I’m reading it (because something that hasn’t been seen by a single person is still something that no-one has seen) but I’m just wondering if there’s some nuance of 唯一人 I’m missing.

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Aren’t you misreading the kanji? :upside_down_face:

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haha you are totally right! :sweat_smile: (well done me for managing to misread it every single time lol, guess my brain just decided what it was and then didn’t look the rest of the time)

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誰一人 + often followed by として is a set phrase.

I’m not sure about ものがある, since it might be one of the sentence-ending expressions with もの, but they’re added as a nuance usually so the English translation wouldn’t change much.

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Yeah that makes way more sense in retrospect/is something I’ve come across before, was just having a brain not working moment lol. I have them very often, especially in Japanese!

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the ものがある here is saying, there is a thing. Everything before もの is modifying it.

So the scentence is:

a [not-a-single-person-of-this-world seen-not]-thing, exists

or

there exists a thing, that not a single person in this world has ever seen

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A nuance of ものがある in this that thread I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that it implies an opinion or feeling from from the speaker, not a fact of nature of just ‘there is’. If you have context, it may make more sense. Otherwise a sweeping statement of ‘no one in the world has seen this before’ wouldn’t necessary be factually backed up anyways (so not that it changes the translation much but the implication does).

https://jlptsensei.com/learn-japanese-grammar/ものがある-mono-ga-aru-meaning/

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