Japanese Classics

Japanese Language Reading
1

Hello everyone!

So I have some free time at work and I thought this would be a good time to start reading the Japanese classics in Japanese.

I started reading 金太郎 and everything was going alright till this line.
「どうしよう？ 橋がないから、向こうへわたれないよ」

I understand from context that it means something like “What should we do? There is no bridge here, we can’t cross to the other side.”

But when I look up わたれない I get nothing in my dictionaries.
Any help with this verb?

Also it would be fun to read, in Japanese, the Japanese classics and talk about them.

2

It’s 渡る in negative potential form. Having two conjugations at once tends to confuse dictionaries.

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3

I would also recommend using ichi.moe when you encounter sentences like this. It was able to detect the correct verb as well:

https://ichi.moe/cl/qr/?q=「どうしよう？+橋がないから、向こうへわたれないよ」

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4

Thanks as always Belthazar!

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5

It seems I will have to start using that site.
I always tend to use Jisho.org or revert back to romajidesu if jisho fails me.

Thanks for the tip

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6

I would definitely recommend it as ichi.moe has almost always had much better parsing than Jisho in my experience.

7

As @Belthazar said, Jisho.org often gets confused if you throw too many conjugations on it. One way to get around that is to change from negative to regular (わたれない to わたれる) and hope Jisho figures it out. If it doesn’t, then I’m usually stumped unless I notice for conjugations, in this case the potential form and then I also take that away (now it is わたる). Although it is probably easier to use ichi.moe or even try a quick google translate/DeepL, to see if they can point you to the right verb.

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