Short Grammar Questions (Part 1)

I heard about 奥さん, but just once before, so I forgot about it.

When talking about other people’s family you usually append さん, though 妻さん I have never heard of. But the omittance is a big clue to the speaker being the subject.

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妻さん sounds like something you’d say to your wife when you’re about to divorce her

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I don’t see the ambiguity in the sentence :sweat_smile:
Wouldn’t it be “あの人に言ったこと” if it’s me saying something to them?
How would you get to that meaning with the passive 言われる?

And even if you change the particle to が, like Saida said, to get “あの人が言われたこと”, it would only change the meaning to “what the person was told (by whomever)”, which doesn’t imply it’s said by me.

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“What was said by me to them”?? :man_shrugging:

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To be clear, in passive voice, the person doing the action gets に (comparable to English ‘by’)

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How do you know when you’re supposed to use なに and when you’re supposed to use どう?

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Afaik, なに is just the more formal version of どう? Also, どう can also mean “how”, which I think なに can’t.

I always thought it was the other way around. Like I always hear なに being used in informal expressions (何これ!?、いったい何 . . .!?). Come to think of it, if どう also means ”what" then how come we never hear どうこれ?

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Hey, I suck at grammar, so who knows. Though, I did find this: Ask-a-Teacher: What's the difference between 何 and どう?

Also, I think they’d say これはどう? rather than どうこれ。Dunno why, it just “feels” more right.

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これはどう does sound more “right” but I also can’t really explain why. I guess the only reason something sounds “right” is because many people say it in that way as opposed to the other way. Like for example, technically “stupider” is grammatically correct English, but no one ever says it like that. People usually say “more stupid”. But for some reason “dumber” sounds totally natural to me. It’s one of the reasons I stopped obsessing over grammar.

EDIT: Actually, これはどう usually isn’t said by itself right? It’s usually followed by something. Like これはどうしますか?“Will this do?”

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None of the answers following seem to cover this, but: yeah, it means the particle can be dropped depending on what precise meaning you’re after.

日本も = Japan, too, (something something)
日本にも = In Japan, too, (something something)

It’s basically the same as 日本は versus 日本には.

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You mean as in 私にあの人に言われた?
I see it now, but it feels like using に two times implies suffering passive, with some third person being negatively affected by this action.

I don’t think it would be natural to use に two times in any other case, since if you wanted to say 私は人に言うこと, the passive is 人は私に言われたこと
If you want to say 人は私に言うこと, the passive would be 私は人に言われたこと

And then you’d simply omit the sentence topic.

I would say it’s probably easier to memorize that どう means how, and なに means what.

It’s just that in some situations, like in the link Nenad posted, どう思いますか is translated with “What” in English, although you could also translate it as “How do you feel about this?” (=What do you think about it?)
Or rather than translating “どうしますか” as “What are you going to do?”, you could imagine it as “How will you go about this?”

So どう and なに are not really interchangeable most of the time, even if the more natural English translation might in some cases include “what” instead of “how”.

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Just curious, but how would you translate something like それはどういう意味ですか?I can’t really think about this as being anything other than a “what” type question even though it’s using どう.

Not the one you asked, but I think it could also be translated as “How do you feel about this?”

It probably means the same thing, and no-one would notice, but I would still consider it taking a bit too much of a liberty (though, maybe a certain context could change my mind). I personally, at least, draw a pretty big line between “How do you feel about X” and “What do you think about X” so I’d translate it as “What do you think about this?” or “What’s your opinion on this?” or even “What is…” as desuka sounds rather formal.

I cant really think of a way to express it using „how“ for that one, but also, when you simply translate it as „what does this mean“, you kind of ignore the いう, too.
So どう isn’t the only part there that isn’t translated word by word; Japanese simply has a different way of expressing this that just doesn’t translate well.

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仕事が忙しすぎるために 、最近実家に帰れていない。
“Due to me being too busy at work, I haven’t been back to my parents’ house in a while.”

Shouldn’t the translation go more like “I can’t go to my parents’ home?”

The translation puts more of an emphasis on the continuous aspect 〜ていない. ‘I haven’t been able to go home to my parents’ lately’, would be more accurate, I think.

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You’re right, I overlooked the progressive tense.