I have a more advanced question. I’ve been trying to find a way to express an idea that is a feature in the grammar of my native language, where you repeat a word for emphasize, then express a contrasting idea. For example:
“De mers merg, dar nu îmi convine.” In English it comes off a bit unnatural, like “As for going, I’ll be going, but I’m not happy about it.” but I’m pretty sure I heard something along those lines in Japanese at some point or another, I’m just not sure what that was.
Maybe along the lines of 行くには行くけど、気に入らない。
Or maybe 行くというなら行くけど、気に入らない。 (or maybe といえば? )
However, I’m not sure if that’s an actual grammar point I can look up somewhere, I’m not even entirely sure the Japanese I conjured there is natural or not, but I’m definitely sure I heard something along such lines in an anime or something before.
Does anyone have any idea what I’m talking about or is it all in my imagination?
I’m working on a workbook page about ～たり～たりする and they’re asking for this sentence to be translated into Japanese: “I met a friend, read a book, etc., yesterday.”
I’m fine with the grammar point being reviewed, I’m pretty sure I’ve got that part of the sentence, but I’m not quite sure how to handle “yesterday”.
I initially wrote: 昨日は友達に会ったり本を読んだりしました。
But, would it be better to do it one of these ways:
昨日、友達に会ったり本を読んだりしました。
昨日友達に会ったり本を読んだりしました。
昨日に友達に会ったり本を読んだりしました。
I’m not sure I understand how best to handle yesterday/today/tomorrow when they’re in sentences like this. I’m not really sure I understand the comma in Japanese yet either.
昨日に isn’t valid. Similar to English, it would be like saying “at yesterday” or “on yesterday”.
Including は gives a contrastive feel. Like yesterday (as opposed to on some other day) you met a friend and read a book. I’d say no particle after 昨日 and with or without the comma are both fine. There aren’t really hard rules with commas in Japanese, and authors sometimes use them just to help show a clear separation between clauses (and probably for other reasons too).
Though, confusingly, sometimes they’re also placed in the middle of what we’d consider a clause in English. One of the wildest use cases (which I just encountered in the answer section of my 日本語検定 book) is using them to break up a long modifier and its modified noun, just to break a longer sentence up somewhere.
There really are no hard rules for them, though as in English, you’ll see them represent natural breaths in speech, and they tend to be used roughly every ten or so characters in longer sentences to help visual parsing.
I guess one place you wouldn’t normally see them would be in the middle of a modifier, but even then, I’m not sure it would be expressly wrong.
That threw me for a loop for a while, but I’m mostly used to it now. And now that I’m used to it I find it pretty helpful. The author of the book I’m reading now does that mostly when there is a verb modifying a long noun phrase. So it might be “○○した、○○な名詞” for example.
I’ve been translating some small comics online recently and I’ve been asking the creators for permission before translating, so I wanted to double check that this is the right phrasing:
“Thank you for letting me translate!”
英訳させてくれてありがとうございます！
I am using a font plugin to be able to recognize kanji written in various styles, so far it is great!
I’m confused a lot with the bottom radical in last kanji. For me it is written in a completely different way in two fonts, I would rather consider that they are separate radicals.
Also my IME showed me both variants as the correct ones. Can anybody explain me a bit, maybe there’s a trick with a stroke order? Thanks!
One is how it looks in typical “font” shape (the bottom) and one is how it typically looks handwritten (top). The same thing happens with letters of the alphabet.
Stroke order doesn’t change, just the contact points.
That’s very interesting, I guess it’s like the letter ‘a’ in the english alphabet. Are there any other examples worth of note? Are there just a few that I can learn so I can get it over and done with, or are there so many?
There are a few that spring to mind right now, most all kanji that use 令 as a radical. 噌 and 噂 are too but that’s an encoding issue with different character sets and standards, IIRC.
It sounds perfectly normal to me at least… I guess you could be more formal and say させていただいて but I’d probably write what comes naturally.
I’ve no personal experience with Japanese proper politeness though, I just use the ます/です forms all the time, so someone a bit more experienced might have better insights.
)
