I think you may want to gloss over this link, definitely the top two answers.
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I don’t mean to be rude, and the link really does provide a lot of information about how のか and の are used in questions, but I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to @banditraider’s sentence because the sentences that Stack Exchange question was about involve 〜のか、〜のか or 〜か、〜か in the middle of a sentence, which are well-known question structures used to express uncertainty while offering or considering multiple possibilities. They are questions framed as alternatives. The most common form of this in beginner-intermediate Japanese grammar is 〜かどうか, which means ‘whether ~ or not’. The other sentences proposed by people answering the Stack Exchange question continue in this vein, focusing on how の and のか can be used to end self-contained questions that appear either at the end of a sentence or mid-sentence before a verb like わからない, in which case they are framing a question or set of questions as the topic of the sentence or as the object of the verb.
@banditraider’s sentence involves an isolated mid-sentence question with no alternative offered and no verb that might take it as an object. In fact, I suspect that’s the reason this question was posted in the first place, because this usage of a question is very rare at the beginner and intermediate levels, and never appears in Japanese textbooks for those levels, including Tobira. It’s not possible to parse with intermediate-level experience, because there’s nothing that explains why the question is present mid-sentence and not at the end of the sentence, since it has no apparent link to the rest of the sentence. This is not a case handled by the Stack Exchange answers, including the ones below the top two answers, because all of them deal with the use of のか in what is unequivocally a question or a set of questions used to present alternatives, and not in a mid-sentence unidentified sentence-in-and-of-itself, with no clear relation to any other word, that in fact acts as a modifier of some sort.
Your link does indeed provide valuable information, but I don’t think it deals with the specific grammatical phenomenon we’re seeing here. It does, however, shed light on what のか’s basic meaning is, which can indirectly help with interpreting how it’s being used here.
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Thank you so much for answering! That makes a lot of sense. One of the ‘definitions’ of the か particle in my grammar dictionary is that it can be an interrogative yes/no sentence-ending particle so it seems like that fits in with what you’re saying and what @Saida was saying about expressing doubt, and the stackexchange thread @Syphus linked to about のか being used as ‘whether or not / if.’
Also yes it is a full sentence taken from the source (a visual novel).
Thank you all again! It took a lot of work but I feel like it makes a lot of sense now.
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It’s interesting that you mention this because ‘A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar’ says that かどうか doesn’t actually have to have the どうか part.
One of the examples they give is:
鈴木さんが大学に入ったか (どう) (は) しらない。
It also says:
When the optional どうか is used, the embedded question has to be a yes-no question. If it is not used, then the question can be either a yes-no question or a WH-question.
Not sure how relevent it is, just thought it was a nifty thing.
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I don’t really know what to say, but I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. Understanding the broader grammar is important here, because we’re not looking at a different grammar point, just a specific usage of it.
Also as far as I can tell, OP’s question wasn’t from a Textbook. So the “level” of the grammar doesn’t really matter, does it?
But OP seemed to get something from it.
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I only mentioned the ‘level’ as an estimate of OP’s past experience. My opinion was also that with beginner-intermediate grammar, one would already have seen the 〜のか〜のか structure. However, thinking back, it seems OP had questions about のか itself, so my assumption is likely mistaken: OP had likely never seen it.
Perhaps I misinterpreted what the main grammar point discussed was then, because my first impression was that the Stack Exchange question primarily dealt with 〜のか、〜のか. Reading it again, it seems I was wrong: the main point was のか. However, none of the answers explains that のか can be used in a modifying clause, which I thought was the main source of confusion here. Again, perhaps I was wrong, because I know that was what confused me when I saw this for the first time, and so I unintentionally projected my past self onto OP.
All in all, reading OP’s post again, specifically the one you replied to, it seems the meaning of のか itself was the original question, even if the specific example in which it appeared was rather special and required, in my opinion, additional explanation. As such, my mistake, it seems my original answer was less relevant than yours as it only tackled the meaning of のか in this particular sentence, and not its use in general. My apologies.
Okay… I swear I’m going to start limiting myself after this. One more question.
Context: the protagonist is worrying about upcoming midterm exams. She thinks:
修学旅行の委員にもなっちゃったし．．．
あんまり勉強の時間、取れそうにないな
I’m understanding this as:
And I also (just recently) became a field-trip committee member…
It it will probably take up the rest of my time.
But why isn’t there a は or が in the second sentence? Obviously the verb is intransitive and there’s no place for a を, so then shouldn’t the subject of that sentence (あんまり勉強の時間) need a は or が? Is the comma messing things up here? That’s exactly how it was written though…
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は or が, aren’t strictly grammatically necessary. One can still have a topic or subject in a sentence without them being explicitly marked. Dropping particles overall is pretty common (though depending on the situation it can sound unnatural, or lead to a different interpretation of a sentence).
One can perhaps interpret pauses as sort of a “soft” marker. But I’m not super confident with that analysis, and overall it doesn’t really matter. Fundamentally, 時間が取れる and 時間、取れる are the same thing. The later being more common in spoken language.
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First of all, in informal Japanese, I don’t think the subject needs to be marked with either particle. A comma is fine. は、が and を are the most commonly dropped particles in informal Japanese, and they’re typically replaced by a comma (if the writer is bothering with punctuation, of course). However, I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at here because I have a feeling the verb isn’t intransitive. It’s not the intransitive verb 取れる meaning ‘to be taken’, but rather the transitive potential verb 取れる meaning ‘can take’, whose object or target can be marked by either が or を depending on what one needs to express, with が being the default. That was my intuitive interpretation, in part because I rarely see the intransitive verb 取れる being used. In other words, the second half of the sentence means ‘it seems I won’t be able to spend much time studying, huh?’
As proof that I’m not spouting nonsense (i.e. that 取れる, the potential form of the transitive verb 取る can be used this way), I did a quite search for usage examples. Here’s one from the Wisdom Japanese-English Dictionary, along with the translation provided by the dictionary:
▸ 忙しくて読書する時間が取れない
I am too busy to spare time for reading.
This example is listed under 取る, and not under 取れる, which is a separate dictionary entry, and thus shows that the potential form is the correct interpretation here. I hope this clears things up.
It’s often necessary to be aware of both possibilities and to evaluate which fits better, especially since many of these verb pairs exist, like 切る and 切れる. For example, in the song Lemon, in this line
受け止めきれないものと出会うたび
溢れてやまないのは涙だけ
きれる should not be interpreted intransitively, because it is 切る to which one can attach a verb’s masu-stem to form a compound verb meaning ‘to do ~ fully/to the end/all the way’ (〜きる). Otherwise, instead of getting ‘every time we/you/I run into something we/you/I cannot fully take/handle’, you get an unparsable sentence.
(PS: Yes, 大辞林 does list this particular usage under 切れる, but note that the definition given is
（動詞の連用形について）完全に…できる，最後まで…できるなどの意を表す。(emphasis mine)
meaning that it’s the potential meaning that is relevant here.)
EDIT: OK, maybe an intransitive interpretation is possible for 切れる, particularly since できる is technically intransitive, but there’s still going to be a nuance of being ‘able’ to do something or of something being ‘possible’. The ‘potential’ meaning can’t be avoided when parsing.
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ゴム人間とはなんておかしな生き物がいるんだろうな
Short question: why is it とは and not just は? What’s the difference of meaning/nuance?
(quote from One Piece)
とは is something you use to define or explain what something is. For example, when you google a new, isolated word, Google often suggests you append とは to your search term, and that’s also how the titles of dictionary pages in the search results start: 「〇〇とは」Another example I can give you is one of the next episode previews for Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor (2017 anime), in which two teachers basically spend the entire preview trolling two students:
「アカシックレコードとは…」(The Akashic Records are…)
「とは？」(Are?)
「とは…」(Are…)
「とは？！」(Are…?!)
「と…わははは！」(A– Wahahaha!) flies away and exits stage right (or left)
(I just translated the meaning of the sentences, because とは is hard to render in English, but notice that the sentence is meant to be explanatory. You can probably still find the previews on YouTube. I think they’re on the KadokawaAnime channel. I can’t remember which episode this was though. Sorry.)
EDIT: Never mind, found it:
(Notice that the girl with silver/platinum hair asks 「先生、アカシックレコードってなんですか。」=‘Sensei, what are the Akashic Records?’ って=informal と(は). See the connection with とは, since she’s asking for an explanation?)
In short, とは is explanatory – ‘the thing called ~ is/involves/etc’ – and you could see it as a shortened というのは; は identifies a topic and discusses it, but doesn’t imply that the rest of the sentence is an explanation or definition.
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I would compare how it’s used here specifically to the English “such a thing.”
Like you COULD say “there’s gummy people, eh?”
but “there’s such a thing as gummy people, eh?”
is clearer and emphasizes the surprise.
Roughly it marks that you’re talking about the concept/definition/phrasing where plain は could be an individual, etc.
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Thank you for your response! This is the first time I’ve ever seen a particle dropped like that (I haven’t done much reading before now) so it caught me off guard.
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You hear this sort of particle dropping a lot in anime, because almost all the dialogue is casual. I’m not sure about, say, dramas, but at least according to dialogues in textbooks, dropping certain particles (mostly は、が、を; I don’t think the rest can be dropped) is quite normal in casual conversation.
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Those are the most common, but other particles can be dropped and are sometimes. 電車乗る is okay to say. As an example. Generally what keeps the others in place is the fact that it’ll be hard to parse or understand the sentence without them. Sometimes they’ll also come off completely differently with the particles dropped than with them in. Also certain dialects are more prone to dropping particles than others.
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From a book I’m reading:
彼等が間違いなく騎士団だろう。
This is narration, not dialogue. I wouldn’t expect 間違いなく and だろう to appear together like this, since they seem contradictory based on my understanding. How can you say something is 間違いなく if you’re adding だろう at the end?
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Isn’t it something along the lines of starting out really sure and then deciding that you’re not that sure after all, or deciding to moderate what you say? Something like ‘They’re certainly an order of knights, right?’ Or perhaps more naturally (in English) ‘surely, they’re an order of knights, right?’ (At least, I don’t feel that’s contradictory.)
EDIT: Just thought of a good example of something similar in English, actually… ‘They have to be…, right?’ On its own, ‘have to be’ expresses a lot of certainty, but you can still soften it.
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It doesn’t feel contradictory, but if I had to guess you feel like they are conflicting levels of certainty?Like me saying Im certainly going to win probably.
In this case だろう isn’t exactly uncertain in whether or not something is the case, its more like light uncertainty that your own thought is the case. So they’re saying that they’re lightly uncertain in their judgement that they must absolutely be knights.
Jona beat me to it, but yeah you would definitely translate it as having a “right” at the end. To take my initial example, imagine me instead saying “theres literally no way we lose to these guys, right?”.
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中に書いておく物。
From the context surrounding it, I figure it translates roughly to “A thing to write inside”, but I don’t know what the ておく is doing there… 
Any help?