〜安易に近づくことが出来ないと感じる様子だ
I would say it’s “the impression of not being able to get close easily”, but otherwise yeah, it makes sense. So it’s kind of like 恐ろしい and 怖い in the sense that the trait belongs to the thing (存在) and not to the 子供.
But the English translation kind of implies that it’s the children that feel awkward? I’m kind of biased when grammar is changed like this and it makes people wonder 
.
@pgoonghang - the TLDR is that it’s just the regular usage of にとって.
Yes the trait belongs to the parents. Seen from the viewpoint of the children にとって. So it’s not a “universal” trait.
When I think along the 怖い lines and replace it in the sentence it would probably translate as “Sometimes parents are a scary existence for their children” So would you feel “Sometimes parents are an awkward existence for their children” is good enough in english?
Though I think I’m now drifting away from the thread topic and entering “How to best translate” territory.
I’m sorry 
They kind of do. It’s if something is scary you feel scared. If something is 煙たい you feel awkward kind of thing.
They do. Another defintion of 煙たい: 気詰まりでいとわしい気持ちである
Note that that doesn’t specify who feels that way, since 気持ち can refer both to a feeling held by someone or to a feeling invoked by someone/something. So you’re correct that it’s like 怖い in that sense - it’s one of those words where two different concepts in English (feeling X or invoking the feeling of X) are the same thing in Japanese. In fact, one of the definitions of 怖い from the same dictionary uses the same kind of description: 不満足な結果や成り行きになりそうで、不安な気持ちである - again not specifying whether it’s a feeling present in someone, or a feeling invoked by somoene/something, but rather going for a phrasing that can mean both. I think the distinction just may not be all that strong in Japanese.
From a literal perspective, you might say this is something like “from the viewpoint of children, parents can invoke uncomfortable feelings”, even if that’s super stunted.
It’s also worth noting that 煙たい modifies 存在 here, not 親. And a 存在 can’t really feel much of anything, so it’s fairly clear here that 煙たい doesn’t refer to something the parents feel, but rather something they make the children (or just others in general) feel, as I see it.
I did some further research, and returned to the thread to say that this is what was tripping me up. The dictionaries I consulted usually said something like “to feel awkward”, but I think that doesn’t;t exactly apply in this case. It’s more like “to seem awkward to others”.
It sort of reminds me of "好き”, which can sort of be thought of as meaning “to be pleased by”.
I like this definition, because it focuses on the feeling itself and not who feels the feeling (
) and who causes it. Which makes sense, because 怖い can be used in a very “meta”, implied (from context) sense without attaching the feeling explicitly to anything.
Maybe it’s the same with 煙たい. I’ve honestly never seen it used that way, so can’t tell 
Right, makes sense! So the parents invoke the feeling of intimidation.
Yeah, if you want a single English definition, it could be more like “having a feeling of awkwardness” I suppose, but that’s still a bit iffy. It’s more of a vague hand-wavy “associated with awkward feelings” kind of thing, and leaves it unspecified and to be interpreted as context allows who’s actually feeling awkward.
I’d say it’s more along the lines of “liked” or “pleasing”, but yeah, it’s similar in that the English concept is very much focused on who actually feels the thing expressed by it, whereas the Japanese concept is much more focused on what the feeling applies to. It’s a little different though, in the sense that 好き won’t ever apply to the person actually feeling something.
Neither have I (mostly because 煙たい is a prime candidate for the “latest Japanese word you learned” thread 
), but the definition makes it seem that way to me:
俺は煙たい → 俺は気詰まりでいとわしい気持ちである → I feel uncomfortable and unpleasant
この部屋は煙たい → この部屋は気詰まりでいとわしい気持ちである → this room feels uncomfortable and unpleasant [to me]
Both overly verbose and unnatural, of course, but like the definition of 怖い it just specifies the feeling itself, not who actually feels it (if anyone).
As far I know, こと turns noun-verb pairings into, in effect, single nouns. (e.g. “すしを食べる” —> “eating sushi”, vs. “すしを食べること” —> “the eating of sushi”.) This is correct, right?
It’s correct, but it’s not noun-verb pairings, it’s in essence verbs.
Just 食べること → “the act of eating” . You don’t have to have a “noun-verb pairing” for that, all you need is a verb, and you turn the whole phrase that the verb ends with into a noun (even when that phrase is just the verb itself).
That’s true. I was just thinking about how one usesこと to talk about listening to specific bands and so on, and it’s less common to just attach it to a verb with no noun before.
It’s called “nominalizer” and the other one that works like this is の. They are used in slightly different cases but both do what you described.
Well, yeah, that’s because you need the noun to tell you what band it is. 
But, seriously, one thing to look out for in that scenario is the phrase ~ことがある, which means something like “have done ~ before” where ~ is the past tense form of the verb.
RADWIMPSの音楽を聴かれたことがありますか？
Have you ever listened to RADWIMPS?
Why 聴かれた, actually? That would be the passive form, or the honorific form if we want something that matches your translation. Am I perhaps misunderstanding something?
Fun fact: I used this structure incorrectly about two weeks ago in a conversation with two Japanese teachers. In the heat of the moment, I didn’t manage to find the right way to express the fact that I hadn’t looked at the timetable for the coming week. (I should have just said まだ見ていません.)
The translation is just not literal. It’s closer to something like ‘to children, parents are sometimes awkward existences’ or ‘for children, parents are sometimes existences that cause awkwardness.’
As for whether or not it’s legitimate, in my dictionary (大辞林), the example sentence for this meaning of 煙たい (which I really need to go dig into because there are words I don’t fully understand), the example sentence is
「父親は子供にとって煙たい存在だ」
So yes, it’s very much a normal way of using 煙たい with にとって.
I was going for the passive form intentionally: “have listened”
But I’m still getting a feel for that, so let me know if I tripped up somewhere.
That’s the curse of knowledge.
You learn all these complicated structures but then you start overthinking it when something simple is required.
Ah… I thought the passive form would have been ‘to be listened to/heard’, actually. I think your sentence would translate as something like ‘Have you ever had [your?] RADWIMPS music listened to [by someone else who you perhaps didn’t want to hear it]?’ (I’m definitely over-interpreting the sentence in order to make it parsable.) If that’s the case, it feels like the sort of passive form one might use for an undesired experience. If it isn’t the passive form, then it would be the active honorific form for someone whose listening habits you’re asking about: ‘Have your esteemed ears ever heard RADWIMPS music?’ or something like that.
To say ‘have you ever listened to…’, I would probably have gone with
RADWIMPSの音楽を・は聴いたことがありますか？
Hahaha. It might also have been some weird translation attempt in my head, honestly: ‘Have I looked at next week? Hm… nope, that hasn’t happened, so it doesn’t “exist”. 見たことない.’ (Perhaps not wrong if the thing looked at was specifically 'next week’s schedule, but still weird in context.) Anyhow, I guess it’s also a consequence of realising fairly late in my study of Japanese that 〜ている can mean ‘to have done ~’ as well.
I would agree with this as well. Also, if the intention was keigo, probably the phrase would’ve been in keigo (the あります changed) and not the verb in the construction 
.
日本語で「MANGA」を読もうと頑張って勉強したりています。
For context, this is apart of a larger sentence about the public, both Japanese and foreign and their relationship with anime/manga.
I get what this says, I just don’t understand the use of the volitional 読もう or と.
I get と like という or ぺんと紙, but then I see it thrown into things like this と頑張って from the sentence, or と同じ, and I completely miss the purpose of it. Any and all tutorials I’ve gone through on it explicitly say it’s the quoting particle, as well as being used to connect things in a “this and that” kind of way. Can anyone point me to a more in depth description of it’s use? I run into it in these circumstances so many times and I’ve never wrapped my head around what it actually does outside of quoting, or meaning ]‘and’.
One thing to watch out for in cases like this is that particles work to the left and not to the right. It’s 読もうと and not と頑張って.
Other than と being used for quotation in と思う、と決める, etc., it’s also a conditional particle, but the general uses are such:
As for the sentence, I found this grammar point: JLPT N1 Grammar: ようが / ようと (you ga / you to) Meaning – JLPTsensei.com
Which has a similar structure, but not necessarily points to the same nuance.
I would roughly translate the sentence as:
Even if you’re reading manga in Japanese, do your best and study.
I think the ending was 勉強したりしています, correct?
EDIT: Now that I think about it, my translation might be a little off and it might be “if you’re trying to read manga in Japanese” and not “even if”. 
To add to the list of the usages of と, another taken from japanese.stackexchange.com might be with the volitional: ～ようとする (try to do), or ～ようと+verb (“trying to (do)” or “in an attempt to (do).” + verb).
I’m not so sure about that, because in this case, the action that is clearly performed by the person to whom respect is due is 聞く, not ある. That aside, it’s quite hard to change あります into something else when you want to elevate someone else while doing so: ございます tends to be something you use to express respect by humbling yourself, so it would be strange to ask if somebody else has had a certain experience using ございます, and I don’t know of any other words that are used to replace あります. Perhaps I’m wrong, because my dictionary does say that ござる can be used as 尊敬語 for ある, but I think that’s probably quite rare in modern usage, particularly since all the example sentences seem to be taken from literary classics.
For what it’s worth, while no source is cited, this Q&A exchange on Chiebukuro suggests that the asker’s initial reference source suggested turning 聴いた into a 敬語 equivalent:
OK, let’s deal with one thing at a time, because the way と is used in each of these cases is ever so slightly different, and I want to be clear. I’ll start with your sentence.
As @WeebPotato said, the end of the sentence was almost definitely 勉強したり して います, which would give us
日本語で「MANGA」を 読もうと 頑張って勉強したりしています。
How can you understand the bits that are confusing you? The easiest, most superficial way to handle this is to know the structure 〜おう・ようとする, which means ‘to try to do ~’. From there, all you need to do is to say, ‘頑張る also involves doing something, and is even more clearly oriented in the direction of making efforts to do something, so it’s logical to extend the logic of 〜おう・ようとする to 〜おう・ようと頑張る and assume it means something similar – to work hard at/do one’s best at doing ~.’ That’s the quick solution.
However, let’s say you want to go deeper and understand what’s actually going on here. What other structures exist? You might have seen 〜とする in a general context, and seen it explained as ‘to take it that ~ is true/is the case’. What if we apply that logic to 〜おう・ようとする? Well, then we’ll take it that ‘〜おう・よう’ is true. What does that form mean? It’s the volitional form, and indicates the idea that someone intends to do something, or at least that something is being proposed and considered. Let’s put this together in an example, since this is probably confusing without context:「私が読もうとしている。」I am currently taking it that I intend to read. Therefore, ‘I am trying to read’. It’s a bit of a leap, but that’s essentially the logic driving this. Does that make sense?
Let’s now go even further: what exactly is this と? Why is it OK to reuse this structure with 頑張る? Shouldn’t it be a set phrase that only appears with する? Just a disclaimer: from here on, I’m going to be talking about what I’ve observed myself. I can’t prove it, and I haven’t managed to find anything that explains it exactly like this, because I’m really trying to mash a whole bunch of trends together. It also doesn’t help that the only explanations that are along these lines seem to appear in monolingual resources – Japanese textbooks don’t bother with this stuff, maybe because you’re only likely to see this in novels, and if you can read those, you probably don’t need the vast majority of Japanese textbooks on the market anymore. However, what I can tell you is that this understanding has worked for me so far.
This と is the quotation particle. ‘How in the world is that a quotation?’ you might ask. The answer lies in a very common structure that probably every English speaker finds extremely strange the first time it appears in Japanese: という. What happens when I write,「甘すぎるけどみんなが欲しいというジュース」? Essentially, I’m offering a description of the juice: it’s too sweet, but everyone wants it. It’s the ‘too sweet but desired by everyone’ juice. That’s not quoted speech. However, for an English speaker, the way I just used quotation marks is completely understandable. That’s what the と in という is doing, with いう just being present to complete the descriptive structure and allow it to be grammatically capable of describing a noun (because いう is in its noun-modifying form). The truth is that this と doesn’t just appear in という. We’re seeing it in action in 〜とする and 〜と頑張る, and actually, it’s even present in adverbs: you ever wonder why it’s OK (but optional) to add と to certain adverbs, like in ゆっくりと? If you take a closer look at those adverbs, you’ll notice that very often, they describe a certain state or appearance, and a lot of them are onomatopoeia. Why? Simple: と is ‘quoting’ (or more accurately framing) to description or impression embodied by the adverb. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, because it’s been a long time since I’ve actually read any serious writing in Japanese, but I’m pretty sure you see this sort of と after little clauses in writing – even in newspapers! – to describe how exactly something happened. It’s just an extension of the logic behind phrases like 〜と言う、〜と発表しました and so on: と captures the general manner in which something was done. This idea is so old that it even existed in Classical Japanese, in which と could be used for similes. For example, there’s a poem by Toyotomi Hideyoshi that’s parodied in How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?, and the original starts like this:
露と落ち 露と消えにし 我が身かな
Rough translation: as the dew it fell, and as the dew, it vanished – my body [poetic pause/pensiveness]
Here, 露と is used to indicate that a comparison is being made between how the persona’s body behaved and how dew (露, つゆ) behaves. It’s essentially just the quotation particle all over again. All this stuff works roughly the same way, whether you’re talking about という、と頑張る, or any of the other examples I raised earlier.
To end off this section, let’s go back to your sentence:
日本語で「MANGA」を 読もうと 頑張って勉強したりしています。
Given what we now know, we can say that this literally breaks down as ‘I’m doing stuff like (that’s what 〜したりしています is for) doing my best in a manner characterised by an intention to read manga in Japanese and study.’ In short,
I’m doing stuff like doing my best to read manga in Japanese and study.
That’s how we can extend the logic of と functioning as the quotation particle in order to understand this structure.
OK, this is what I’d call the ‘other’ usage of と: the sort that’s used to indicate the presence of something else. It’s very similar to ‘and’, but I’d prefer ‘with’ as a translation, though ‘and’ is definitely the better translation in some contexts. The first example you raised is certainly just ‘pen and paper’. However, in the second example, well… something is ‘the same as ~’. There’s a standard of comparison present. You’re comparing it with something else. It’s no coincidence that we say 〜と比べると (‘when [I] compare it with ~’, ‘upon comparison with ~’ etc.): the same particle is used because the same logic is applied. It’s not quite ‘and’, but it uses the same idea that ‘and’ encapsulates: two things are placed together, side by side, and something happens from there. As another example, [someone]と付き合う would mean ‘to mix with/date [someone]’, whereas [someone]に付き合う is a way of saying ‘to accompany/go with [someone] (in order to do something together)’. (Or at least, that’s how it had to be understood in order to get a girl out of an embarrassing situation in a rom-com anime I’m watching.) Once again, と carries an idea of accompanying something else, or otherwise involving something else.
I hope I’ve provided enough depth without splitting hairs.
EDIT: And yes, there’s one other major usage of と I forgot about, which is
It’s not necessarily just ‘whenever’: it can also be a ‘when/if ~, then ~’ thing, and can also be used when something happens at the same time as/immediately after something else, like in ‘when I opened the door, my friend was standing there’.
There are probably lots of little details that even I don’t know about because I hardly use this structure, but when it’s used for conditional structures, what’s required is that the consequence be obvious/natural/definite. It has to feel like a universal or general truth. It doesn’t have to be something that happens a lot – something only relevant once is fine too – but it still has to be something clearly true, like ‘if you get 50% on this exam, you pass’. That’s the essence of it.
First of all, this is N1 grammar, and I think it’s fairly archaic. It doesn’t really fit the style of the rest of the sentence, in my opinion. Secondly, I don’t think there’s actually a contradiction or contrast between reading manga in Japanese, and working hard and studying, unless of course context says otherwise. Essentially, using this interpretation is equivalent to replacing 読もうと with 読んでも, and if that’s really what the sentence means, my first question would be ‘Why specify that the reading is happening in Japanese (日本語で)?’ Under normal circumstances, reading manga in Japanese would not conflict with working hard and studying in any way, unless perhaps the speaker is a native Japanese speaker, but even then, one would wonder why we wouldn’t just assume he or she is reading in the most convenient language available. I just don’t think it’s very likely that we’re looking at 〜ようと・が here.
Good point. Thanks for digging more into this!
Also, interesting to see 〜ようとする being used with a split / without する following directly after. I haven’t seen it used like this so far.
I would kind of argue that in this scenario, one could use 〜時 instead and maybe that would sound more natural. The “whenever” was something Genki proposes, for instance, but it doesn’t always fit the context and hence the “or an event pointing to the future”, because I noticed it doesn’t quite work in the past or in abstract scenarios. However:
I kind of like this definition a lot more .