Short Grammar Questions (Part 1)

Yes. The subject marker が and the “but” が are completely independent entities. Japanese being confusing as usual.

が after a verb means but. Like けど. There really isn’t much else to it.

I highly recommend picking up these Japanese grammar dictionaries. They are great references and would answer a lot of your questions.

While there are multiple problems with this sentence, things I want to ask are,

  1. から vs からの vs の. Actually, I searched and saw 昔からの友人; and if for some reasons, I don’t want to express just の…

  2. How do I say zero things, without putting in the negative (何もない)?

Any e-book recommendations? The Kindle counterpart is not available in my region. And I still can’t purchase from Kindle JP so far. (I might be able to in the past…)

This is an expression that points to a period of time, “from long ago”. You can use から to express time after a specified moment e.g. “あの時から”, or to specify distance from a point in space (“ここから” etc). And you can use it to express the origin of something, like “妹からのプレゼント”, but in the case of 話 it’s not something received, like a gift; what you want to talk about is what your sister’s telling stories of. 妹の話 expresses that idea pretty well, but if for whatever reason you don’t like it, just expand the idea, as in 妹が言っていること, or 妹が話していること.

Do you often say “zero things” in English? It sounds pretty unnatural either way. Maybe if you rephrase the whole sentence in the following way I guess you can avoid a 何も “negative”: 私が信じられる妹の話は ゼロ/皆無 だ。But it feels like a weird way of saying it. Maybe someone else has other ideas.

I am not sure if I understand this. At least, it is perceived.

Would you say “A story from my sister” in English? I’m not really sure what you’re saying.

Actually, yes

image

The point is “I can’t believe any of the stories my sister tells”, not “I can’t believe any of the stories from my sister”.

If you say 妹からの話 it implies that you receive a story/the stories from your sister, as in for example, she writes them on a note and gives you the note. It’s a specific situation in which the story is treated like an object being received. Whereas 妹の話 is more general.

Edit: I may be wrong though. If anyone else is more knowledgeable, please correct me.

Hey guys, quick question

I’m a bit disoriented on the adjectives and adjectival names, な , の etc.

I learnt that while な adjectives are used for description, の adjectives are meant for sort of classification.
I’m at a very low level with grammar as many of you know so apologizes if I say some bulls*t
As far as what I’ve seen with my ‘immersion’ I only encountered い adjectives or な and の adjectives, but I never encountered, nor studied the case of い adjectives used with な or の
I just encountered きれいな人 on the tofugu article about な and の adj. and was surprised tk see it paired with な. I only encountered things like 赤いぺん (red pen). Would it be possible to say 赤いなぺん or 赤いのペン? And if yes, what would the difference be?
Would it be possible to say きれい人 or きれいの人 ?

I think you are a bit confused. きれい is a な adjective. It ends in い but that is deceptive. If you write it with Kanji it is 綺麗 without a kana sticking out at the end. Compare it to an い adjective like 赤い where the い is sticking out at the end and you might know what I mean.

There are a few adjectves which can be used as い and as な adjectives but don’t worry about that yet. の adjectives are a seperate category. If you have one adjective from one category it normally is ONLY in that one category.

Oh I didn’t know that, in the tofugu article it was all kana

I got it, I hope.
So, for now I only have to worry about words that are one of these, but not more than one of these:
い-adjectives (赤い)
Adjectival names that are used to describe with the な particle
Names that are used to label or classify, wjth the の particle.
Right?

This category is pretty small and not so common. You will mostly handle the other two. But yes I think you got it. The most important thing when learning one of those is knowing in which category it falls (like with きれい) to know how to attach it correctly to things and not confuse yourself.

I included it for the sake of some sort of completeness and because in the CD YT videos I’m finding them quite a lot.

Awesome, thank you for the help :folded_hands: about knowing which category they fall in, is this something I should put a concerted effort at memorizing? Or it’s something that comes natural with experience and immersion? (Or both?)

Ok, so の adjectives are kind of just nouns. の usually has to have a noun in front of it.

な-adjectives are nouns that are used descriptively so often they get the な suffix, hence, adjectival nouns.

い-adjectives are adjectives, straight up, but just like you can have a noun be a NA-adjective, you can have noun forms of the I-adjectives, e.g. 黒い → くろ

Because you can’t with な. の is trickier but we can ignore that for now.

Nope. You could use the noun version:

あかのペンです

Except for the fact that the noun version isn’t really used like that because the I-adjective version exists. In fact, for that word the の version is actually a different thing that means “complete or total”, e.g. 赤の他人 = complete stranger.

:backhand_index_pointing_up: This is good advice.

Just stick with learning I-adjectives and which nouns are also na-adjectives and you’ll be fine.

I think if you know the most common な adjectives that end in い the rest will come pretty naturally.
It’s not a complete list but adjectives like:
きれい
ゆうめい
きらい
すき
べんり
All are learned pretty early.
They all end in an い sound with the first three ending in an い proper so they often get used wrongly by beginners.

Very clear! Thanks, I don’t think I have more doubts left now. For my low level this explanation should hold long enough

To me this seems just ungrammatical. Have you seen this?

Artifact of an edit. :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth:

@mariodesu do you use jisho.org regularly? It usually provides a very detailed breakdown for each word entry and highlights whether a word is a verb, noun, な adjective, の adjective, acts as a suffix, etc. I always found it super useful :slight_smile: .