Short Grammar Questions (Part 2)

In AながらB, B is considered the “primary” action and A just happens at the same time, so I don’t really see an issue with the English sentence.

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This has actually nothing to do with いつも but with ながら :blush:

To quote Bunpro: “Grammatically, the (B) action is considered to be the ‘important’ action, while the (A) action expresses the timeline within which (B) takes place.” So in our case the studying is what the focus should be on.

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Yeah I think I’m arguing the English grammar more.

It’s not a natural way I’d construct that

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Hmm, guess we just disagree on the naturalness of it. It sounds totally fine to me :man_shrugging:

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To me both these English sentences are conveying the same meaning…

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Hi guys, good day to you. I was reading this Fuji Q highland information page and was confused by what the にはじまりmeans, or why the particle に (at) is used here:

急加速にはじまり急旋回・横揺れ・バック走行を伴う非常に激しいコースターです。

I’m reading it as “It is an intense ride that, at acceleration, includes sharp turns, shaking, running backwards”, but Google translate gave “This is a very intense coaster that starts with sudden acceleration, followed by sharp turns, swaying, and reverse driving.”
My question is what exactly does 急加速にはじまり mean here?

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I think “starts with” is fine for this. You mentioned “at”, but since English prepositions are pretty all over the place, you can’t always predict what に will be when converted.

EDIT: see vanilla’s comment below. Whether it’s possible to translate with “with” or not, it’s still the case that you shouldn’t expect に to always mean “at”

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The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar lists these general meanings for に:

  • direct contact - 黒板に絵を描いた
  • location of existence - ここに電話がある
  • direction - 私はロンドンに行った
  • purpose - 僕は魚を買いに行った
  • indirect object - 太郎は花子に本を貸した
  • source/agent - ボブはメアリーに切符をもらった
  • point of time - 二時に友達が来た

(all deriving from a general concept of “contact”).

Sometimes the appropriate English preposition will be “at”, but often not.

And then there are a bunch of what are usually taught as grammar patterns with ni + a verb, like に限らす、に当たって、による、に基づく etc.

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I don’t think it’s “starts with” as in the beginning of the rollercoaster (unless that’s what leebo was saying with his message and I misunderstood). If that were the case you would say 急加速からはじまり or maybe 急加速ではじまり

にはじまり is used here for 羅列. When you use it on the first thing of a list it feels a bit like that first thing is being 強調ed a little bit/showcased more.

Here is another example I found just searching online

海鮮丼 : 850円 5種類くらいの魚が乗っており、マグロにはじまり、たこ、 いか、白身は聞けず、真ん中には赤貝が乗ってました…

You can see they’re just listing the 5 types of fish that were on the kaisendon

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That’s what a native I checked with said, but you know natives. Can’t trust em as far as you can throw em.

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Hello!

What is the difference between joining things with し vs して?

Ex.

甘酸っぱいストロベリーチョコで野球のボールの縫い目を表現、手のひらサイズになっています。

vs

甘酸っぱいストロベリーチョコで野球のボールの縫い目を表現して、手のひらサイズになっています。

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In practice I would say stylistics, but the former is more common in writing.

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Awesome, ty!

Note that this applies in general to て-form and 連用形 (ます-stem), not just for して and し.

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You can find a discussion of the finer points of this in the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese under the entry “Vmasu”, which happens to be in the read-through club’s section for this week, so it’s fresh in my mind.

The rough summary is that they both mean “verb and ~”, but the te form version implies a close relation between the two actions. So in some cases where the two actions are really closely linked (eg 自転車に乗って学校へ行く) the Vmasu form is strange, in some cases you can’t use the te form (eg 幸男はよく働き、よく遊ぶ), and in some cases either is OK and the choice is stylistic with the Vmasu form being more formal.

The Dictionary entry is five pages and includes various example sentences where either one form is not OK or where both are permitted.

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There’s a line of dialogue from a conversation in the meaning of a game I’m playing whose grammatical meeting I fail to grasp.

I deleted the name of the game in question to prevent spoilers but just in case spoiler tags

主の御前に一条の光を捧げ奉らん!

The verb in question is from a character who is saying they’ll do something for the protagonist, and on top of that it’s in very formal speech, so to me it doesn’t make sense for it to be in the informal way of replacing ない with んlike in how つまらない becomes つまらん。

In this screen, is she saying like “no, no! The others were resurrected (like everyone else)” ?

I got confused because the ending particle of the sentence in the ちゃ

or "

It’s probably just a cut off version of ちゃった. I’m also not sure where you got “like everyone else” in the translation.

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in the ‘みんな’ part. Usually they use for the other people around who is speaking and etc.

But the translation is correct at least for the resurrected part?

You haven’t exactly given us enough context to be able to say…