Contempt for what? Staying calm? That’s… a very weird thing to show contempt for Why would you hold contempt for someone not going off the rails and acting irrationally?
“Often” as in “in many situations/on many occasions” doesn’t make sense to you? It’s the only meaning that makes sense to me personally, really. To me this really reads like someone’s saying there are a lot of times when someone keeps a cool head. That makes the most sense semantically too, as I see it.
Fits with the translation too - “always” is just a hyperbole for the exact same thing.
That’s the image the sentence elicits from me, idk Like a situation where it’s weird to stay calm, in a heated debate about an issue, in a very emotional situation where it’s weird to stay that calm. The speaker is angry about the other party not showing any emotions.
I do think “often” makes sense in an English sentence conveying “You keep a cool head on many occasions.” But I don’t think the Japanese よく would be used with that meaning in this sentence. I can’t really explain it any better.
I kind of feel you guys are overthinking this sentence a bit . If we take よく as a generic strengthening qualifier, it’s more down to the ね and the overall context where this sentence could mean contempt.
Literally, it’s just person B noticing loudly and/or being slightly surprised that person A can stay quite calm.
But like @WeebPotato said, that seems very contextual. Certainly not the kind of thing you can conclude just from it being potential - よくできた is a thing and doesn’t usually express contempt at all
Sorry, that was kinda unclear. Like @Myria says, I was referring to the Daijisen sense 4 (" ４ 困難なことをしたり、考えられないような喜ばしい結果を得たりして感じ入るさま。本当にまあ。よくぞ。「―来てくれました」「月給だけで―やっていけるね」"), because their sense 5 which I was quoting cross-refers to sense 4. I was paraphrasing in the hope of not introducing confusion by either quoting an entire sense that I didn’t directly want to talk about or leaving a dangling cross-reference, but I ended up being confusing anyway (especially since on second look my paraphrase is a bit off)…
I also thought it was kind of interesting that almost this same question was being asked from the other angle in Japanese on an English conversation site:
Very interesting, the interpretation seems to be rather unanimous to natives. (I just realized the OP is of course specifically asking for that nuance… still.)
A situation where someone got cheated on by their partner did come to mind when first reading the sentence, but I guess I also didn’t totally grasp the nuance when I gave „a heated debate“ as an example, which doesn’t quite seem to fit.
I’m currently going through Shin Kanzen and having a hard time understanding つつ. From what I’ve learned so far (please correct me if I’m wrong), ながら and つつ are interchangeable. Also, from what I learned from ながら, it is continuous and active.
I guess, for the life of me, I cannot make sense of questions 1 and 2 and why the are the way they are. Can someone please explain to me as they would to a 5yo?
That’s a pretty bare-bones explanation of the grammar point – if I were you I’d try looking it up in another resource as a cross-reference. The two are not totally interchangeable – basically there are some cases where you could use either, and some where only one is right. (And the text you quote has an example where only ながら is right.)
I find those questions quite tricky, I’m more picking an answer on ‘what’s the odd one out’ than anything else, and the DoIJG entry for つつ while interesting doesn’t very clearly shed light on those questions in particular.
Yeah, I got b for question 1 (which I think is because you want two ongoing actions, and a and c are both “action that happens at a point in time after the discussion, not contemporaneous with it”). Question 2 is the one I was much less sure on, and I was leaning to b. But rechecking the DoIJG I think that would be “while I was in the process of sitting down on the sofa”, not “while I was sat on the sofa”. Hmm, and similarly with c that would have to mean “while I was in the process of boarding the train”. So I agree that a is right.
As you can see I don’t have any intuition for “sounds right” for these
Thank you so much for your response. I know that the grammar point was pretty bare-bones — I did look at 2 other sites and 3 YouTube videos and still couldn’t put 2 and 2 together. So, I felt that I should just ask people more knowledgeable than me. However, your other response made it clear why it wasn’t the sofa (my original answer)! I appreciate it. I’ll be checking DoIJG as well. Thank you for the resource.
I can’t explain it as stated above since the wrong answers are just wrong to me because they don’t sound right… But one thing that might help you out is that tsutsu +teikitai is a pretty standard set pattern for telling people how you plan to do something going forward.
Used with verbs that express prolonged actions (考える, 話し合う, 相談する, etc.)
Used in writing and formal speech
Not used for everyday actions (drinking beer, etc.)
Subject is the same in both V1 and V2
So it seems that ～ながら is less formal, and possibly used with actions that are not prolonged over a such a long time.
As @pm215 has already pointed out, there are also specific cases where ～つつ and ～ながら are not interchangeable, as discussed in the DIJG (Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar), in the notes on page 546.
I think because the two actions have to be simultaneous ongoing ones – 1a and 1c are both “we discussed it and then we separated | made a choice”, so there’s no simultaneity. The -teiku in 1b means it’s an ongoing process of coming to a decision, which can thus be going on at the same time as the discussion.
For q2, look at the stuff the DoIJG has about punctual and movement verbs in its ‘tsutsu’ entry.
Why would you hold contempt for someone not going off the rails and acting irrationally?
Like a situation where it’s weird to stay calm, in a heated debate about an issue, in a very emotional situation where it’s weird to stay that calm. The speaker is angry about the other party not showing any emotions.
