If anyone is curious about this, or want dense grammar book online (
), this resource introduced the term 終止形 to me. It’s the form that got subsumed by the 連体形 form Jonapedia mentioned. (linked to appedix but there’s jump links along the right side)
https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-7-Conjugation_Schemes
I love this! 
To put it another way, you can also look at the tone and context: that ending with ず, to me, makes the sentence sound like a proverb (which could be a joke of sorts). It could also just be an unfinished sentence expressing her state up to the point she was motivated to clean. 結局 is like ‘in the end/ultimately’, and could make the remark sound reflective or even a little resigned. My understanding of the situation is this: she didn’t want to clean and procrastinated, and then suddenly felt like cleaning up when she found out the guy was coming.
If we take those three things together, you get something like ‘[sigh] In the end, I wasn’t motivated until right before he came.’ In other words, ‘Ultimately, I wasn’t motivated until the last minute.’ Or, if we take the joking ‘proverbial style’ interpretation, we get ‘Ultimately, “motivation doth not come 'til the last second”.’ aka ‘Sigh… indeed, procrastination is real.’
and then suddenly felt like cleaning up when she found out the guy was coming.
Hence もう明日電気屋さんが来る with her drawn freaking out with the mess in the foreground.
Honestly? I think I get this stuff more than I give myself credit for. I’m definitely the over thinking type. Thanks for the help, everyone!!
The first five chapters of this manga are online, by the way, though it sounds like you’re now at about the end of the online sample chapters.
You know those panels are in the past because you’ve just read the scene where the lighting guy came and the apartment was neat, so “tidying up in a rush because the lighting guy is coming” must be a flashback.
I also think that reading speed is a factor here, because the other cue that it’s a flashback is that panel 9 reads というわけなのでした, which is a classic “summing up an explanation” phrase. If it takes 30 seconds to read those 8 flashback panels and get to that phrase, that’s not very long to spend with the details in your head before they settle into “that’s definitely a flashback”. If it takes 30 minutes that’s a lot longer…
Yes; the end of the previous chapter has her agonising over when to make the appointment to get the lights fixed (“a week? No, impossible, make it two weeks”) because she knows she has to clean up first. Then we skip forward to lighting appointment and clean house. Then she fetches all the bagged-up stuff back from the veranda where she stuffed it at the last moment, and this is when we get the 結局 line. So it’s “I gave myself a full two weeks to clean up, but 結局 I didn’t start til the last moment anyway”, and that’s the start of the flashback panels of the last-minute tidying.
In the ホリミヤ manga I was confused by the line
でも俺髪の短い子ってイマイチ…自分が髪長目だからかな
specifically “髪の短い子”.
In context the character seems to be talking about a girl’s hair length, but this seems like an odd way for の to behave.
since it is the hair itself that is short, not the girl/child.
why is the adjective 短い attached to 子 rather than 髪?
Thanks in advance!
This の is literally just が transformed for the purposes of it being a relative clause.
髪が短い is modifying 子.
You can say 髪が短い子, but often it becomes の, and it’s exactly the same as it was, it just put a の costume on.
Thanks so much @Leebo ! You’re an absolute legend.
I was looking up の in my grammar and particle dicts to no avail.
Googling around for “Japanese relative clause の” gave me extra examples and discussion, perfect!
(The community on this forum really is the best!)
If you’ve got the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, it’s touched on, but not really explained, in the が1 article. Notes, number 5.
I spilled my miso soup all over me so I was trying to say I spilled my miso soup.
What is the difference between saying お味噌汁をこぼした and お味噌汁をこぼしてしまいました. What is the ending. I tried to look it up but it says to put away?
Is it like saying I spilled it…and threw it away?? Or I spilled it and it’s gone?
しまいました is when you mess something up, or do something you shouldn’t have done.
味噌汁をこぼした
I dropped it, it happens.
味噌汁をこぼしてしまった
Ah shit…
Also, rip miso soup.
The ending is しまう or しまいます, to do something completely or accidentally.
That’s awesome. Thanks! I’ll be using that one a lot:joy:
Perfect thanks! That is indeed my grammar dict of choice, I’ll take a look through it tonight.
仕事が忙しかったりいろいろ疲れてくると
Hey. This highlighted part actually brings 3 questions to mind:
How do you interpret this たり with only a single thing?
Is いろいろ疲れ like saying “I’m all sorts of tired” in English?
I’ve read about ていく and てくる a few times already but I’ve never understood it. What does it mean that tiredness is ‘moving closer’?
“Things like [whatever it attaches to]”. It makes it less definitive, which Japanese usually prefers.
I’d say it’s like “I’m tired in various ways” which is a little different to me than “I’m all sorts of tired”, which could just be emphasizing being really tired. But it’s not wildly different.
This is basically “get tired.” Come to be tired.
It’s not that tiredness is ‘moving closer’. It’s that the act of being/getting tired is something you do (or that the subject of that sentence does) as you move closer to (hence ‘come towards’) the present. You get tired over time as you approach the present moment.
EDIT: Wanted to look something up first in case my intuition was completely off the mark, but turns out it was right:
If you’re wondering about this from a grammatical standpoint, it’s just that it’s possible to drop the して when the たり structure is used adverbially. As for the meaning of this structure, well, Leebo’s already explained that. You can also use this to ask questions in a less direct way:「時間あったりしない？」=‘do you happen to have time?’ Probably not the best idea for more formal communication, but it’s fine in more casual settings.
Thanks, y’all. Just to clarify my understanding of the ‘sentence’ as a whole, does this sound okay?
If/when I come to be tired in various ways from being busy with work and such…
Sounds fine to me. Even ‘whenever’ is a possibility for translating と. It just has to fit the context. Does it?
The rest lines up with what we’ve discussed. 
That reminds me of this little blog post on など, which also is often used for “X, Y, etc” but sometimes is just “add extra vagueness”. (He quotes an example of use of “X, Y, Z など” where the XYZ are clearly exhaustive.)