Short Grammar Questions

Japanese Language Grammar
#6804

I’m a little hesitant to turn it into a ‘similarity particle’ because I’m worried there’s a case I haven’t thought of yet. Come to think of it, it might be a little less obvious how to link usages like 「三時間もかかった！」(‘It took as much as three hours!’ – I’m using ‘much’ to emphasise magnitude without focusing on numbered quantities) to ‘similarity’, even if you could say drawing parallels and emphasising that a certain quantity is relatively large requires ‘similarity’ as well. My personal preference is to start from ‘also’ and extrapolate things from there, but that’s probably because 也 works like も in many cases in Chinese, and we use ‘also’ in the same way as 也 in Singlish, so I have a non-standard usage that helps to refer to.

However, all the words you just listed are possible translations of も given the right contexts.

2 Likes
#6805

I’ve seen （気） げ as a suffix in novels - to my contextual understanding it carries the same meaning as そう right? Are there any subtle differences between them?

#6806

Most of the time げ could be replaced by そう with no change in meaning. However, げ is more likely to be used in writing than in spoken language, and certain idioms use げ but never そう.

7 Likes
#6807

This isn’t a grammar question but what’s up with the commas next to each kana in ずんぐりむっくり?

20210307_032438
20210307_0324381800×4000 561 KB

1 Like
#6808

That’s basically the Japanese form of italics. It emphasizes something for some effect, whether it be irony, exaggeration, etc.

5 Likes
#6809

For none grammar questions there is The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar), just fyi :smiley:

3 Likes
#6810

Aw yeah I remember that thread, thanks for the heads up. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#6811

What counter should one use for empty, pint glasses? I was learning towards 本 but I think it is probably wrong… Thanks for any help.

#6812

~乾杯？jk, no idea. I’d just go with ～つ, though.

2 Likes
#6813

looks like 個 does the trick

3 Likes
#6814

I was watching this youtube video, and at 0:34, 形だけでも is said. What does that mean in this context?

#6815

形だけ is kind of like “perfunctory”. His self-intro has the “form” of a self-intro, but not much more. He says something like “Maybe I’m not going explain my good points or hobbies or whatever, but even if it’s just a perfunctory self-intro, I wanted to upload one.” Basically just lowering expectations I guess.

3 Likes
#6816

I seem to have forgotten my basics but a verb can’t appear before da/desu right? But why can we say something like 見ないです? Is it because ない is an adjective?

1 Like
#6817

Yes, strictly speaking what’s happening when you negate a verb is you are attaching an い adjective to the stem, and since です can be used to make い adjectives polite you can put です after a negated verb.

3 Likes
#6818

Hi guys. I’m currently using “Japanese the Manga Way” as my grammar guide and I’m about halfway through it. I find it really useful but I was wondering what I should learn next once I finish the whole textbook. Should I move onto something like Genki 2 or would I be at an intermediate grammar level? Also will I know enough grammar for the JLPT n4 or n3 once I complete that book?

Thanks in advance :slightly_smiling_face:

#6819

Frankly I’d highly recommend doing something like Genki 1 alongside Japanese the Manga Way, the book has no exercises, and even in its intro says that it isn’t really meant to be a sole resource.

1 Like
#6820

I don’t know if this is complex enough to be worthy of a new thread, but I didn’t get any answers when I tried googling it.
My question revolves around the use of おいしい in this problem.
image
The grammar resource I got this from said the format for this grammar point is [Noun A]だけではなく[Noun B]も…

I’m not sure if it was deliberate or a typo, but the resource specifically said “noun” instead of 名詞(めいし) like it has in all other lessons at this level… However おいしい is a い形容詞(けいようし) isn’t it? Why is it allowed to be in a noun’s place here? I tried to ask a Japanese person, but I didn’t understand her explanation. She said おいしい is a noun here, like おいしそう, which I could understand being a noun here, but she wasn’t able to give an explanation of why おいしい should be read as a noun here. She implied that you wouldn’t be able to put やすい in the same place, which makes sense to me, but she didn’t have a reason other than you can use おいしい like that, but not やすい.

Therefore, what is going on? Is there some category of い形容詞(けいようし) that can be treated as nouns? What determines whether they can or not? Or is there a specific list?

1 Like
#6821

おいしい is not a noun, that’s easy enough to answer. So it cannot be “noun A”. The structure, as you describe it, seems to be… a confusing way to describe the structure of that sentence at the very least. Without knowing more about the purpose of the example in the whole lesson it’s hard to say more than that.

As for flipping it, you would have to change some things around, but you could say 牛丼は (値段が) 安いだけでなく、味もおいしいです. And that would be fine, I would say. But since the thing that も attaches to is specific to やすい you have to change it if you put おいしい in やすい’s spot.

2 Likes
#6822

My bet is that like many learner resources they want to teach for some reason a limited version of the pattern, just nounだけでなく, even though verb/i-adjective/noun are all ok, but they forgot about it and put the adjective おいしい :grinning:

I remember distinctly being surprised when I saw for the first time i-adjective or verb in the XよりYほうが pattern, because it was taught in my textbook only with nouns…

1 Like
#6823

だけで(は)なく can have any of the following forms:

Verb-dictionary form + だけで(は)なく
Noun + だけで(は)なく
なadj + なだけで(は)なく
いadj + だけで(は)なく

From JLPT N2 Grammar: だけでなく (dake de naku) - Explanation and examples

It’s probably like @Arzar33 said that they want you to concentrate on the noun part even though the example just used a regular い-adj.

While asking natives to help with how something is said can be useful, they quite often can’t tell you why something is so for the same reason that your next door neighbor probably has no idea what a copula is. :wink:

2 Likes