Short Grammar Questions (Part 1)

I’m just using it loosely to mean “When you have more than one thing modifying something, so there are multiple ways to interpret it.” You have 血まみれの and 帽子をかぶった and they’re “nested” in the second expression. 血まみれの doesn’t modify 帽子 it modifies 男, which is in turn modified by 帽子をかぶった.

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, etc

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That’s Sierra! FromSoft would be King’s Field

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is it good

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King’s Quest is a series of heavily dated, musty old DOS adventure games, but I like them.
King’s Field is a series of heavily dated, musty old PS1 dungeon crawls, but I’m very excited to play them at some point.
Dark Souls / Bloodborne / Sekiro is a series of sleek, shiny new critically acclaimed action RPGs and one of the most widely influential game series of recent years.

Not sure I can answer whether any of them are good or not, but that’s some info about them.

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Why is “君にしかできない任務だ” Why is it dekinai instead of dekiru? Maybe it’s the heat but the -nai is throwing me off.

しか〜ない is a set

You will always see ない after しか. It’s usually translated as “only” but it acts more like “except.”

So 君しかできない is like “(those) except you cannot do” rather than “only you can do”

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Yeah this translation is one that has always bothered me. Its really more like “other than” or “with the exception of”, but since its always with the ない that naturally becomes part of the explanation and they turn it into “only”. To me, that was always way harder to understand. Same with stuff like 必ずしも and 何ら to a lesser extent I guess.

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Same! The moment I was introduced to しか through Tea Kim’s guide and later in Genki, I translated it as “no one/nothing but”. Sometimes だけ is used in a similar fashion, but supposedly しか has the added nuance that the “only” is not sufficient, but that’s the only thing there is. Something like:
100円しか持っていないよ!
I only have 100 yen on me!

EDIT: Removed が after しか as suggested by @Leebo . Thanks! :slight_smile:

Minor point, but I don’t think you need the が after しか. Usually it’s just しかない or しか(verb)ない.

I also agree that it seems like the しか has a somewhat stronger meaning than だけ? Like 君にしかできないこと sounds a lot stronger than 君にだけできること for some reason.

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Hmm good point! I think the に between the noun and しか or だけ is also not technically needed. At least I’ve seen both used without に. Not sure if it follows the same rules as other similar modifiers.

に is optional with できる, but I omitted it accidentally in my response.

I want to say が after しか is not unnecessary, but actually ungrammatical. Though I don’t have a source at the moment.

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Yeah that’s what I was trying to get at, I’m pretty sure using が after しか is ungrammatical. Definitely sounds off to me. None of the examples in the DOJG have a が after しか, for what that’s worth.

The に in e.g. 君にだけできること is apparently quite flexible by comparison, it seems you can not only omit it but also rearrange it to 君だけにできること from what I’ve found.

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Hello! Quick question…I was listening to this song that was released today! (if you played the original Sonic you’re going to recognise it immediately lol)

I swear! When katakana is used instead of kanji is when I struggle the most lol

So with ヒトユメ, フタユメ, ミユメ…the singer is counting dreams right? “One dream”, “Two dreams”, “Three dreams”…Am I correct? I’m being confused by the fact it is not counted using the normal hitotsu, futatsu and so on…

And…ノミホソウヤミヲ トリモドスシナリオ
what is supposed to mean? It’s the ノミホソウ that I don’t get at all @_@

Thank you so much for your help ^^U

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飲み干す > 飲み干そう (volitional form)

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Seems that way, especially if the words appear in series. ひと, ふた and み can be seen as stems of sorts with the meanings of ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘three’, as you may have noticed in other counting words like 一人 and 二人. You might also have seen words like ふたたび, which means ‘again’, but can literally be explained as ‘second time’.

Leebo explained what のみほそう is above: the volitional form of a verb meaning to ‘drink dry/drain by drinking’. I don’t know how this works in the context of the song, but what you need to know is that のみほそう here is being used to modify (even though that’s really rare in modern Japanese) やみ, which I’m assuming is ‘darkness’. シナリオ is probably ‘scenario’ in the sense of ‘script’, so we’re probably looking at a phrase that means something like… ‘[it’s a] scenario in which [I(?)] try to take back all the darkness [I, or maybe someone else] tried to/intended to/considered drinking to the last drop’. That’s how I’d interpret it, but I haven’t listened to the song, so you’ll have to tell me if it fits. Hope that helps.

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Truth is that it can be “drain by drinking” since the song its a collaboration for a tea CM lol.

I forgot this one: ノミコモウヒカリ キボウノモノガタリ

“A light [???] A tale of hope”

Then
朝はサエザエ 真昼はウララカ
ミドリの丘に 立ちのぼる森羅
宵はユラユラ トポトポ迫って
あなたの羽を 休めるでしょう

サエザエ? ウララカ?
Sorry for many questions! I wasn’t finished reading (or trying at least) when I asked the first question lol

Same pattern, with the verb being 飲み込む this time, which is something like… swallowing. Literally to ‘drink/swallow and take in’. So ‘the light I tried to swallow/gulp down’, I think. You can see the parallels with the line on darkness.

さえざえ = clear/bright/refreshing
うららか = the appearance of the sun shining peacefully

So I think it’s something like ‘the morning [was] bright, noon peaceful and clear’.

If you look at the stanza you just quoted, you’ll notice that there’s plenty of stuff about the natural environment and different times of day, so the trend is fairly easy to spot.

By the way, while I don’t think anyone has issues with answering your questions, maybe it might help you if you had an EN-JP dictionary for these things? Of course, they can’t explain everything, especially finer nuances, but they can give you an idea. Jisho.org is very popular here. Another I can recommend you is https://ejje.weblio.jp. (Yes, the interface is in Japanese, but type something in English into the search bar and it works exactly like any other dictionary.) Weblio’s dictionary has more example sentences and includes the data Jisho uses as well, so I prefer it, but Jisho’s interface might be more appealing, so you might like it better. I hope these will make it easier for you to decipher lyrics and other new words.

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I do use jisho.org on my day by day, but tried to use the katakana words (since I expected they were some kind of onomatopoeia word) and didn’t get results. Now tried with plain hiragana and got the results!!

First time hearing about ejje.weblio so I’ll add it to my bookmarks. Thank you!!

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Yeah, generally, dictionaries prefer hiragana. They’re the one form that easily gets converted into everything else. I don’t know why the same doesn’t happen for katakana, but I guess it’s just a matter of current conventions: hiragana is the current default way of writing things, especially when it comes to pronunciation, so perhaps that’s how dictionaries store information.

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I saw a YT video thumbnail aimed at Japanese people learning English titled “英語が最速でペラペラになる方法”. I believe the meaning is something along the lines of “Fastest way to become fluent in English”. If this is the correct translation, then I’m confused about the “英語が最速で” part.

Based on my very limited understanding of Japanese grammar, I would’ve phrased this like “英語でペラペラになる最速の方法”. Could someone break this down for me?