Short Grammar Questions (Part 1)

No, I was unclear. 食べすぎない is correct here; 食べなさすぎる is not.

食べさすぎる = doing too much of “not eating”
食べすぎない = not doing too much of “eating”

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I think it should be the other way round, so
食べすぎない = don’t do too much of 食べる
食べなさすぎる = do too much of 食べない = eat too little

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They are trying to say the same thing. The problem here is that 食べなさすぎる sounds a bit crazy in English so it’s hard to explain it in a simple way.

You must focus on the order each function (ない and すぎる) is being used

食べる → 食べない (not eat) → 食べなさすぎる (not eat) too much
食べる → 食べすぎる (eat too much) → 食べすぎない not (eat to much)

Just written like that it sounds a bit crazy, but the first one ends being like “eating too little”, as @Myria pointed. A use example could be:

君は食べなさすぎだよ!病気になりそうだからもっと食べて?
You eat way too little! You could get sick, so eat more

The second one is what you actually wanted to say, standard “not eat too much”, so an example could be:

美味しいのは分かりますが、他の人が食べれなくなるから食べすぎないように気をつけてください。
I know it is tasty, but other people could become unable to eat it, so please pay attention to not eat too much.

Hope the examples helped clarifying it a bit.

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Thank you all! @SyncroPC, @Myria, @Belthazar.
It’s clear to me now, giving context as what @SyncroPC did was helpful

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Ive got a question about the way the causative form is used here.

So 真那 is talking about how she got some guy (ヤツ) to totally fall for her.

My question is that start of the third sentence she says. So the guy is the subject for the first two sentences, but then it just switches to 真那 being the subject which sorta threw me off guard. This was especially the case because normally with causatives, the person on the left side of the に is being made to do the action. But in this case, あたし (the speaker) is the one causing the action and the person who the やつ is supposedly crazy over. The person becoming addicted is completely left out in the sentence (which is normal, ik)

With context clues I can figure it out, sure, but just looking at あたしにどっぷりハマらせて,虜にして is there any actual way to figure out that thats how the sentence is structured? Basically, is there a surefire way to know just by looking at that that its actually あたしは彼をあたしにどっぷりハマらせて and あたし isnt the one whos being made addicted to someone?

I think your rendering is correct because ハマる is intransitive so アタシ is what the guy is going to get ハマる’ed on.

According to this site, if you go further down, using intransitive verbs with causative can allow one to use に or を to mark who is being made/let to do something. The author suggests that を is more likely implying that the doer is being made rather than allowed to do something.

yeah based off of context clues I have no doubt about the translation, I just find it weird that the doer is excluded completely.

Essentially we know 3 things.

  1. The guy is the subject of the causative expression

  2. 真那 caused it/let it happen

  3. The thing the guy is addicted to is 真那

Basically I want to know if its possible to be certain of all these things just by the sentence fragment あたしにどっぷりハマらせて. To me, it doesn’t seem possible and I think you need a lot of context, but I was wondering if it was more obvious than it seems. ハマる needs に and so does the causative, but they use the に for different things which I think just complicates the sentence too much to be certain of in and of itself. Technically, the に that is excluded is the one marking who the causative expression is happening to, but this threw me for a loop due to the change in subject. The problem im addressing, however, is that theres no way to know which of the にs was the one excluded without context. We just know one of them was.

The way I look at it, it’s obvious to interpret that the guy is being made to fall for the girl. This is based on the entire passage you provided. With just the fragment, it’s not possible to come to that conclusion. Had you just posted that in you first post, someone would’ve requested more context. If you include the entire sentence that contains the causative, you can certainly make that conclusion. I think you’re making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

With that being said, the guy is not the subject of the causative sentence. I say this because the speaker, made a point to clarify that she is the object that the guy is supposed to fall for. I say that identifying the object of ハマる is even more important than clarifying the causative object, which is probably why it was omitted. As we know speakers normally don’t explicitly say that they’re the subject unless it’s unclear by the context. In this case it can be assumed that the girl (the real grammatical subject, assumed by omission) is the person making the boy ( the causative object, which could be marked by を or に) do something. If you read the link I sent, it clarifies this further. Because it’s an intransitive verb in causative form, it’s a bit confusing, but looking at it this way is consistent in the full context of the sentence.

Let’s look again with the full sentence:
(あたしは彼を)あたしにどっぷりハマらせて,(あたしが彼を)虜にして、ボロ雑巾のように(あたしが彼を)捨ててやるのよ。

If he were the subject, it wouldn’t make sense at the end of the sentence where the main verb is written as 捨ててやる.

Hopefully that answers what you’re musing about.

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You misunderstood my post. I know hes not the subject of the sentence, i said hes the subject of the causative expression. In other words, hes the one being made or allowed to do something. What youre calling the causative object is what i call the subject in this case.

And its not so much about complicated or not, I was just wondering if there was a way to know otherwise. If not, its fine. I just figured that grammatically speaking it could mean the exact opposite on its own and wanted to make sure.

EDIT: The girl actually likes the guy and not the other way around, so maybe it was structured that way on purpose

My apologies if someone already asked this, but I’ve recently started on grammar, with Misa from japanese ammo since for Tae Kim’s I don’t nearly have enough vocab to understand anything that’s happening past the first particles explaination and it kind of feels like I’m reading chinese… oh wait

I know about はがをにでと (I do have some questions about the last 3, but I need to train to really get how they work, but I need vocab to be able to read and understand without running off to Jisho and Rikaikun, first world’s problem right here) and I started Tae Kim’s, but the first day I’ve seen it I’ve been wondering about the state of beings:

They are the same words as NA Adjectives, and they apply to nouns as well, but for the present form you use だ, Misa hasn’t talked about that, and from future video titles it doesn’t seem like she will so here’s my (probably dumb) question: isn’t だ the same as です ?

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They are not quite the same as each other, but they usually both function as the copula (which is “be” in English).

です is polite
だ is non-polite (which is not to say it’s rude, it’s just… not a polite expression)

Because of the politeness factor of です, it can be used in some situations where it would be ungrammatical to use だ.

For instance, い adjectives do not need a copula, since they basically already have the meaning built in. They are like verbs in some ways, at the end of a sentence anyway.

But since です is used for politeness, you can put it after an い adjective.

おおきいだ is ungrammatical
おおきいです is fine and polite

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Oh that clears things up, and those ungrammatical situations are just い adjectives then ? (and verbs but that’s just logical lol)

Yeah, you can use です after negative verbs, but that’s really because ない is actually secretly just an auxiliary い adjective you can put at the end of a conjugated verb, not part of the verb itself.

Obviously you can’t put だ there.

Oh, and there are times when you can’t use です. If you are quoting your own thoughts (i.e. using とおもう) then you can’t use polite forms. Because it doesn’t make sense to be polite to yourself in your own thoughts, even if you are telling your thoughts to someone who you are going to be polite to by changing おもう to おもいます.

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Thanks man ! I’ll surely be back when I have more grammar questions !

お助けてください。Even though I know Hiragana, Katakana, and am learning Kanji, I still need a lot of help with grammar. I can understand some basic particles, but some of them coincide or very similar. What’s the difference between に and で and the difference between は and が ? Secondly, just like what I said, they can coincide. Please tell me what all of them are. For example, I’ve seen には and では . I also need to know (sorry, Japanese has so many options) all the ending to sentences. There’s です, だ, and even in instances where it could be じゃないもん . May somebody please teach me all or most of them. Thank you.

Here, allow me to write a particle textbook in a forum post

Or, you can go here or here or here and buy this and this and then ask questions about specific things instead of a question about ALL the things :wink:

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Quite. This is the Short Grammar Questions thread, not the Teach Me All The Grammar Questions thread.

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Sorry about misunderstanding.

I guess I don’t understand the point of your question then. :sweat_smile:

Well lemme put it like this. While reading the sentence, it seems like it means one thing, but then when you get to the てやる, you realize it means another. This is strange and very rarely happens from what I remember, so I was wondering if I missed something that made it more obvious やつ was the subject/object of the causative expression and 真那 became the subject of the sentence.

But again, I could see the author making it intentionally seem like she’s saying shes the one who is into him since she actually is but its very tsun about it.

Yeah, I don’t think you were missing anything. Like you mentioned before, it could be a stylistic thing the author added to create the character’s personality. Considering that it is something the character says, it could be purposefully confusing because the character sounds like they don’t really understand themselves based on the revelation you made in an earlier post.

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