This is one of the example sentences from 悲しい:
桃ちゃんが悲しい気持ちの時は、お父さんもお母さんも辛い気持ちになってしまうのよ。
When you feel sad, Momo, neither your dad nor myself are happy.
What part of the sentence is causing the negation? (Not happy)
I’m guessing it’s something in になってしまう but I don’t really understand.
も can mean ‘not either’ with a negative sentence. But I think the use of ‘neither’ is just trying to make a what they saw as a more natural formulation of the お父さんもお母さんも construction even though it is not strictly literal. 
辛い means painful or bitter. 幸 (happiness) has a slightly different kanji.
Edit: in other words, this is not a negative sentence at all in Japanese. They just chose to translate it with “not happy.”
Oh, man, I completely missed that 
I definitely read it as 幸. Thanks for pointing that out!
(I guess seeing it translated as “happy” primed my brain into thinking the kanji was happy…)
Yeah it’s definitely easy to mix up, especially when you’re already looking for “happy.” I had to look at it for a second… but also 幸い (さいわい) wouldn’t really make sense in context here since it doesn’t fit the tone of the sentence, which is also what clued me in on it probably being つらい. It is kinda strange that the kanji for nearly opposite feelings are so similar but, what’re you gonna do.
It happens to all of us. Guess that’s why translations can sometimes be more of a hindrance than a help.
One possible etymology of the kanji suggests that 幸 really is related to 辛, and that it somehow took on a meaning opposite to its original meaning because ‘punish a criminal’ became ‘an emperor sparing a criminal from such punishment’. Another explanation suggests that 幸 is the combination of two other kanji that referred to two different things (an instrument of torture and unexpected success). In any case, two things:
That is very interesting, I was curious about the etymology. I think I’d easily be able to tell them apart if I saw them both in the same sentence, but in isolation sometimes it can be easy to mistake one for the other. Definitely something to work on.
My confusion is with the very last line. “俺の嫁だっつってんだろ！”
The context is that they’re playing a dating sim or some similar game
I can’t tell whether だっつってんだろ is supposed to be a informal way of saying だといってんだろ or it’s という twice. But I don’t feel like the second makes any sense so I dunno lol.
I know the last sound of a verb gets changed to ん sometimes during informal speech, so it should be だと言ってるだろう, right?
I think it’s といって according to this:
といって to っつって
Similarly, the te -form to-itte といって gets contracted to ttsu-tte っつって. To make matters worse, since te-iru no ているの can get contracted to te-n てん, you can get this monstrosity:
といって to っつって
Similarly, the te -form to-itte といって gets contracted to ttsu-tte っつって. To make matters worse, since te-iru no ているの can get contracted to te-n てん, you can get this monstrosity:
- matte to itte iru no da
待って といっているの だ
“Wait” is what [I’m] saying.
[I’m] telling [you] “to wait.”- matte ttsu-tte-n -da
待って っつってん だ
(same meaning.)
Ic ic, thanks!
Just wanted to make sure, informal grammar kills me 
No prob. I use that site a lot to look up these contractions because I struggle with it, too. That’s just one I remember encountering somewhere recently so just verified with that site that I had it correct.
Dang you sniped that one!
I’m reading Yotsuba. She just woke up and is showing her Dad a picture that Fuuka drew for her. She says:
「おきたら おいてあった」
I feel like this is composed of 起きる in past tense + conditional form, おく in te form and ある in past tense, but if so, I can’t really put the meaning together.
Something like: “if I woke up, this is here”?
～たら is often thought of as “if” but it can also just be “when.”
おきたら when I woke up
おいてあった this was left here
Are you familiar with ～てある? It is like ～ている, but it places emphasis on someone having done the action.
窓が開いている - the window is open (just a nuance-less statement of fact)
窓が開けてある - the window is open (because someone opened it and left it that way)
Thank you, that clarified it wonderfully
How is listing done in Japanese? For Example in English it’s: the colors I see are brown, red, and blue.
Is it done as 茶色と赤いと会う etc. or is there another way to write lists?
Nouns can be connected with と, yes. Though you seem to be mixing nouns and adjectives. You can’t do 赤いと. It would be something more like 茶色と赤と青. The way you did it is an incorrect mix of nouns and adjectives.
Just in general, if you want to connect adjectives you’d have to use て/で. So if leading with 茶色い, it would be more like 茶色くて、赤くて、青い。Or if you want 茶色 at the end as a noun, you can do 赤くて、青くて、茶色。
会う only means “see” in the sense of “meet” like when we say “I see my friends every day.”
If you mean literally see with your eyes you would use みる or みえる
the colors I see are brown, red, and blue.
茶色と赤と青が見える
I see brown, red, and blue.
私が見える色は茶色と赤と青です
The colors I see are brown, red, and blue.
oh, 会う was a typo, I meant 青(blue). I wasn’t actually trying to translate the sentence since my question was more about how to connect listed items.
Ah, okay.
As was noted, you can use と to list nouns, but it creates an exhaustive list. The listed items are the complete extent of the list.
や can be used to create an incomplete list that implies there might be more applicable items that just aren’t being mentioned.
