Short Grammar Questions

Japanese Language Grammar
#6004

これは vs それは … I know that for a concrete object, e.g. the cup I’m holding would be これ but that cup on the shelf is それ … but what about abstract situations, the kind of thing that in English you’d sigh and say “This is difficult … but I’m afraid I must you that your aunt is no longer with” or that sort of thing.

I feel instinctively I ought to say それは難しです but have really no reason to back me up (perhaps I’m heard it oftener said on anime, which is hardly a ringing grammatical endoresement). Ought it be これは難しです instead? Or perhaps it doesn’t matter …

#6005

Here a nice page (in Japanese) about it. It’s full of examples, so I find it usefull.

An over-simplified explanation:

あ- assumes you and the listener both know what you are referring to, previously. So if you are saying “you know that restaurant we once went, with the great okonomiyaky? I can’t recall the name, though”, you are gonna use あの店、あそこ and such. (that’s also the reason of the famous「あれ」to indicate random stuff, the speaker is assuming the listener knows what they are talking about) It also works for people, happenings, days, etc…

そ- used to refer to entities that were introduced during the speech. So if you are saying “There is this guy in my classroom and he (…)” you are gonna use その人、そいつ and such. (be aware そいつ is pretty rude, I’m just using it as an example)

Using こ- for abstract concepts is a lot more uncommon although it does exist. The website goes over a couple examples.
Feel free to ask about a specific sentence if you want.

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#6006

Oh, very specifically: my professor is going to interview me over Zoom (in Japanese) and I’m partially deaf, which she knows, so I wanted to acknowledge my situation with something like それは難しいとおもいます。

#6007

@Saida @buburoi Thank you, that makes sense!

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#6008

The use of these indicators is extremely dependent on context, so it’s hard to say what exact word would work, but be aware that Japanese in general use less such indicators than European languages, so don’t forget that saying it full-worded is always an option.

難聴者でありながらやるのは難しいところもあるでしょうが

Is a more natural way of stressing your worries at the beginning of the interview, I would say.

Other than that, using あ- would be wrong, so just go for そ- if you addressed the topic already.

Since your hearing impairment is something personal, saying things like この状態で面接を受けるのは is also perfectly acceptable when referring to your own deafness, but not the interview itself (I’m not sure if Japanese deaf community endorses 状態 being used like that, but that’s a different discussion)

And of course, it’s Japanese. So omitting the whole shit and just praying the listener will get by context is always a great (if not the best) option, lol

色々大変だと思いますが、よろしくお願いします！

And blast through it, hahaha

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#6009

I’m no expert, and I mix them up fairly often (partly because I learnt Japanese through French, so I think I subconsciously keep relying on the rules used in French for “ceci” (‘this’) and “cela” (‘that’) – “ceci” is much rarer). However, based on the situations in which I tend to get corrected (and what I saw while giving @SyncroPC’s link a quick read)…

それ tends to refer to things that were just mentioned a bit earlier in the conversation, especially if it’s something mentioned by the other person in the conversation (and not by you). It also indicates more distance between you and the thing/idea being discussed than これ.

これ tends to be used for things that you’re about to mention (e.g. ‘this is just something I heard, but…’). It’s also used for things that affect/involve you directly or which are still relevant/true at the point that you’re speaking.

Two personal examples in which I got corrected:

  • I was talking about having the impression that I wasn’t improving much in Japanese anymore, and so I said 「それは…停滞期ってやつ？」(roughly ‘is this… a period of stagnation/a plateau?’). My friend said it ought to have been これは, and after reading the Tomojuku article and thinking about the implications of each word… I think it’s true. By using それ, I made it seem like the situation wasn’t directly relevant to me and that it was some abstract/hypothetical thing that I wasn’t experiencing currently. Neither of those things was appropriate for what I was saying.
  • I was quite upset about a particular event and essentially wanted to say, ‘OK, that’s it. This is the end/I’ve had enough.’ I said 「それで終わりだ」. Again, wrong. Why? Well, it might not have been wrong to say that ‘that’ (i.e. whatever I had just described in the conversation) was the ‘end’, but the end of what? Something far removed from me? The end of some story I heard? (Even for this last case, I’m not sure if それで would be better than これで.) In any case, because I was upset in that moment and I was making a decision of sorts to ‘end’ things and move forward into another phase of my life, これ was more appropriate because it was relevant at the time and very much related to me. It’s like how これ is sometimes used to refer to the present moment, as in これまでに (more or less ‘in the period leading up to this point’ as opposed to これまで=’(from some point in time) until now’), which I saw in an NHK newsflash the other day.
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#6010

私に似合いますか means “Do you think it will look good on me?” right? And 私に似合っていますか means “Do you think it looks good on me?”

#6011

Hello,
I have a question regarding 区域 vocab example sentence:

日本政府は、その区域の正確な大気中の放射能濃度を公表しているのですか？

which they translated as

Will the Japanese government announce the exact zone in the atmosphere where the radioactivity is concentrated?

Still, I believe it’s rather “Will the Japanese government announce the exact concentration of radiation in atmosphere in that zone?”

Could somebody approve either of lines? In case I’m wrong after all, I’d appreciate if one could provide additional notes why it turned this way.

#6012

Yeah, except I’d even say “Have… announced”.

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#6013

Today in class I was asked what verb form goes with conditional と and I answered plain form. My teacher corrected me and said that it’s always the dictionary form and the negative plain form can’t be used. I checked the Nihonge Bunkei Ziten and as far as I understood they say as well that the dictionary form is the only option. Genki and Tae Kim on the other hand list examples with negative verbs. Can somebody help me an explain this? Thanks a lot.

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#6014

Can you post links and/or screenshots to the Genki and Tae Kim examples so we can see more easily?

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#6015

Are you possibly thinking of ～ないといけない? Because that’s a structure which is another way of phrasing ～なければならない.

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#6016

@buburoi I think you should ask your teacher about this structure, because it’s valid as far as I know. Perhaps it’s a special case.

Here’s another example of the negative plain form being used:

Perhaps it’s just not polite enough? I see no evidence of it being unacceptable though.

PS: Posting what you saw in the sources you checked might be helpful too.

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#6017

From Tae Kim:

  1. 学校に行かない と 友達と会えないよ。
    If you don’t go to school, you can’t meet your friends.
    http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/conditionals

In Genki there‘s an excericise where they ask you to rephrase sentences with と. They give negative sentences like 日本語を話しません —日本語が上になりません。(You have to combine these by rephrasing)

Here’s another page where they give examples for negative verbs:
https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-conditional-form-to.html

And finally the definition I found in the book:

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#6018

Does this mean that Yamamoto San got chosen by the class representative or that Yamamoto San got chosen as the class representative ?

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#6019

Strictly speaking, I think it’s possible to interpret it either way, but “chosen as class representative” seems like the most likely thing they envisioned in writing the sentence. The other version just has a lack of clarity and context to it, while the “chosen as” interpretation requires no additional information. “Chosen by” leaves you asking “for what purpose” and whatnot. But it’s not relevant to the question they are asking, so it doesn’t actually matter from that perspective.

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#6020

Thank You!

#6021

Seems to me that 辞書形 and 普通形 are used interchangeably in that definition. The negative forms aren’t mentioned, but I don’t think they’re precluded by that definition either. In any case, even if Tae Kim’s guide isn’t always reliable, Genki is published by the Japan Times, so I find it hard to believe that the examples in it are wrong.

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#6022

Hmm maybe, but they don’t give examples with negative verbs at all and usually explicitly state when negative verbs are possible. But thanks for your help!
Maybe my teacher can tell me more about it next week but I doubt it. She only reads definitions from her book when she explains grammar and every time someone asks a questions her head explodes … :smile::v:

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#6023

Is your teacher using みんなの日本語 by any chance ? In みんなの日本語, the と conditional is taught with dictionary-form only, but not because it’s mandatory, it’s just that they are teaching a very specific sub pattern of と, the one which “express a situation where, as a result of a certain action, another action inevitably happens”

Pretty much always related to machine. Press this button and the water will come out, turn this and the volume will go up etc.

So it’s not like negative form is wrong, just doesn’t fit the pattern they want to teach “an action causes inevitably another action”. Because negative form is not even an action to begin with :smile:

Yeah…At beginners levels I had plenty of Japanese native teachers with fairly bad English and it was almost always a waste of time to ask them to elaborate on grammar. Their strength was elsewhere. (And it was not their faults either, without a common language in which student and teacher are fluent enough, it’s just really hard to have detailed discussion on grammar)

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