@CrabigatorDiscipleWK
Posting it here:
Correct, although German is kinda complex. But what I’d say is the Unmarked word order is SOV, but due to the V2 constraint, simple sentences appear as SVO.
So in the Japanese case, リンゴを食べる is the unmarked order while 食べる、リンゴを would be a marked order. Same for an example of something like “With this ring, I thee wed” is an example of marked word order in English.
Hey man, haven’t seen you in awhile
Do you just like reappear once per year
Yea every once in awhile I go, “Hey, what’s going on over here” and then I get bored with it in like 12 hours.
For those of you who use bunpro, do you guys mark it right if you get the grammar correct but conjugate incorrectly?
Nope. That’s part of the exercise for me so if the tense is wrong it’s wrong.
Back when I used Bunpro, if I was sure that the tense had no relevance to the grammar point being tested I was less strict.
Can I put 多い in front of a verb?
If I’m not mistaken the following sentence is correct:
昨日お茶を多かったです。= Yesterday there was a lot of tea.
My question is if this one would also work:
昨日お茶を多い飲みました。= Yesterday I drank a lot of tea.
Thank you very much in advance!
Technically no, but you can put 多く which is a conjugation of 多い. 多く can kinda be its own thing, but generally if you want to describe a verb, you need an adverb. Making i-adjectives into adverbs is as simple as replacing the i with a ku.
For example 早い帰りたい is wrong, but 早く帰りたい is right.
With that all being said, 多く飲んだ doesn’t sound right. We just don’t really use 多く to describe that sort of thing as far as I know even though in english we translate ooi as meaning “a lot”. たくさん飲んだ sounds a lot more natural to me and is what I would go with. In the case that you wanted to have the nuance that you drank so much that it was overboard, you could say 飲みすぎた.
This should be 昨日お茶が多かったです. を has a few other niche uses, but it is primarily used to mark direct objects of verbs. While い adjectives conjugate like verbs, they typically can’t take a direct object like verbs can.
For this one as Vanilla mentioned, you would need to conjugate 多い into its adverbial form 多く. (And also 多い probably isn’t the best word to use, I would suggest たくさん as well)
Whoops, forgot to reply to this. Yeah on the adjective side of things を is primarily used with few select adjectives. With that being said though, I think the sentence has a bit more wrong with it than that. 昨日お茶が多かったです just doesn’t feel right with how 多かった is being used here. Like definition wise it fits, but it doesn’t feel natural to me.
Yeah I agree that it sounds unnatural, I just felt it needed to be pointed out that を was being used incorrectly first and foremost. 
Edit: I wonder if this is similar to in English how we have countable vs uncountable nouns. For example, it sounds wrong to say “there were many sands” instead of “there was a lot of sand.”
I see, thank you! I didn’t think of flexing 多い.
You’re right! I’m still pretty new to Japanese grammar and things aren’t as natural yet, this slipped my mind.
Thanks for pointing out the nuances between 多い and 沢山. I only used the sentences as examples for my question, but good to know.
For reasons 多い can exist in front of a noun in larger relative clauses, such as オーストラリア人の多い場所
It isn’t a matter of countable vs uncountable, but it’s more a specific quirk of the history of 多い because it really means something more like “a large amount of X exists”, so it basically needs Xが多い cause without the X it doesn’t exist.
Yeah that makes sense. I was pretty sure Japanese didn’t have a countable/uncountable distinction so I was wondering what the specific reason could be.
And yeah in relative clauses that makes sense… while it technically is coming before the noun, it’s still being used in a prepositional way, it’s basically just rearranging YはXが多い to Xが・の多いY.
Right, exactly. I just figure it is a worthwhile distinction, cause there are adjectivals where the opposite is true like 大きな, この, etc, that simple can’t exist in a predicate position.
Hi, could I get some help breaking down the grammar in this sentence please?
Context: villains have a villainous meeting. The leader ends it by saying:
自分が誰のために、何をする存在なのか．．．
くれぐれも忘れるなよ。
The last sentence is clear, but I can’t parse the first. Google translated it as “For whom and what do you do?” which seems fair, but I still can’t understand how you get to that end.
自分が(oneself)誰のために(for who’s sake)、何をする(what do)存在(existence)なのか
か is obviously the question particle, and なの is nominalizing 何をする存在, but what does 何をする存在 actually mean? “Existence of what you do,” “do something existence,” … that makes no sense to me.
Looking at it again, it seems like it’s saying:
You. For whose sake, do exist?
I’m not sure how accurate that is. Either way, my question is basically: how exactly is 何をする modifying 存在? And what does that mean in English after it’s been nominalized by の?
Thank you.
The (your) existence is doing what, for whom?
It’s not. 存在 is already a nominative. It’s the colloquial version of 存在だ+のですか, but colloquial, so no です. Then だ has to be な.
Also, the subclause is the whole sentence up to 存在, so the base sentence is: What is the existence (where you do what for whom)?
Thank you for answering. I gave it some time and still have trouble understanding it though.
The biggest thing I’m struggling with right now is なのか & のですか. What’s the difference between those two and the question particle か? What is it adding to the sentence?
I found it again in this sentence later about the main character dreaming. She was daydreaming earlier in the day, and (I’m assuming) started having the same dream after she fell asleep that night.
朝に見た白昼夢の続きなのか、
海の中にいる夢\だった。
Which I’m breaking down as:
朝に見た白昼夢(the waking dream i saw in the morning)の続き('s continuation)なのか、
海の中にいる夢(an underwater dream)だった (was)。
But I still can’t see what it’s trying to do here. It throws the whole sentence into disarray for me.
The continuation of the waking dream I saw this morning, was an underwater dream.
Is my best interpretation but it sounds very awkward and I just ignored the なのか completely.
Some online resources say のか is “endorsing and questioning the preceding statement.” So that’s saying it can either emphasize it it or turn it into a question, right?
A question particle in the middle of the sentence expresses doubt about the preceding statement:
Whether it was a continuation of the waking dream I had this morning, (but) I was underwater in it.
It’s both. か is always a questioning thing. (Gotta be careful with sweeping statements like this, someone correct me if I’m wrong!) Most likely it was the same dream.
My personal interpretation of this is slightly different. If I were translating literally, I would translate it rather as ‘the sort of existence/beings you are, doing what and for whom… never ever/really don’t forget.’ In other words, more idiomatically, it means ‘never forget what you are, what you do and for whose sake.’ (Obviously, the idiomatic version loses some of the emphasis created by the word order in the Japanese version.)
Did you copy that sentence with exactly the same punctuation as is used in the book, manga or anime (or drama?) you’re looking at? You sure that’s one sentence?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything like this, but if I remember correctly, this is an example of a question being used as a modifier…
Yeah, OK, I just dug through my message history with my fluent friend. I encountered a similar sentence from Shield Hero Volume 18 in August 2019. Here’s mine:
返事さえもまともにできないのか、絆は寝っ転がったままなので煙が充満する部屋から出る。
As if unable to give a proper response, Kizuna continued to lay around, so I came out of the smoke-filled room.
Similarly, your sentence means something like ‘it was a dream about being in the middle of the sea, as though it was/seemingly/perhaps a continuation of the daydream I had this/that morning.’ The use of a question (のか), along with な as the copula because you need something to replace だ after a noun, actually just adds a sense of uncertainty. You could replace なのか with である here, if I’m not wrong, but that would mean the speaker is certain that the sea dream is the continuation of the daydream. Using なのか instead indicates that the speaker is making a guess or relating what seems to be the case. In essence, the speaker has taken an ordinary relative clause – 「できない絆」or「である…夢」– and added an element of uncertainty.
To be honest, after you’ve seen usages like this a few times, you might start – like me – to think that か should be called the ‘uncertainty particle’ instead of just the ‘question particle’. That’s probably more accurate.