Short Grammar Questions (Part 1)

Is there a difference in meaning between these two sentences?

彼は、これは何だと言いますか。
彼は、これは何と言いますか。

Oh, wait, I’ve got an example!
3時に集合です
The meet up is at 3.

It’s strange to have two topic particles (は) in the same sentence.
Do you mean:
彼は、「これは何だ」と言いますか。
彼は、「これは何」と言いますか。

In which case, both sentences mean “Is he saying ‘what is that’?”
The quotation marks make it an exact quote, so the only difference is whether he used だ or not.

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Ok, thanks for clarifying :slight_smile:

According to jisho 集合 is a noun as well as a suru verb. Maybe it works because it describes an action although it’s a noun?
Does it work with all suru verbs? The only one that spontaneously comes to my mind is 勉強 but 勉強です sounds weird. :thinking:

Yes, that’s what I was talking about. More specifically, an action that happens at a specific time.

A noun implying an action will always be a suru verb (doing said action). (Well, there are probably exceptions, as always, but they must be rare.) The problem is whether that action happens at a specific time or is more continuous.

Quick question, grammar is not my strong point. In the sentence “大豆から、いろいろなものを作ります。”, what is the purpose of the な? I was reading a list of simple sentences for practice, and I read this one as something like “many things are made from soy beans.” But I can’t figure out why the な needs to be there. Is anyone able to shine light on this for me? Thanks!

So いろいろ (色々), which means “various/all sorts of”, is a な-adjective, which means な gets put onto the end of it when it’s modifying a noun like that (here, it’s modifying もの)

There are two types of adjectives in Japanese, い-adjectives and な-adjectives – you can check out this site to read more on how adjectives work in Japanese!

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色々 can be used in a lot of ways, one of which is a na-adjective. This basically means that it comes before the noun its modifying and there is a な sandwiched in between them. In this case, もの is the noun and 色々 is telling us that its just “various things”.

Your translation is right though.

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Ah thank you! I feel kinda dumb now, not sure why I didn’t put that together. I didn’t really think of “various” as an adjective, but now it makes total sense now that I do. Thank you for the quick answer!

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チワワは目が大きい犬です。
Chihuahuas are big eyes dogs.

Could someone explain me the structure of this sentence?

I thought it would be 大きい目が犬 because the eyes are big and not the dog?

@zdennis

チワワは目が大きい犬です。
Chihuahuas are big eyed dogs.

チワワは大きい目が犬です。
Chihuahuas are dogs with big eyes.

Take what I’m writing with a grain of salt, but I see both working. In the 2nd sentence, you’re emphasizing that chihuahuas are dogs while in the 1st sentence, it’s the idea of having big eyes that is emphasized.

チワワは目が大きい犬です means “Chihuahuas are dogs with big eyes.”

That’s how you do relative clauses with adjectives in Japanese. They don’t need a word that means “that have” or “who” or “with” in the sentences.

チワワは大きい目が犬です is odd. You can fix it by adding ある after 目.

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Oh, I totally thought I had added a ある xD Thanks for the explanation!

Dammit, you ninja’d me about 大きい目が犬 being odd.

Seeing as you’re here, would 大きい目の犬 sound better? How about 大きい目がしている犬?

I guess I can see this as being okay, I don’t know how natural it is.

Change が to を and again, I think the grammar is fine, but I don’t know how natural it is.

In both cases, I’m not saying the naturalness is doubtful, just that I can’t comment on it.

At the same time I personally probably wouldn’t say either of those.

I’m struggling to understand the が.
It marks the subject.

The subject of a sentence is the person, place, thing, or idea that is doing or being something.

So the subject is big eyes. And they are doing “belonging to the dog”. Which is a Chihuahua.

Is this right?

目が大きい gives you no problems right?

If you put it in front of a noun, it just modifies that noun as a whole chunk. I’m running out the door, so I can’t link to resources for relative clauses at the moment, but I’m sure all the main internet resources people go to for beginner grammar have sections on it.

I see its like [目が大きい] の 犬