The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

All stories that are pretty relevant to this question then! Interesting.

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I think that’s the confirmation I was looking for. I was wondering whether it was like 入る where you have to figure it out through either context or convention.

I just learnt 楽天主義 and the example sentence given for it was “あいつほど楽天主義なやつはいない”. Why is な before やつ?

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because he’s not an optimistic fellow

edit: I’ll clarify since my silliness was likely more annoying to you than helpful.

な-adjectives a.k.a. nouns must have a な after them to modify other nouns.

Yeah, and yet its still pretty rare to hear 受け入れる just because I mean, usually its pretty cheesy to just say “I accept you” when someone has gone through stuff like that. Usually those parts use a bit more of a drawn out and descriptive conversation. But yeah, I guess a lot of the books I read just end up having outcasts lmao. Theres a lot more like that on my list but I never paid much attention to it.

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@rodan @Jonapedia, thanks for the detailed explanation ! The rest of the song use such plain language that I didn’t expect classical Japanese at all. :sweat_smile: I wonder if the average Japanese person is as confused as me when hearing the song for the first time, but if it’s from 百人一首 it’s probably famous enough to be recognized immediately.

Btw:
まつとし聞かば今帰り来む → 待っていると聞いたならばすぐに帰ってくるよ
Interesting how classical Japanese modernized pretty much always end up longer and bulkier.

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na-adjectives aren’t the same thing as nouns and they have different grammatical rules (even if there is some overlap).

A google search does show some usages of 〇〇主義な that aren’t things like 主義なのか・主義なのに (since なのか・なのに are always acceptable after nouns anyway), but I’m not seeing great results overall. I’m also not seeing any explanation for why using な to modify a noun here would be acceptable since generally you can’t use な after a noun to modify another noun.

It’s a bad sign that searching for this (after minor filtering) returned this very WaniKani example sentence/page as a result on the first page of Google. That doesn’t make me think that this is a normally accepted structure. Maybe someone else will have better luck finding out why this is okay or confirming it’s a mistake.

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O.K., first of all, I’m responding to a beginner and your technicality will not help them with their initial hurdle, you’re really just being argumentative.
In fact, we can even go no further than Tofugu to find a similar answer (other sources also support this):

a) Who said Yasu was a beginner?
b) There is a technicality here, but you’re getting it backwards. な-adjectives are adjectives that behave similarly to nouns, not nouns that behave similarly to adjectives. You cannot use a な-adjective as you would a noun - for example, この綺麗は私のです - what on earth is that supposed to mean?
c) You’re being patronising to seanblue? seanblue? Perhaps if you study Japanese much more, you might eventually become worthy to describe the strap on his sandal in Japanese.

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I feel like 楽天的な would have been a better word choice for the sentence, but I suppose that wouldn’t be using the correct word lol

You can find plenty examples of 楽天的な人 and stuff

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  1. Don’t assume everyone asking questions is a beginner. Yasu has been around here for a while and has asked a lot of questions at various grammar levels.
  2. Don’t assume everyone who contradicts you is being argumentative. Please consider the possibility that just like everyone else you’re not perfect and may sometimes make mistakes.
  3. My “technicality” is that there is a fundamental difference between these two parts of speech. Learners may not need to know every single difference between them at the beginning, but learning that they are different early on is perfectly reasonable (especially when the fact that they are different is relevant to the question at hand). Teaching that they are the same is doing a disservice to the learner and will just make things harder when they try to use them interchangeably in situations where they aren’t interchangeable (as in Belthazar’s very basic example).
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So there’s this popular song floating around called うっせっわ. I’ve been trying to pick apart this phrase for a bit but I was wondering where it came from + the nuance of this exact phrase? I’m assuming うるさい and maybe the わ being ben or something. Any ideas?

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It is indeed a sort of contraction of うるさい (it’s うっせぇわ by the way). 〜あい sometimes becomes 〜えぇ in colloquial speech, and the る just kinda vanishes and meshes into the following consonant, leading to うっせぇ. わ is a sentence-ending particle somtimes used for emphasis. So うっせぇわ is something like “wow you’re annoying”.

I get what you’re saying but idolising people is maybe not the healthiest attitude either :sweat_smile:

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Oh, no, I’d never idolise seanblue. Leebo, on the other hand…

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Everybody’s idol Leebo?

For real though, I get that you were (probably, hopefully) joking but tone communicates poorly over text, so it’s not unlikely that someone would read your message as “never ever dare to disagree with seanblue” - which is not a healthy attitude and could actually discourage people from expressing their own understanding and engaging in discussion, which is the opposite of what we want. Or at least the opposite of what I want, I can’t speak for everyone of course :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

There’s no doubt in my mind that seanblue is more knowledgeable than many of us, and they’ve always been extremely helpful from what I’ve seen, but they’re still human. While I can safely assume that if they disagree with me on Japanese, I’m wrong… They’re not perfect. Nobody is. And (civil and polite!) discussion is extremely conductive to building a good understanding of what you’re trying to learn.

So while I agree with what you (probably) meant, I think the joke may be a bit too easy to misread, basically. But that’s just one Internet rando’s opinion of course, so feel free to ignore me :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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What did I do to get dragged into this…

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@seanblue @Belthazar Guess I’ll just drop the Wanikani team an email? Also, I can’t believe this started from a word like 楽天主義 :stuck_out_tongue:

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I asked a native speaker, but they told me that 楽天主義なやつ is right and 楽天主義のやつ would feels wrong in this context but they couldn’t explain why, as native speakers do :laughing:

Following the Tofugu article framework, my guess would be that in this sentence the optimism is not used as a label (it’s not optimistic guy vs pessimistic guy for example), but as a trait or a characteristic, so it can be compared and graded. There is no guy more optimistic than him.

Same as when talking about きれいな人, like we can even give a note about how beautiful someone is (9/10!), but it’s not possible when talking about きれいのヒント (beauty hint), because it’s just labelling what kind of hint it is.

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I’ll idolize seanblue as much as I want! You can’t stop me!

listens to seanblue solo album

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綺麗は気持ちです

This horse is a person?
Oh my god!!! What is that supposed to mean.
Wow, horse is an adjective.