The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

Then my last edit stands. I’ll translate the whole thing when I get home in like 30 mins if it’s still not clear.

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checking on nhk easy

what does it mean 沖縄県 緊急きんきゅう事態じたい宣言せんげんしてほしい?

literally I would translate it as okinawa prefecture wants to go out of the declaration of state of emergency?

I’d be interested to see your translation! I think I might have got the wrong idea a bit when I did mine…?

Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but I’m not so sure about this. Or rather, I was asking myself if it would be necessary to say 私にとっては instead of 私には in order for that interpretation to make sense/be very likely. Anyway, more importantly…

I felt this way too, so I did a quick Google search, and I think I found the source interview for this quote…

Ah, oops, I see it’s the link @Phryne posted. Anyway, I took a quick glance at the relevant bit, and I saw this:

誰に頼まれたわけでもないし。

神野

そう、日本の演歌の将来のためとか、きれいごとじゃなくて、もっと突き詰めて、もっと楽しんで、歌を歌っていきたいからやってます。

──

つまり、自分のために。

神野

毎年、決まった歌だけを歌い続けて、結果もだいたい見えてる、それでは、わたしには、意味がない。

何とかチャンスをつかみたいんです。だから、続けています。

I think this sounds like she said that sentence in response to「つまり、自分のために。」The way I see it (given the next sentence as well), I think she might be saying something like ‘“I” am irrelevant’. More precisely, I think that whole section means:
‘Every year, I sing the songs that’ve been decided on, and the results are more or less visible to me. As such, ‘I’ am irrelevant. [N.B.: Literally ‘I am meaningless’, if I’m not wrong.] I want to seize a chance somehow. That’s why I’m continuing.’

In other words, 神野美伽 is saying that she’s going to keep going so she can grab hold of the chance she’s seeking, and not ‘for herself’. At least, that’s how I understand it.

PS: I think we can find some additional support for this interpretation in the next sentences, because she uses んです and だから, as if to emphasise that「何とかチャンスをつかみたい」is the true reason that she wishes to continue, possibly because she feels the interviewer might have misunderstood her, given the last question.

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Close, but not quite. The subject of 欲しい (the person doing the wanting) and the agent/doer of the verb in the て-form before it are always different. There’s also no particle after 沖縄県 in the sentence you provided, so (unless there was one in the original article), you might be expected to take 沖縄県 緊急きんきゅう事態じたい宣言 as a single block.

What would the sentence mean in that case? Well, it means that

  • the speaker/subject of 欲しい
  • wants
  • [someone else to] release (literally ‘take out’, ‘put out’, ‘send out’ and other similar verbs with an idea of ‘to make (something) come out/appear’)
  • an Okinawa state of emergency declaration

Putting it all together, someone wants a state of emergency to be officially declared in Okinawa.

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I think your first „hypothetical“ interpretation is perfectly fine, that’s actually how I read it as well.
Having a hypothetical and then following with a それでは seems really normal to me. It reads similar to それだと.

When speaking, you‘d probably change the intonation a bit, to make it stand out as a hypothetical scenario, but that’s obviously impossible through text.

To me, this interpretation makes sense in context as well.

She talks about how she’s not in the US to only sing the same old songs, but to „dive right in there“. This relates to her talking about the differences between American and Japanese audiences as well. She has to prepare more, study the songs more so that she can properly convey the feelings the songs engender in the audience, etc. She is in the US, doing this with intent.

This also fits with this part here:

She sees herself as the „最先端“ of 演歌, really connecting with the songs and conveying them to their audience properly, without relying on 昭和 nostalgia and people being already familiar with the songs she‘s singing.
This is just my personal interpretation. I might be reading too much into it.

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Ok am home and checked out the context

Yeah it changes it, so ignore what I said earlier. As for what it means now that I can see this context, I mean I think we just disagree on the 意味がない. Shes not saying shes irrelevant. Shes’ saying that she wants to get more into singing and enjoy it more, so just singing the same songs and getting better isn’t anything of value to her.

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This makes sense, especially after reading what @Myria said, but I’m not sure what meanings 私には意味がない can have. The typical meaning of AにはBがない is ‘there is no B in A’, and I can’t think of an example in recent memory where it meant ‘for A, there is no B’. I’m not saying that this meaning doesn’t exist, of course, but I just don’t know if it does, which is why I went with the more literal (and possibly incorrect) interpretation.

I guess what we’re disagreeing on is what is meaningless: is the meaningless thing 私には or それでは?

This makes sense too, but I’m not sure how that translates to the sentence we’re analysing being hypothetical. I think the use of だいたい and 見えてる (and not 見える) suggests to me that this is something that’s already happening, particularly since だいたい suggests a sort of mental assessment occurring in her mind – ‘I can more or less see the results’ – as though there’s already something that she can evaluate. That wouldn’t be the case for something purely hypothetical.

However, it’s possible that she’s saying that this stuff alone isn’t what she’s aiming for, even if it’s not hypothetical. Guess I need to read more of the interview to find out what she actually does in order to compare it with what she’s saying and work out what it really means.

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You are probably more familiar with the pattern than you realize, but the fact that the thing 意味 refers to isn’t directly in front of it may be tripping you up.

If I said 私には生きる意味がない then you would have an easier time noticing that pattern. You could do the same thing in that case where you just say 私には意味がない so long as you establish you’re talking about living or something of the sort beforehand.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, my example probably doesn’t help clear that up. には can behave like にとって kinda, but is often more natural in cases like this. Maybe if I explain it like that it’ll be clearer.

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This does make the literal ‘there is no meaning of living in me’ interpretation impossible, but it still roughly fits the ‘I have no meaning in living’ interpretation, which is another common meaning of 〜に〜ない. (Yes, both of those translations are horribly unnatural, but what I’m saying is that at least one of the nuances of ‘existence in a context’ or ‘possession’ is still possible, which still falls within the usual set of meanings for 〜にある・ない.)

It’s OK. I figured that it was possible, but I just hadn’t seen it very often with ある・ない, so I didn’t want to jump the gun. I have seen it with other verbs though.

Anyway, I did another search, and I’m seeing all the words/particles in front of 私には意味がない that I needed to reassure me popping up in the examples I’ve found: は, なんて, 〜ても… so yes, OK, this 私には, especially with that comma after it, can definitely mean ‘to me’. Also, yes, it makes more sense for それでは to be the main topic of that sentence, with それ referring to what she said just before.

I guess what I’m still stuck on is this: how much of「毎年、決まった歌だけを歌い続けて、結果もだいたい見えてる」is hypothetical? To me, it doesn’t sound like the entire thing is a scenario that she’s raising for the sake of discussion, because of も, だいたい and the present continuous tense. I’m now pretty sure that 決まった means ‘routine’ or ‘fixed’ or ‘same old’, but even then, I don’t know what to make of the second half of the sentence.

What’s currently running through my head goes like this, though perhaps that’s a result of interpreting everything before それでは and everything starting from それでは as two separate sentences (maybe there’s actually a grammatically correct way of joining a sentence-ending form (終止形) like 見えてる to それでは, but I’m not aware of it, so I’m stuck with the default interpretation):
‘Continuing to sing the same songs every year… I can more or less see the results of that. That would be meaningless to me.’ (I had to change the punctuation to capture how I’m thinking about it because the て-form and gerunds like ‘continuing’ aren’t exactly the same in English: gerunds in these contexts have more clearly implied subjects than in Japanese.)

The slight difference here would be that with this interpretation, それ in それでは would refer to ‘singing the same old songs’ and ‘the results’ of that, as opposed to ‘singing the same old songs’ and ‘being able to see the results’.

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I think that’s reasonable considering how little information is actually in the sentence, but I think the context suggests that it’s the government of Okinawa that wants the state of emergency declared by the central government. That does count as “someone”, but just wanted to mention that natives probably wouldn’t see it that vaguely.

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Yes, I figured the statement was from some government official, but I wasn’t sure whom from. Okinawa’s government definitely seems like the best inference here, without further information. Thanks.

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@Phryne @Vanilla I just found someone who asked about the same sentence on HiNative and got an answer:

I think that the second answer agrees with my final interpretation:

わたしがアメリカのジャズクラブで歌っているのは、チャンスをつかむため。だから、毎年同じ歌だけを歌い続けて、新しい歌に挑戦しないのは、わたしにとっては意味のないこと。そんなことをしていても、よい結果は得られない。

意味がない
→中身がない、内容がない、むだである、重要じゃない、やらなくていいことだ、役に立たない

結果も見えてる
→いい結果が得られない、平凡な結果しか出せない、結果はたいしたことない、

I didn’t quite pick up on the fact that the 結果 envisioned was necessarily bad, but I think my interpretation implied that the results would not be satisfactory, which is similar.

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Yeah I just read your reply and realized that 結果もだいたい見える was referring to something else. Kinda disappointed in myself for not realizing that after seeing it was actually 結果も大体見える, but maa.

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I guess it happens to all of us, especially with sentences like that that don’t really follow textbook structures. The stuff I missed – though I did guess they were possible – was

  1. the specific meaning of 決まった here, which is closer to ‘fixed’ or ‘routine’ than ‘decided’
  2. 私には being able to mean ‘to/for me’ i.e. being equivalent to 私にとって

As it turns out, I think all of us who tried to interpret the sentence were at least partly right: @Myria and @Phryne were right about part of it being hypothetical/raised for the sake of discussion (「毎年、決まった歌だけを歌い続けて」), you were right about それでは being the main topic and therefore the ‘meaningless’ thing, and I was right about 結果も見えてる being factual (though I initially interpreted 結果 incorrectly as ‘the success I get from choosing to continue to sing those songs’). Everything fit together in the end.

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Its not really an excuse for me since really 95% of my knowledge comes from things outside of textbook structures and explanations. At least it made sense after seeing it, so I probably won’t make that mistake again and it ended up being a learning moment.

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Same here actually. Beyond the N3 level, almost everything I know is from other sources, especially anime, and most of my vocabulary is from outside of textbooks as well. Maybe at least 60-70% of my knowledge. But well, there’s always the possibility that a sentence involves something we haven’t seen before, or that we haven’t seen enough to be sure (which is what happened for me here).

But yeah, at least you’ll probably get it right the next time! :slight_smile:

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Is 〜とされている mostly used in formal/writing? I’m using Bunpro and all of the example sentences are explicitly from news articles or dissertations.

Mostly? Yeah I would say so.

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Ahh thank you for clarifying! I think that was my confusion. I’ve heard the song a few times and keep thinking like “hmmm isn’t わ an older woman/polite thing? why is it in this rude title I wonder…”

And whoops, I mistyped it earlier. Thanks to you and yamitenshi for the explanations :slight_smile: colloquial Japanese is so different regionally and pop culture also trips me up, dang!

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