Hello everyone, hope you’re doing well.
I’m writting this post beucause i’m having trouble to understand japanese sentence when reading, (more specifically the sentence being totally reversed in construction compared to french or english sentence).
For example this sentence.
私の母はこの辺の生まれです。他所の人間だなんて言わないで下さい。
I’m having trouble with the second part, i thought it meant “human from other place don’t have to talk please”, but i was wrong.
Can someone share ressource or tips to understand sentence without reading them from the end ?
Not sure if my explanation are very clear.
Best regard to all of you.
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Well this is the thing about Japanese that you can’t be entirely sure about the meaning of the sentense until you read it completely. You start reading and as you read you form a guess about the meaning of the sentence, but you need to constantly update that guess as you read the sentence further.
The sentence starts with 他所の人間 – and it’s natural to assume that it’s going to be about something people from other places do or do not. However, then you see だ – which makes 他所の人間だ a separate part of the sentence. So, at this moment you realize that this sentence is not about something people from other places do, but about the statement that someone is from other place. And because you have the previous sentence as the context, at this moment you can already guess that that someone is the speaker’s mother. At this moment you can already guess that the remaining part of the sentence would be “please don’t say that”. “My mother was born around here. Please don’t say that she is from another place” – something like that.
Overall, it’s about practice, context and constantly updating your guess about the meaning.
Anyway, best of luck with your stucies 
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In cases like this it makes sense to read the whole sentence and then break it down:
他所の人間だ - people/person from another place
なんて - things like (negative connotation)
言わないで - don’t say (order)
ください - please
and we work our way from the back
ください - please
言わないでください - please don’t say
なんて言わないでください - please don’t say things like
他所の人間だなんて言わないでください - please don’t say things like “a person from a different place”
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Jay Rubin’s book Making Sense of Japanese has a short chapter at the end describing a method for doing this, with a worked example using a complex sentence from a Japanese history book. It’s basically as @trunklayer says – you start at the front of the sentence and you build up what you know about the sentence and track what clauses you’ve seen that haven’t yet attached to a verb.
In this specific case, some other pointers:
- 言う is “to say (something)”, not “to talk” - it always has what somebody says attached to it either implicitly or explicitly
- なんて can be used, like と, in a “quotative” way, to mark the thing being said for a verb like いう
- there’s no “have to” or “must” meaning in the Japanese here
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Right, reading a sentence from the end is a common beginner tip but that’s only to make the transition from SVO to SOV sentence order easier.
In Japanese you need to keep a close eye on the particles because they tell you what the expression before the particle does in a sentence.
There’s no single resource to help with reading sentences. You basically need to study grammar and read. Over time you’ll get used to the sentence structure and you’ll memorise common patterns, which will make it possible to guess the sentence meaning before you read it completely.
Actually in spoken Japanese it’s fairly common to not finish sentences fully.
In your example they could’ve stopped at 「他所の人間だなんて！」
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Thanks you for the response, guess i’ll be working this part for a while ahah.
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Yeah, i’m trying to decompose sentence like that to ease the work, i’m having some trouble with the invisible が particle sometime, to identify who is acting but im confident one day ill master it.
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i see, thanks for your response, i’ll keep working that aspect then, thanks
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Thanks for your response, i’ll keep working to master this part then thanks.
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I think I heard of the invisible が, but I’m not sure if this makes things easier. If you look at the critical pieces in each sentence, it becomes clearer:
私の母はこの辺の生まれです。
The topic is marked with は already and there is nothing else suggesting the main actor in the sentence could be someone else.
他所の人間だなんて言わないで下さい。
The sentence ends with a request. Since the previous sentence mentions 私の母, there is a fair chance that the 私 issued the request.
In longer texts the “who said what” becomes a little more complicated, but if you have two actors, a man and a woman, it’s likely the man and woman are going to use slightly different language or there is a difference in social hierarchy between them to provide additional context. For instance, the woman is a 社長, the man’s a 先輩, etc.
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By definition, requests are issued by the person who says them… Grammatically the subject (the person who will or won’t be doing the 言う in this case) would be the person being spoken to.
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