How to say “Do you know that X is X”

3 comments

1. If you do not show any attempt at making the sentence, this does indeed seem like a /r/translator request.

2. there isn’t, the concept of a copula doesn’t exist in japanese, it’s a western concept applied to a foreign language. many english language books talking about japanese will list だ・です・である・であります・でございます as “copulas” but they don’t always act like copulas. many times they serve no grammatical purpose at all except adding information about a politeness level (like at the end of a lot of sentences). sometimes they’re interchangeable and sometimes they’re not. ある and いる can be “is” in some situations.

   the short answer is don’t translate word by word and get out of the habit of expecting to. english and japanese are too different. they don’t have the same parts of speech, tenses, moods, or constructs. nearly nothing is cognate. there is no single consistent “is” in japanese, period. it depends on the context. learn to interpret phrases, not individual words. sentence patterns and phrases can convey equivalent concepts, but individual words cannot.

   if you really want to say “do you know that red is red”, that would be 赤は赤だとわかる？ or 赤は赤だということがわかる？ but “is” in different situations may be entirely different. or unneeded. there are dozens or more different kinds of cases possible.

   for similar reasons, you can’t translate “it” in “it is raining”, either. there’s no real meaning for that “it”. it’s required because our grammar requires it to be there, but it’s not a pronoun that’s shorthand for another noun, it has no translatable meaning into other languages.

3. Personally I would forget about it if i cant find anything about it since at the end of the day english and japanese are two different languages. リンゴ and apple mean the same thing but at the end of the day the two words are completely different