I’m a huge Yoasobi fan, so I decided I’m going to use their songs to help me with my Japanese learning. I’ve started with “If I Could Draw Life”, and the first line is “月が綺麗な夜に (tsuki が kerei na yoru ni)”. I understand that 月 (tsuki) is moon, が (ga), な (na), and に (ni) are particles, 綺麗 (kirei) is pretty, and 夜 (yoru) is night. This is basically giving us our setting, “During a night when the moon is pretty or beautiful”.
This is great, because I understand the context, right? Well, not fully. You see, as far as I understand it, な (na) is a particle similar to ね (ne) except just a bit rougher, and it can also be used as kind of a precursor to a negative verb, such as ない (nai) or じゃない (janai). The thing is, when I remove な from the first line, it becomes “月が綺麗夜に” which translates to the same thing.
My question is, how does な contribute to this line? I’ve tried looking up definitions for the particle, but I never find this specific scenario. Am I just not searching right?
5 comments
な isn’t a particle, it’s part of 綺麗. 綺麗 in this case is being used attributively (preceding the noun), and as it’s a な-adjective, you need that な on the end.
Are you aware of い and な-adjectives and how they function? I don’t mean this in a rude way, it’s just that this is usually one of the things you learn at the very beginning of studying Japanese
This is something you usually learn right at the beginning. Maybe read a grammar guide like this: https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/adjectives
> which translates to the same thing
How could you possibly know that if you don’t even understand how adjectives work in Japanese? (It doesn’t, btw, that sentence is not grammatically correct)
な isn’t a particle, but rather the 連体形(れんたいけい) conjugation of the 形容動詞(けいようどうし) (な-adjective) 綺麗(きれい)だ.
な allows the 形容動詞 「綺麗」 to connect with another noun.
[noun]は**綺麗だ**。[noun] is pretty/clean.
**綺麗な**[noun]だ。It is a pretty/clean [noun].
Edit: If you remove な, the sentence becomes ungrammatical. The translation becomes something more like, “the moon in the cleanliness evening” or “the moon in the beauty evening.” Apart from fixed Sino-Japanese compound words (like 自由民主党◎ and not 自由**な**民主党✖, or 株式会社◎ and not 株式**の**会社✖), IIRC nouns can only modify other nouns using [の or な](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/na-adjectives-no-adjectives/).
It’s a na adjective, there are also i adjectives, I think you can look at the inflections on Jisho.org
If you’d use a textbook, you’d learn what な adjectives are so much earlier than you’d be able to input that text that the question never would have come up in the first place.