Hello, all!
Now, before I get to it I’d like to say that I’m absolutely loving learning Japanese so far. I’m so thankful for Cure Dolly’s videos (R.I.P.). They’re fantastic! However, I seem to have run into some issues and I would love if anyone could clear them up for me. Also, I’m not sure if this is a daily thread post considering the length. If it is, I’ll repost there.
I try to take notes with her videos and just tried out her worksheets after finishing Lesson 7. Worksheet #1 was for the first 3 lessons and was very easygoing with only two corrections!
I was feeling myself a little after this, I won’t lie. So, I went straight into the second worksheet which said it was for lessons 1-6 and **-BOOM-** wall. So let’s get into my issue.
In the second worksheet, the first set of questions has you take Japanese sentences and turn them to English.
Question 2: はしって いる いぬは げんきだ
My answer: Running makes the dog healthy.
Cure Dolly’s answer: The running dog is lively (healthy).
Question 3: わたしが きのう みた ねこは さかなを たべて いる。
My answer: Yesterday, I saw a cat eating a fish.
Cure Dolly’s answer: The cat I saw yesterday is eating fish.
So, my answers were off, obviously. I’m not sure as to where I went wrong. I remembered afterwards for Q3 that Dolly said relative time expressions would go at the beginning of a sentence, so I figured きのう would go at the front and I got even more confused.
Also, the next section was translating English to Japanese, and I had no clue what I was doing at that point so I won’t even get into that. For some reason, it feels like all the grammar I was taught in the first episodes doesn’t apply anymore? But I have a strong feeling I’m just missing that “A-HA!” moment here.
Could someone maybe help me out here?
2 comments
Hopefully you don’t mind if I write these in full kanji, I’m on mobile and it’s easier
走っている犬は元気だ – You need to take the entirety of 走っている犬 to be a noun. 走っている in this case is an attributive verb, which you can tell because it directly precedes a noun, 犬. That means that it is directly modifying 犬 (aka it is *attributing* something to 犬), so the entire phrase 走っている犬 is itself a noun phrase, and *that* is what’s being marked by は and commented on by 元気だ. So:
走っている犬 – “The running dog”
走っている犬は – “As for the running dog”
走っている犬は元気だ – “As for the running dog, it is lively/healthy.”
As for 私が昨日見た猫は魚を食べている, the same sort of thing applies. The 私が昨日見た part on its own would mean “Yesterday I saw”. However, the verb is directly preceding the noun 猫. That means that it is an attributive verb, and actually, the entire phrase 私が昨日見た is modifying 猫. In we call this type of clause a “relative clause”, and in English we form it by using the word “that”, though we often omit it. So 私が昨日見た猫 is “The cat (that) I saw yesterday”, and that entire phrase is then maried as the topic by は. So:
私が昨日見た猫 – “The cat that I saw yesterday”
私が昨日見た猫は – “As for the cat that I saw yesterday”
私が昨日見た猫は魚を食べている – “As for the cat that I saw yesterday, it is eating fish.”
Another thing to note is that 食べている is a present tense verb, so it couldn’t mean the cat was eating a fish yesterday, it must mean it is eating fish now.
I recommend you study attributive verbs and Japanese relative clauses a bit. Here are a few links to resources explaining them.
https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/japanese-relative-clauses/
https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/how-to-modify-nouns-with-the-ta-form/
https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/clause
https://www.imabi.net/ichidan-verbs
I hope this helped 🙂
So what you need to know here is that verbs can modify nouns, like adjectives do. You put a noun after the verb do modify the noun.
So
はしっている いぬ
Means “(the) running dog”
わたしが みた ねこ
Means “the cat that I saw”
When using time expression with verb, you usually put it directly before the verb so
わたしが きのう みた ねこ