Hey everyone, I have a hard time understanding sentences in Japanese. For instance, I would tell someone “don’t have time” in english. However, in Japanese you would say “jikan ga nai” aka “time don’t have”. Do native speakers/high level japanese learners flip it to understand the sentence. Like oh “jikan ga nai” hes saying “don’t have time” or do they interpret it literally as “time don’t have”. I’m sure its probably hard to understand what I’m saying. When I learn japanese phrases etc I always tend to flip it/interpret it to english sentence structure.
5 comments
That’s the first major huddle learning japanese when you start typically from indo-european languages. I think there is nothing else than repeat and repeat again until you get used to it. Basically you need to not translate in your own language just get japanese directly or you’ll never be able to cope with the flow.
A german native speaker may have a little advantage because verb is also at the end. Korean a great one as the structure is very similar to japanese, I have heard that Turkish was also agglutinative language so easier to learn when you are turkish.
Sentence structure is largely arbitrary. English sentence structure is not more natural or logical than Japanese sentence structure; it’s just what you’re used to.
Once you get used to it you interpret jikan ga nai as jikan ga nai
To add on to everyone else’s thoughts, reaching fluency in Japanese (like how you are fluent in English) also means thinking in Japanese as opposed to translating everything into English
To me (and probably most native speakers), ない is essentially “not exist”, rather than “not have”. So 時間がない is, if I were to translate it literally, “time not exist” and in this specific case the word order matches that of English. But the important difference is that ある/ない, unlike exist/not exist in English, is usually (and often implicitly) tied to/associated with someone/somewhere/a situation that “have” it, which is why it’s often translated to “have” in English. If I say お金がなくてさ it’s implied that money doesn’t exist *for me* i.e. I don’t have money.
In many other cases the word orders in English and Japanese don’t match, but at least native speakers never flip the order or anything, because it’s natural for us. As much as you find Japanese grammar strange, we find English grammar unintuitive. There’s nothing inherently more “correct” or logical about English’s word order.