I’m an English language American learning Japanese (hiragana) and I’m confused by the double possesive use of の preceeding お姉さん. ‘Oneesan’ means YOUR older sister, so why is the other possesive ‘no’ infront.
The sentence context was:
あなたのお姉さんは何年生ですか?
Thanks for any input! I just like to learn all the specific grammar and usage so I can respectfully speak Nihongo correctly!
どうもありがとうございます!
5 comments
>’Oneesan’ means YOUR older sister
Can’t say I’ve heard that one before. Who told you that?
お姉さん is not always “your” sister – it just shouldn’t be used to talk about one’s own sister to others.
Definitely a bit of a challenge to get used to swapping words like this when learning Japanese.
The use of あなた here is probably for additional clarity. It is often not necessary due to context.
The rule that the books on polite grammar will tell you is that you use a construction like お姉さん to show respect to that person and, in particular, you use it either (1) to that person or (2) about someone in your “out group”.
For a family your “out group” is someone not in your family. So you don’t say お姉さん about your own sister but do about other people’s sisters.
(The in/out thing matters in business contexts for example you refer to your boss differently when talking to outsiders than insiders).
However, some aspects of these rules (particularly referring to mother/father) are not followed in normal speech as much nowadays.
In short お姉さん does not mean “your sister”.
As others have said, a very strong feature of Japanese is to omit context that is not needed, but to litter a sentence with contextual clues anyway. Saying “あなた” in this context would be very odd.
It would imply that you didn’t know the name of the person you were talking to, or their relationship to you (teacher, customer etc), but you also felt you could ask them how old their sister was. A possible situation, but very unlikely.
If you’re interested Renshuu is another sort of gamified app but it has actual grammar lessons in addition to vocab instead of just throwing sentences at you like duo. I have also used Duolingo and I don’t recall it teaching what you’re saying here but maybe you need a different presentation to pick up the correct grammar rules and vocabulary meanings
Others have mentioned stuff that needs to be said, but I feel like one thing I want to point out is. Duolingo might be free, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good start when it’s teaching you like this. It’s a lot harder to correct yourself later on when you’re used to seeing it like this, and will continue to make more mistakes if you rely on it. This will make it harder later on for you.