I was talking to a friend (native Japanese) about 2nd language acquisition. I wanted to ask the question “Which personality traits will make it easier to learn a second language?”. This is how they said it in Japanese.
どの性格の人がより第二言語を学びやすいか.
I can’t wrap my head around what より is doing in this sentence. For sure よりusage always throws my brain for a loop. I’m fine if the sentence contains both のほうが and より but for some reason a sentence with just より is always hard for me.
We chatted with another native Japanese speaker and they thought this sentence was pretty natural but neither could really explain the grammatical details.
We also came up with this sentence which is way easier for me to follow:
どんな性格だったら第二言語を学びやすいか
I hoping someone can give me a bit more insight into the use of より in the first sentence and I’d like to hear opinions on how often this type of より usage is in everyday Japanese.
Thanks
5 comments
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Yeah often より attaches to the end of a word, like any other particle. But here it actually comes *before*. It combines with やすい to mean “easier”. Another thing that makes this sentence tricky is that there are a bunch of words between より and やすい.
In デジタル大辞泉 they have this より separated out into its own entry:
> ［副］《助詞「より」から。欧文の翻訳で用いられ広まった語》一段と程度がまさるさま。いっそう。「他の者に比べて、彼はより勤勉だ」「よりよい社会」
Not an expert by any means but I *think* there’s an omitted noun just before より here. It’s implied that basically “all humans” would be there so they just don’t say anything. So like the real full sentence might be:
どの性格の人が**全ての人**より第二言語を学びやすいか
Idk if that’s the correct noun there but the point is that *something* would normally go there in this grammar point so if there isn’t anything it’s usually something implied by context.
Hopefully someone can correct me or confirm if I’m correct because I’m also learning!
より in addition to its usage as a particle has another usage as an adverb meaning “more”. This is likely what’s being used here.
(I am making the assumption this was something written)
The thing being compared is often left out, which is something you come to understand in the flow of conversation, and often stumps in writing. So you can also end up with weird things like
よりいいね．
Which again in conversation is pretty obvious, and in writing because writing lacks context, is confusing.
And if you sort of squint and compare that sentence I wrote, and the sentence you wrote is the same formation, grammatically.
And the then the probably more obvious to newer speakers, the really common それより．(Roughly, “like that, only moreso” in context.)