On Duolingo, I’ve done countless sentences along the lines of:
_____ は ゆめい ひと です。
When I used this sentence structure in my Japanese 101 class, my teacher told me the correct/right/better way to phrase it is:
_____ は ゆうめいな ひと です。
I didn’t fully grasp her explanation why though and I didn’t want to hold up the class for this. Can someone please elaborate why, grammatically, the latter is better/more correct? I’m growing increasingly annoyed with Duolingo as I’m starting to realize how surficial it is. This is not the first time I’m coming across something like this.
ありがとう!
4 comments
有名な人(ゆうめいなひと) is correct, the other way is simply incorrect. At least I’ve never seen it and didn’t find a reference using Google.
有名 is a na-adjective, so it requires a な after it in order to be used as an adjective.
Dunno if Duolingo actually says that other form is correct, but if they do they’re simply wrong.
It’s just one of those fundamental differences between English and Japanese. For this type of adjective, you put ~な~ in between the adjective and noun (either this or the adjective has a い ending in which case no な neccesary).
**when you learn kanji the い at the end is always in hiragana so it’s easy to tell ゆうめい→有名 not an い-adjective. かわいい→可愛い, is an い-adjective**
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Getting into the nitty gritty, な is really a special form of です that lets you describe something with it (like with verbs e.g. がっこうに**いく**ひと). It’s really something like . . . ゆうめいです→人 You’re assigning a descriptive noun (ゆうめい) to a certain object (in this case ひと).
Now why you can’t just use です or the casual form だ instead is a historical question which I don’t know the answer to. I would reckon that one of the sounds morphed into the other over time, but one of the usages kept the original sound.
Maybe opinions vary but what we call な-adjectives aren’t true adjectives at all. They’re just nouns that are being used to describe something. ~い adjectives are true adjectives, you don’t have to put anything between them and the noun.
You should learn kanji and not only hiragana. Then you would have known that ゆうめい is not an i-adjective.
*Out of curiosity for how well it would do, I just put the entire question into chatgpt to see the response, this was it.*
“Your Japanese teacher is correct, and there is a grammatical reason why the second sentence is more accurate.
In Japanese, adjectives are generally placed before the noun they describe. In the first sentence, the word “ゆめい” (yumei) is an adjective that means “famous.” However, it is being used as a noun in this sentence, which is not incorrect, but not entirely natural.
To make the sentence more natural, you would typically add the suffix “-na” to the adjective to make it into a noun modifier, which is what is done in the second sentence. So “ゆめい” (yumei) becomes “ゆうめいな” (yuumei-na) when used to describe a noun.
In summary, the second sentence is more accurate because it follows the grammatical rule of using adjectives as noun modifiers in Japanese. Duolingo is a great tool for practicing vocabulary and basic grammar, but it may not always provide the most natural or accurate phrasing. It’s always a good idea to supplement your language learning with additional resources and practice with a knowledgeable teacher or tutor.”
*From my beginner knowledge this sounds more or less like a good answer? I’ve been experimenting with using chatgpt for language questions recently.*