I asked ChatGPT a question about a grammar point that I was slightly confused about and it answered it pretty good I think. Here was the question I asked. Is this the correct answer generally speaking?
“in Japanese tamani means occasionally, yet grammatically you still need to add kotogaaru at the end of the sentence. why?”
In Japanese, “tamani” means “occasionally,” but it is not a verb, and it cannot be used alone as a sentence. To express an action that happens occasionally, you need to add a verb and a particle to create a grammatically correct sentence.
The particle “kotogaaru” is used to indicate the existence or presence of something. When added to the end of a verb, it indicates that the action is being done. For example, if you want to say “I occasionally eat sushi,” you would say “watashi wa tamani sushi o tabekotogaaru,” which translates to “As for me, occasionally eat sushi.”
The addition of “kotogaaru” at the end of the sentence is necessary to make it a complete sentence in Japanese grammar. Without it, the sentence would be incomplete and lack the necessary verb and particle to convey meaning.
9 comments
>watashi wa tamani sushi **o tabekotogaaru**
idk the way it writes romaji and missing ru tells me it sucks and lacks accuracy to be asking stuff
1. “Koto ga aru” is not a particle, it’s a structure consisting of multiple words. People learning JP tend to call these “grammar points”.
2. Its definition of “koto ga aru” is incorrect.
3. “Tabe koto ga aru” is incorrect. It should be “Taberu koto ga aru”.
4. The example, if you correct the grammar, isn’t wrong. But do not think that it is the only way to say it, or that it will be natural to say that in all situations.
Idea: do not take ChatGPT’s explanation at face value, and doubt *everything* it tells you: look up the suggestions it has given: “tama ni” and “koto ga aru” and *see* if there are articles online about how these words are used, and learn from *those*. If you cannot find an external source, *disregard* what ChatGPT has told you.
ChatGPT will output a fever dream. Use it to find key words you can Google. Don’t use it as a teacher. Use *real* non-AI resources to actually learn from.
The premise of your question is not correct and ChatGPT is just hallucinating an answer.
It’s perfectly fine to have a sentence with たまに～する that doesn’t end in ことがある.
First of all, you don’t *need* koto ga aru for it to be grammatically correct, but it changes the meaning without it.
Second of all, ChatGPT has been proven time and time again specifically to be a bad resource to use unless you are at the level of being able to parse out whether the answer it gives is useful or not. Search the term on this sub and find dozens of examples and explanations far better than my own. For that reason I say ignore its response.
Third of all, the answer you are looking for is that XX koto ga aru means roughly “XX concept exists” and can be used to convey many sentiments such as “I have eaten(before)” rather than simply “I ate” (e.g. XXを食べたことがある = (literally) the concept of having eaten XX exists)
Following that line of logic, tacking on たまに to that means “I have occasionally eaten XX” and without ことがある would be analogous to “I occasionally ate it” (sounds a bit like you no longer do, but when you did it was only on occasion)
The core of ChatGPT is trained to auto-complete answers that sound good.
Training it to be correct and helpful is too difficult and has been left as an exercise for the future. It often is those things, but only through pure dumb luck. Please stop using it as a tutor.
People have pointed out obvious flaws, but the kicker for me is that in no way are “tama ni” and “koto ga aru” even grammatically bound to each other.
>it answered it pretty good I think.
And this is why it’s so terrible, because it answered it terribly in a way convincing to the most vulnerable demographic.
Please stop using it as a learning aid. You have to doubt everything it says, and by the time you’re done fact-checking it, you’ve done all the work you would have done without ChatGPT, and then some.
ChatGPT is not trained on a romaji dataset. Use kana for proper output
GPT4 does better for Japanese