How did YOU wrap your head around cryptic sentence-enders like よね、かな、だろう、and んだ?

24 comments

1. This is a good post.

   I “wrapped my head around it” by understanding that they’re not “cryptic”, they just don’t translate easily into English.

   Like you (very correctly and accurately) describe, there is no single Japanese word that equates to “man”, “dude”, “bro”, “fuck”, or whatever.

   Likewise, there is no single English expression that correlates perfectly to a certain sentence-final Japanese particle.

   You get a sense for these things by having a lot of conversations in Japanese. That’s really all there is to it. They’re not “simple”, no, but they become more difficult when you try to map them directly to English words.

2. >you usually end up ignoring them anyways

   Not if you actually understand them. They might not all map onto words but each of them will add meaning to the sentence that can be translated. It might be word order, word choice, or in some cases just a word, but nothing is ‘meaningless’.

   I found it easier to get a general idea of what they mean and then consume a lot of Japanese to see it in context. The meanings all fell into place eventually. It’s probably not the answer you wanted but they’re particularly hard to link to distinct English translations

3. Having started watching fansubbed anime over 15 years ago most of these just became intuitive at some point, long before I ever tried learning the language. Once you’ve heard something across enough different contexts it’s gotta click sooner or later I guess

4. It’s not necessarily ‘cryptic’, it just doesn’t have an English equivalent and trying to map these particles to an English equivalent is what is creating the confusion, not the other way around.

   The particles set the tone for the sentence and give it an unique ‘flavor’ that expresses the speakers thoughts, you get an intuitive sense on what the particles are used for and when to use and not use them after months of study seeing them in dozens of contexts. I never actively sat down and learned when to use these particles, I subconsciously picked up on it after listening to hundreds of hours of Japanese speech and it just comes out.

5. Sorry but the fact that you call them cryptic just means you haven’t learnt enough I guess. There’s also nothing much to “wrap your head around” those expressions. They can be studied like any other expression or particle or grammar point. There’s nothing cryptic about those expressions you brought up.

   What’s with all the “except when it doesn’t”? I don’t get it. Feels like you’re just feeling overwhelmed and decided to complain about things you don’t know, which you could have just spent that same time to read about and would have understood it better?

   Why are you learning 関西弁 when you’re having trouble with basic particles from 標準語?

   Stop trying to translate from Japanese to English 1:1, and start mapping the Japanese directly to **feelings** instead. Skip the English.

6. > or was it a matter of seeing it used over and over again and slowly getting an intuitive feel for the particle’s many usages?

   yep, “this shit doesn’t map to english at all how the fuck am i meant to ever understaoh ok i get it now”

7. I feel the replies so far are a bit overly defensive, so I will start with agreeing with OP that the explicit meaning of these endings are very hard to spell out. I think the attitude of most people is that explicit meanings is the job of a linguist, and most people are just trying to get a vague feel of when it’s appropriate to use. If you like linguistics, the academic details, and use it to motivate your learning (which I kinda do as well), you do you. To that extent, a linguist would remind you that a written language is not necessarily the same as a spoken language, even when used by the same people. A lot of the “except when it’s not” that you observe is because written Japanese fails to capture spoken Japanese the way that English could fail to capture spoken Japanese. This points to the same advice that everyone else is giving: listen to spoken Japanese and feel the emotions behind the speech. Anything that tries to amp-it-up tends to make this easier pick up like anime, variety shows, streamers, etc.

8. I think this is a pretty good post with some good sources, but there’s also a lot of gatekeeping down below and a lot of offense taken over the word “cryptic”. There’s nothing wrong with trying to understand and make sense of things. That’s how we learn. Instead of “YOU’RE WRONG, YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING” 😂

9. I agree with the anime watcher. Watching animes helped a lot to naturally understand these enders.

10. There are 2 points. If we understand what something means and if we can use it like natives. These two goals require significantly different approaches.

    Understanding is much faster, we simply need to check all meanings. Very often to pick all nuances it’s far away from simply looking in a dictionary, and very often neither articles are enough, personally I was reading linguistic papers. When you read something like 50-200 pages about a single topic with literally hundreds of examples for different nuances, it becomes quite clear how it’s used, what it can mean in different situations and so on. In some meaning it’s even much better than personal tutoring, because people spend years figuring out, collecting examples and so on, and usually they share it completely free for everyone to benefit.

    However, this understanding doesn’t mean that we will be able to use it ourselves correctly. Usage is much more about practical ability and mimicking, and while it takes only 1-4 hours to read and understand, practical ability is usually more about years. Over these years we deal with different situations and polish our practical ability.

    Some people completely ignore education sources, and speaking honestly if we use foreign language for several years, amount of things we can pick up naturally is huge. The only problem is that when something isn’t very evident we do not pick it up and still can miss some nuances about it. So theoretical understanding isn’t so crucial, but it can speed our learning up a lot. Like think about articles a/an/the in English. Would it be faster to learn with educational sources or on our own? It’s all the same for foreign languages too.

11. Lots of reading.

12. If you are months into your Japanese journey, everything is cryptic. If you are a few years of consistently doing Japanese, these are sentence enhancers.

13. There are hard sentence finals in English that Americans are confused by as well “innit” and all those things we keep trying to answer that are not questions.

    Also the first time you hear a sentence by a native end in na no ni, na no ne, my very strong suggestion is not to giggle. Because they are already frustrated. And especially bite down on the desire to say NU to complete the な行 for them.

14. So, just like kanji

15. What I did was SRS their basic meanings, and then read a lot. After seeing them in many different sentences, it was easier to figure out the ways that it’s used and why.

16. ね/よ/よね -> I know/y’know/isn’t it?

    かな -> I think/thought/wonder …

    -> It could be …

    りんごかな -> Is it an apple?

    バカかな -> Are you(Is he) an idiot/a moron?

    んだ -> The spoken language of のだ

    のだ -> An assertion with emphasis on reasons or grounds.

    A statement, request and demand to the other party.

    Emphasis is placed on the situation or state of affairs.

    な, さ, and わ(Kaasai) are a little hard to explain, so they are omitted.

17. #EXPOSURE TO THEM

    -end thread

18. my favorite one is べ　

    習うより慣れるべ！

19. I remembered ね by thinking of it like Br*tish people going innit

20. Just using them. They’re one of the easier things to get because they’re so common

    Translating them to english might be useful? but I don’t think so, that way madness lies.

    Heard people use them in English too like code-switching, just because they’re useful and don’t have a direct translation. I find that a bit… weeby tho.

21. I used to watch a lot of anime a few years back and even before I began learning Japanese two years ago, I had heard them so much that I picked up on them decently quickly

22. Most of those aren’t cryptic if you do the proper grammar learning…

    The only ones that have more ambiguous usage are さ and わ in my opinion. よ could also be argued maybe since it can change slightly in connotation depending on your sentence-ending pitch. But I’ve never heard of anyone having a hard time with it.

    The rest are all pretty straightforward.

23. What’s the difference between: “nan desu ka” and “nan desu ne” ?

24. I don’t think you understand them on their own so combining them is only more confusing