Why don’t textbook explain what Na-adjectives actually are?
Most textbooks present Na adjectives as this completely arbitrary thing that exists for no reason. Just that “Hey, some adjectives randomly need a “na” or alternate conjugation. That’s life, memorize it!”
In reality, it’s more similar to the “-y” ending in English, when you try to make a noun into an adjective. “Hm, this soup tastes **fishy**.” Or, “That story is really sketchy.”
Explained like that, it makes a lot more sense and is easier to remember. It’s not arbitrary, it’s logical.
4 comments
No, it’s arbitrary. “-y” is 「～っぽい」, or something. I don’t know what textbooks say, but how it should be taught is な-adjectives are words that have adjectival meanings, but are basically nouns as far as grammar is concerned, except they take the copula な instead of the copula の in subordinate clauses.
Well first of all ‘y’ only works for certain words in the English language, な applies to words that that wouldn’t work for like ‘pretty’ (pretty-y isn’t a thing).Then also:
>suffixes -ish and -y to words in informal contexts to make the reference sound deliberately vague and approximate.
A 綺麗な人 isn’t ‘pretty-ish’ , just pretty. The language is precise and not informal. な *can* be used to informally make adjectives on the spot sometimes, but it’s not always like that. As I said, its usage is very broad compared to the translation you offer.
Third, grammarians argue all the time about the category and nature of な adjectives, whether they are actually adjectives, etc etc. So they might want to avoid that pedantic fight by just describing how it’s usually used.
So yasashii means easy and kantan means… easy-y?
That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
I get you. Japanese textbook or many other language books often teach you to memorize things first then try to make sense of it later.
However, the story of na adjective is really complicated. You just can’t put な after all nouns to make them adjectives. Sometimes you must use the suffix 的 (てき) after nouns to make them na adjectives for example 具体的な (not 具体な)
So the goal of the textbook is to balance between two sides. Trying to explain grammar points but not too much to discourage learners or not too less that the learners got misconception.