Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don’t need their own posts, and first time posters go here (March 16, 2024)

7 comments

1. I have the sentence:

   > ここから富士山がよく見えます

   Which I have translated as:

   > You can see Mount Fuji well from here.

   However, when I read the sentence before seeing the translation I was confused about the よく, which I understand as “often”. So I read it as:

   > You can see Mount Fuji often from here.

   Sorry if this is an obvious question, my vocab is still pretty bad. I presume よく has two meanings?

2. Hi,
   I sometimes read Japanese novels or play games in Japanese, and there is the occasional Kanji/word I have to look up on my smartphone. I was using ‘Japanese Dictionary Takoboto’ for this, which I liked since there are not many ads, and it allows you to save your looked-up words in lists to learn them later. However, the handwritten Kanji search is subscription-based only, and searching by radicals is too time-consuming.
   Do you know any similar app that is very lightweight and fulfills that job? I don’t need any prepared fancy vocabulary practices or tests—just a relatively ad-free dictionary with handwritten kanji search and organizing searched items.

3. This is more of a linguistics question than a language question, but it’s pretty clear to me that the Japanese language has been losing sounds throughout its history and I’m wondering if there’s any good papers or books on why. Googling just gets dumb results with people complaining about the small consonant inventory.

   What I’m more interested in things like the fact that を is losing its consonant sound actively in the present to the point textbooks feel the need to romanize it as (w)o or w(o) depending on the book. Or the fact that there are no “yi, ye, wi, wu, we” sounds despite all those consonants and vowels occurring separately from each other elsewhere in the language.

   ​

   One thing I’ve noticed is how quickly many native speakers rush over “soft” sounds like “h” or “r/l” to the point that they’re almost indistinguishable and I wonder if this tendency is part of what has led to some of those sounds disappearing.

   ​

   another thing I noticed is that my Japanese teacher was very specific that the word for the Yen is pronounced えん and yet whenever she’d give us example she’d audibly say something like “sore wa sanbyakuyen desu” with a distinct but very slight “y” consonant at the beginning of what should be just “en”.

   ​

   So yeah those are just a few of the things my brain has been swirling over since I started learning the language and I’m hoping someone knows of more reading to this end. I know it won’t help me learn the modern spoken language any, but half the fun for me is the history of the language so learning about the linguistics keeps my passion alive for learning the language itself.

4. Hello!

   I’m working through Genki 1 Lesson 7 and I came across this during an exercise question.

   The questions are referring to a picture of Sora’s family and this question was asked:

   お母さんは何をしていますか。

   The answer is: 高校の先生です。

   My question is: how would I know if お母さんは何をしていますか。is asking me “What is my mom doing (as in her job)?” or “What is my mom doing?”

   Would it just be context of the situation or context of what is said previously to know?

   Thanks! 😀

5. Wiktionary says “In modern Japanese, 讃 is *mostly* replaced by 賛” so what are the exceptions?

6. Just came back to learning Japanese, and I was looking for a tutor. I’m not too interested in iTalki just because I do want to be venturous with picking teachers lol It seems fun to search for teachers that I may or may not like. Leave any suggestions!

7. Is this a grammatically correct sentence?

   あれ　には　おれ　が　たべてみた｡

   I’m intending to say “I saw eating.”

   I’m only doing this because in English the preposition “saw” wildly changes the meaning of the sentence “I _ eating” compared to “I am eating” or “I was eating” because it changes who ate.

   So I started thinking about the equivalent grammar in Japanese and I realized it’s not clear to me how to say that. Can final verbs modify previous ones by changing their subjects? Rather than me eating and seeing, I want to say that I saw the action of eating.

   Do I need to say explicitly a demonstrative like:

   あれ　には　おれ　が　その人　を　たべて　を　みた｡

   In order to express this idea in Japanese?

   …

   Also, can you say:

   おれ　が　その人　を　たべる　を　みた｡

   “I saw them eat” ?

   Or should it be:

   おれ　が　その人　を　たべた　を　みた｡

   Can I use double ta’s for the verb conjugations in one sentence?