Daily Thread: simple questions, comments that don’t need their own posts, and first time posters go here (March 18, 2024)

12 comments

1. is it 一番早いのスロット or 一番早いスロット?

   一番早いのスロットが今日5.30-6pmですけども、大丈夫ですか？

2. In recent one piece gear 5 episodes, luffy says:

   “kore GA ore no saiko chiten da”.

   Why isn’t it “kore WA” instead of “kore GA”?

3. how do i search online for 「言葉の」使い方？

   for instance, im trying to find out the use cases for when i can use それはそう – whether with friends/colleagues/customers. under 使い方, it appears to be sentence examples, which describe how i can use it in a sentence, instead of who i can use the sentence for.

4. I’m working on a Dark Mode Theme (CSS swap) for goo辞書 which will be employed using this plugin: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpeebahjckkjfobafhncgmne

   Just want to get some initial feed back on first impressions, it’s far from done but I did a lot of ground work already: https://i.imgur.com/QICfgNI.png

   I’ll publish it to the repository when I am done and will release it to community. I was tired of bright background blinding me.

5. Confused about the sentence

   学級委員長なんだからやっといてくれよ~ たのんだぞ!

   Its specifically やっといてくれよ that I can’t seem to pick out the individual words unconjugated.

   Any help is appreciated.

6. Hi, so a question about potential forms of verbs. I don’t know if this question has much to do with understanding Japanese or is just fiddling unnecessarily with technicalities, though.

   So, what I believe to be true is that to express the potential form you just apply れる・られる to the 未然形, but often more idiomatically for godan verbs in particular is to use the “potential form”. An example I’ve actually discussed here before is instead of 登られる, say 登れる. What I’m not quite settled on is that it seems to me that these “potential forms” are actually at least in some cases derivative words with their own distinct meanings.

   According to tofugu, the potential form can be formed from any verb.

   >([article](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese-grammar/verb-potential-form-reru/)) For godan verbs, replace the ending vowel from the う column on the kana chart to its corresponding え column kana and add る. So if the original ending is 〜う, the new ending will be 〜える. If it’s む, your new potential ending will be 〜める, and so on.

   However, below is a list of non-る godan verbs which I’m not sure about because I think they are more commonly thought of as transitive/intransitive pairs. If I check [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io), it claims that the verbs on the right are all potential forms of verbs on the left, but only the stared (*) examples are listed by goo.

   浮かぶ　→　浮かべる

   続く　→　続ける

   *付く　→　付ける

   育つ　→　育てる　

   *立つ　→　立てる

   Even though goo lists 付ける and 立てる as potential forms, it also lists those as words themselves, neither of which has a definition similar to 付く・立つことができある, and in fact させる appears in the definitions of all the potential forms quite a bit and I’m not sure that’s a coincidence since it looks like the process from going from intransitive to causative like in [this example from kokubunpo](https://www.kokugobunpou.com/%E5%8A%A9%E5%8B%95%E8%A9%9E/%E3%81%9B%E3%82%8B-%E3%81%95%E3%81%9B%E3%82%8B/#gsc.tab=0).

   メンバーが 集まる。→　キャプテンが メンバーを 集まらせる。　≒　キャプテンが メンバーを 集める。

   So where I’m a little lost is **are the listed ける・べる・てる-ending “potential forms” best thought of as potential or causative verbs, or may there be times when it is ambiguous**? I have to admit that before I decided to stop being lazy and start cataloguing how the verbs transformed, I hadn’t paid attention to how they worked in my reading, but I’m not sure how well I’d be able to differentiate either way.

   Incidentally, this little investigation made me think about the relation between intransitivity, causation, and を, and why some sources call it the “accusative” particle.

   Indicentally #2, I actually started this investigation by looking into the grammar behind 私に何ができる and ended up finding an interesting article about the use of が vs を with potential verbs and how it’s changing over time if anyone is interested: [https://kotobaken.jp/qa/yokuaru/qa-51/](https://kotobaken.jp/qa/yokuaru/qa-51/) .

   *EDIT: formatting*

7. How do you minimize bad writing habits when writing without a teacher or someone who can correct you?

   For context:
   I’ve recently gone back to study Japanese. I am slower when writing and reading vs. speaking, so I decided to address those and start from the basics.

   I was practicing how to write が when I noticed that the way it’s written in my reference book (Japanese from Zero! 1) and how Japanese people actually write が are different (youtube). Not vastly but noticeably.

   I would not dare say that any of these two are wrong; I’m just starting and am no expert. The difference, however, does get me confused. I want to write properly and minimize bad writing habits (that can be difficult to unlearn eventually).

   Hence my question.

8. Apart from 硝子 being pronounced ガラス, are there other words where you write the original kanji but use the loanword pronunciation?

9. after finishing genki 2 i was planning on going straight to quartet 1 for grammar, is there a textbook i should go over before then or is it ok to make this jump?

10. I have a question regarding this anime ending song: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgrztAzm_vM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgrztAzm_vM)

    Some of the audio doesn’t seem to match up with the lyrics displayed. At 3:30, I don’t hear “boku dake” and at 3:43 I don’t hear “fumidasu” or “boku wo.” Is there a dialect at play here, or are the lyrics just not accurate? Thanks in advance.

11. want to study with a friend – need tips for people who struggle with self-studying

    heya
    so me and my best friend have prior experience with formal japanese classes that we had to abandon for various reasons, i took it for about a year and a half and she took it for a couple months. besides that, we’ve been surrounded by the culture through fandoms, hobbies and the such for several years so we’re not total beginners but we definitely prefer to (re)start from the basics to polish things up

    we’re both pretty bad at self studying because of adhd, lack of driving motivation and struggling to keep a steady routine for a longer period of time, its really not just a “if you wanted you would” so please try to be understanding… so we thought we could try studying together (remotely bc we live in different countries) in order to keep each other motivated and have fun with it since we’ll get to share our doubts and progress

    self studying can be overwhelming due to the immense variety of materials out there which have been the cause of my many failed attempts at doing this alone in the past because I’d get caught up in trying different things and never sticking to one…

    for starters, since we both have Genki, i thought we could go over it together with the help of Tokini Andy’s genki lessons videos since that seemed the most simple approach, but id like to know if anyone has suggestions… and apart from that, how can we supplement genkis lessons? like i said, i know there’s a ton of guides out there but it becomes overwhelming not knowing which to pick and trying to make a plan on my own… so it would be really helpful if someone could help me out

    and sorry if this is too much 🙇‍♀️

12. Is there a Japanese-equivalent of Google Ngram? Specifically for comparing frequency of phrases