Hello all, I’m currently trying to summarize and comment on a short story in Japanese, and I have the following sentence so far: たいてい、童話に教訓があって、この物語の教訓について、「貪欲な人はぜんぜん栄えません。本当の愛の方が強いです」と思います。After writing this, I popped it into Google Translate (only to see if they put a second 句点 in the brackets or not!) but noticed that it phrased the latter part of this sentence as 「貪欲な人はぜんぜん栄えません。本当の愛の方が強いです」**だ**と思います。I know it’s Google Translate and should be taken with an entire spoonful of salt, but I can’t help but feel, since I *am* expressing a rather complete idea as a thought, and saying that this *is* the 教訓, which is a noun, that this might actually be more correct. I’m sure the sentence is unnatural anyway, but I’m not a very advanced learner, so I’m still at the stage of angsting over pesky particles ;P Any help would be appreciated <3
1 comment
* 愛が強いと思う: I think that love prevails. (Implying that you find it too affectionate for a fairy tale how it tells some lesson.)
* 愛が強いだと思う: I think it (the lesson) is “Love prevails”.
Besides polite forms are unfairly inserted in an indirect quote like 栄えません and 強いです, the major problem of your sentence is absence of topics. You need to topicalize some points like this: たいてい童話に**は**教訓があって、この物語の教訓について**は**.