Japanese Language

Source: https://twitter.com/shamo0301/status/1456534675376119808 with an omake in the replies! 😊

Hello everyone, and welcome to our (kind of) daily JLPT thread! I'm sorry I couldn't post one of these for the past week. I was busy with work and couldn't get the time to prepare an entire review of a new structure. I'm back and hopefully will be posting these more regularly again. With that said, let's get started!

本日の文法：JLPTN3の「～（という）わけではない」

～わけではない Is a pretty common expression that you're going to find in a lot of media such as anime, manga, manzai and dramas. It's also used in everyday conversation, though, so you will get a lot of mileage out of this one.

For the most part, its meaning is close to "it's not like..." or "...doesn't mean that...", so basically, it's an expression for a partial negation of a statement. You'd use it when you don't want to fully deny something, but still want to point out that something isn't quite correct.

So a few example sentences would be

お金があるから、必ず幸せにるというわけではない。"Having money doesn't necessarily mean you will be happy."

成績が良かったから、他の生徒に教えるのが得意なわけではない。"Having good grades doesn't mean you will be good at teaching other students"

So right now there are a few additional things you may be wondering:

First of all, what is という in this instance, and why is it optional? Is it really always optional or does it have a more nuanced use most of the time?

Generally speaking, where you can use a simple わけではない, you can also use a というわけではない. They're grammatically equivalent in that sense. However, they do have a very slightly different meaning, where という gives the impression that you're taking a less opinionated and more objective approach to the conversation. You would use というわけではない when you perhaps want to make a general statement. Looking at our first example sentence, you will notice that we're talking about a general perspective "money doesn't mean happiness in general", and as such, it doesn't feel like you're talking about anyone in particular, and you're just making a statement. But for our second sentence, you may notice the situation is most likely referring to a successful student that has decided to teach the rest of his class, and is probably not great at it. In this case, leaving out という makes the comment slightly harsher, almost like a criticism to a specific person in question.

So do keep those differences in mind.

Also, it's important to point out that わけではない is a rather stiff way to use this expression, and you may want to use わけではありません in formal contexts, or わけじゃない in more casual contexts. わけではない sounds a bit academic, kind of like the one speaking is a figure of authority. The type of speech you would find in textbooks, newspapers, academic research and similar scenarios.

Some examples for different settings would be

この道まっすぐ行ったら、すぐに図書館に到着するというわけではありません。その前、公園も渡らなければなりません。"You will not reach the library immediately if you walk straight down this road. You have to cross the park first as well."

いや、別に俺の妹が天才なわけじゃないけど、結構頭がいいし、頑張れる人間だから。"Nah, it's not like my sister is a genius or anything, but she's pretty smart, and she works hard."

The first example could be someone giving directions to another person, presumably a complete stranger. In this scenario, using full-on 敬語 would probably be overkill, but using a more informal form would come off as rude. This is why a polite form like this one might work.

The second example is far more informal, but you will also encounter a lot of this in every day life. I've personally found myself speaking to many of my co-workers like this in the office. Definitely not to my boss or other superiors, though, so watch out for that.

I think that will be all for today! Hope everyone is having a nice day, getting ready for JLPT in only 12 days!

This one is a bit tricky, in fact. What it means to say in English is "when the coffee is empty, we won't refill it".

In Japanese, instead of こちらのコーヒーが it should say こちらのコーヒーは. With the は it's correctly implied that the こちらのコーヒーは refers to 終了になります, therefore "the coffee is over (when it's empty)". With the が, even though the mistake is obvious to an experienced speaker, it could be theoretically implied that こちらのコーヒーが refers to なくなり次第, therefore leaving the subject to 終了になります vague/dangling: "when the coffee is empty, [something else] is over".

この先 could be vaguely translated as "from this point onwards", which usually has a temporal meaning "from now on", but in this case it's meant to be spatial, "don't walk past this sign".

I don't know if the mods of /r/LearnJapanese planned on migrating their stuff over to a lemmy instance. They seem to be permanently private as of right now, so I just wanted to link to the internet archive of the subreddit's language learning resource list.

Keep in mind that the links on the internet archive lead to other archived sites. For example, archived google docs don't load properly, so after clicking on one, you will need to copy/paste the link into your address bar.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker nor fluent in Japanese. So please take everything said here with a grain of salt. Also, this is my first time creating a post on Lemmy, so I hope I don't make any mistakes.)

I made a post about this topic on Reddit some time ago. I think it's interesting enough to post about it here as well to get the community going.

The Wikipedia article on 無生物主語構文（むせいぶつしゅごこうぶん）describes a difference between Japanese and English (and probably many other languages') sentence structures.

While in English it is okay to have an inanimate subject in a sentence with a transitive verb, a direct translation into Japanese would sound unnatural.

Here is an example: The English sentence "This medicine will make you feel better." can be naturally translated as 「この薬を飲めば、気分が良くなりますよ。」

The inanimate subject in the English sentence ("this medicine") becomes an object in the Japanese sentence, and the "you", which is an object in the English sentence can be thought of as the subject in the Japanese sentence (which is not explicitly mentioned in this case).

Unfortunately, I don't have an easy to follow rule on how to translate such sentences into Japanese, but many examples are translated with simple conditional phrases or something like ～のため or ～のせいで.

Note that all of this only applies to 他動詞. 自動詞 on the other hand can take inanimate subjects without the problem of sounding unnatural.

A google search will yield many more examples.

グーグルで検索してみれば、例文がたかさん見つかれます。

It wanted to give out a message of freedom, but the mistranslation ended up meaning "we are free of charge".

Can't remember where I saw this picture, but it's definitely not one I took.

Doesn't seem to be available in zlib, and ones I've found online are in very low quality.

I love this podcast. They discuss a lot of the more mind-blowing quirks of language from a Japanese perspective. It has led to some truly mind-blowing moments for me, where I have understood English from a completely new perspective, and I really enjoy it.

The catch is that it gets pretty hard at times! But if you want to discuss it here, that could be pretty fun! This episode was particularly interesting.

For some additional context: they're discussing how amazing "vocabulary" is, and they start the podcast joking around a bit before getting into the subject matter. Hope some of our most daring members give it a try!

Hello everyone, and welcome to our daily JLPT thread! The July tests are coming up quickly, so I thought we could have a daily thread where we discuss questions, or talk about what we've been practicing. In this thread I will also be sharing one graded grammatical structure every day, so feel free to use it for your own reference.

本日の文法：JLPTN1の「～極（きわ）まりない」

～きわまりない Is a very interesting structure that could translate to "extremely" or "as can be".

A few example sentences for this could be

図書館で大声を出して騒ぐなんて、迷惑きわまりない。 "Speaking loudly and making a ruckus at a library is as annoying as it gets"

昨日、彼の態度は失礼きわまりない "His attitude yesterday was extremely rude"

This structure could be considered relatively similar in meaning to 「非常に」 though naturally the way it's built is different. In this case you mostly just attach it to a noun. That makes it relatively easy to use! Remember that this is a relatively literary or formal structure, so you probably won't be hearing it too much when speaking casually or colloquially.

Hope everybody has a very nice day studying for your upcoming test!