Japanese Language

12:26 AM

I've confused myself. Dainichi helped point me in the right direction.

My sample verb form of 食べれば was not from 食べれる -- what I get for trying to describe Japanese while thinking in English, perhaps. o.O

@snailboat, I think now that you were trying to point out that 食べる itself is 一段 so the conditional ば form is 食べれば, while the conditional ば form for 食べれる would be 食べれれば.

Anyway, I'm clearly having a stellar Monday.

Rilakkuma

1:24 AM

Sometimes I feel I would never be able to speak Japanese if learning only by books for English speakers. Somehow they feel overcomplicated to extreme.

Anonymous

2:24 AM

@Rilakkuma I think any learner of Japanese needs to be familiar with the basics of Japanese school grammar (that is, grammar as taught in Japan) just so they can use dictionaries and other Japanese-language resources based on that system

Anonymous

If it is not wrong, how is 忘れれれば pronounced? Specifically, where is/are the pitch accent(s) placed? All natural and/or correct words and phrases should come with a natural pronunciation. — 非回答者 29 mins ago

Anonymous

I don't know why, but I just assumed it would be LHHHHL

Anonymous

Now I don't know why I assumed that :-)

Rilakkuma

2:51 AM

I'd say HLHHL

but it is regional probably

while traveling around Japan I've noticed pitch accents vary wildly and with great amplitude so probably it is not really reasonable to stick to the "TV accent" unless one learns from abroad

for the sake of education it is worth to know though :)

Rilakkuma

3:06 AM

Also, traditionally Japanese is divided into four dialect groups - Eastern, Western, Ryukyu and Hachijo

I am not trying to disprove it but based on my own observations from the point of pronunciation Japan is rather divided into Northern, Inner, Western coast, Eastern and southern coast and Seto coast pronunciation groups. <-- warning, original research!

which means people in, say, Hokkaido will sound somewhat similar to people in Fukushima, while people in Tokyo (let's ignore the fact there are many people from other regions) and Kanagawa will speak somewhat similar to people from Ibaraki to Shizuoka

...and people from Shiga will sound quite similar to people from Shikoku, especially Ehime, Kagawa, etc.

Choko

「忘れ・・・」は、「HL..」では始まらないですね・・

LHH...になるでしょう

Rilakkuma

全く地方によると思います。

Choko

貼れた

Rilakkuma

正式な発音に自信がないけど。(笑)

んが :D

Choko

かわいすぎて食べられない！

Rilakkuma

3:19 AM

でしょう。

Choko

かわいすぎて食べれれれない！

Rilakkuma

LHHHL - 確かに。

Choko

"れれれば"でぐぐると、 274,000 件もヒットするｗｗｗｗ

みんな間違ってるか、ふざけてるみたいよ

Anonymous

@Choko Aww!

Rilakkuma

そろそろお昼の時間。

Choko

3:25 AM

私もです。

Rilakkuma

んが。

Choko

いびき？

Rilakkuma

ううん。「んが」ってはゴロゴロの音。

外は暑すぎて出たくない。ンガ。

Anonymous

4:16 AM

@Rilakkuma You don't think a learner could try to learn the NHK accent while living in Tokyo?

Anonymous

(I mean, of course it's difficult for many learners to get pitch accent right, regardless of what sort of accent you're learning)

Anonymous

Obviously you'll hear other sorts of pronunciation in Tokyo, but don't you get an ear for what sounds "standard" and what doesn't?

Tim

5:23 AM

I just chanced upon this paper in English. It gives a summary of how ra-nuki kotoba (with academic references) are used on pages 13-15. (link below) For me the most interesting part of this discussion is how some of us probably have not been conjugating the potential form with the conditional form correctly, even for everyday verbs (bad learning? / bad habit? / not commonly used?/ in reality such expressions such as 「食べらればよい」 get used anyway?)

lup.lub.lu.se/luur/…

Rilakkuma

@snailboat to be honest the only case I hear "the standard" is in the news and while riding train, short as that. Most people use sort of local accents which are different...

Tim

(continued from my last post)

It refers to “ra-nuki” as “-re-form”. Some its points on pages 13-25 were quote/unquote:

It only occurs with potential forms of some verbs (I think we knew that)

The most common verbs are, 食べる ‘to eat’, 来る ‘to come’, 見る ‘to see’, and 起きる ‘to get up’, all of which appear frequently in casual speech. The fact that the “-re form” is used very selectively suggests that at its current level, the language change is occurring on individual word level rather than grammatical level.

Some (not all) of characteristics proposed by other research included:

Anonymous

5:45 AM

@Tim It does seem like several people here have been leaving out the last れ before ば

Anonymous

I have to admit I was surprised

Anonymous

I went and double-checked in all my books to try to figure out why someone would do that :-)

Anonymous

I mean, if I had it wrong, it wouldn't be very surprising. I've made a lot of mistakes :-)

Anonymous

@Tim Thank you for the link! It turns out I had that file on my hard drive already, so I must have seen it once

Anonymous

I spent a lot of time trying to organize the linguistics papers on my computer, which I have hundreds of

Anonymous

5:48 AM

But unfortunately when you download them they tend to have rather unhelpful filenames and I've lost some

Anonymous

It's too bad the author of the thesis chose to work with such a small survey

Anonymous

They have only 22 respondents

Tim

@snailboat I can recall struggling and even chuckling over it once upon a time but I thought I had got it right for common verbs - now I am not so sure.

(Yes I noticed 22 did not sound representative even for one region like Tokyo. It would be difficult to do a national survey that was representative, even for one age group.)

Anonymous

@Tim Have you heard of the Harvard Dialect Survey?

Anonymous

They put it on the internet and let anyone respond

Anonymous

5:57 AM

They got far, far more results than any normal academic research project

Anonymous

You might consider some of the data questionable in one way or another (I do) but the fact is the sheer volume of the data makes it a pretty exciting project! :-)

Anonymous

www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_15.html

Tim

I try not to use ra-nuki because (I think) it is easier for others to recognize but when I asked some people it sounded like their use depended on the situation. They might use 食べられない and 食べれる (at different times, depending on context).

Anonymous

I don't know if there's been anything comparable for Japanese, but I wonder if anyone's put together a website like that and made maps

Rilakkuma

/me been taught they actually have different context

Anonymous

6:01 AM

Well, the one without ら is a short potential form

Tim

I meant 食べられない in its potential use.

Anonymous

@Tim That might make an interesting question for the site :-)

jkerian

yeah... just looking at the 'aunt' case... my pronunciation is all over the place... not nearly so organized as either case f or g

Anonymous

I say ænt, but I knew people where I grew up who said ɑːnt

Rilakkuma

I say ōnt, but I am not native speaker after all.

Anonymous

6:06 AM

It never occurred to me that the distribution might be more complicated than that

Anonymous

@Rilakkuma What is your notation?

Anonymous

Mine is IPA

Rilakkuma

I am struggling to find the appropriate sound for "ō" in IPA... do you know how Swedish å is pronounced? Something like that, but longer.

Anonymous

Possibly /ɔː/ or /oː/?

Rilakkuma

should be /ɔːnt/

Anonymous

6:11 AM

There is a good IPA chart here web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm with better pronunciation recordings than Wikipedia

Rilakkuma

wow, thank you.

Tim

I am not sure I'd get much from it. I think you have to learn a lot these things naturally. Perhaps from the first we should have observed that 忘れる is unlikely to be conjugated into 忘れられれば in the first place and らー抜き is a colloquialism. It reminds me when I first learnt adjectives　（形容詞）I was told not to say 楽しくないor 楽しくなかった so I learnt not to (but I see the conversation has moved on...)

Anonymous

And an IPA keyboard here westonruter.github.io/ipa-chart/keyboard to help with typing the special symbols

2

Anonymous

@Tim You were taught not to say 楽しくない?

Tim

@snailboat Perhaps it was just 楽しくなかった

Rilakkuma

6:15 AM

why not?

Tim

楽しくない feels ok.

Rilakkuma

Grammatically both are fine I think. In the actual life I would rather say 微妙 than 楽しくない.

Tim

I showed my early text book to some colleagues. They looked at the conjugations and observed "we don't say that". it was not for grammatical reasons.

jkerian

hmm... I don't think there's anything wrong with 楽しくなかった... but perhaps you were told to avoid using it where we'd say "it wasn't fun" in english?

Tim

Grammatically it is fine, and I suppose in the the right context it has its place, but in practice you are less likely to hear it because people will say it differently.

Rilakkuma

6:22 AM

recently got very nice practice on this. Went to a restaurant notorious for average-tasting food. After the meal the waitress asked お味はどうでしたか？ Answering 美味しかったです！ would be a lie, answering 微妙 would be insulting.

in that particular case I did not want to be sweet by telling a lie and decided to say what I think about the food without actually saying it. The best I could figure out in those few seconds was まぁ、美味しかったです。

what would you say in this case?

Tim

In this case I was not being picked up for "literally translating from English" - they were just looking at my early text book. But, yes, there are time when an English phrase such as "it was not fun" comes into my head, followed by a literal translation such as 楽しくなかった, and then I have pause to try come with a more natural Japanese alternative..

(editing problem)

I think in both English and Japanese we try to lie but if the person seemed receptive then I might say something like "You customers here like it well done don't they?"

Anonymous

I have never tried to tell anyone at a restaurant that their food was bad

Tim

And then follow it gently with some like "I come from xxxxx so I am used to being done rare (or whatever)"

@snailboat Yes I think we normally try to lie.

Anonymous

Not me.

Anonymous

6:37 AM

Hmm. Maybe I would.

Anonymous

I think though that I would simply not comment on the food

Anonymous

Unless I were forced to do so

Rilakkuma

when you are explicitly asked I think it is great chance to have a comment.

Anonymous

Sure.

Anonymous

@Tim I think you're more socially aware than I am. Thinking about it, I've come to the conclusion that you're right. :-)

Rilakkuma

6:47 AM

I think in Japan being passive aggressive is not always culturally right thing to do.

The society is quite hierarchical and doing some pedagogy (in particular setting only) on others is not frowned upon.

and although no one is being straight aggressive saying "まずい" it is often perfectly fine to point at flaws so that a restaurant can improve.

Anonymous

8:58 AM

There are 13 people in here! :-)

Anonymous

Is that our new record? :-)

Rilakkuma

:)

jkerian

"we're all here, because we're not all there"

Rilakkuma

9:37 AM

ぼー

Choko

１３！？

へ～

Choko

9:57 AM

There is a difference between 「これば」 and 「くれば」. In the example in the OP, 「くれば」 would be "if you had come", whereas 「これば」 would be "if you could have come". — Maikeru 6 hours ago

ちょっと何言ってるかわかんない

Anonymous

10:11 AM

I don't know either

Anonymous

We've had a lot of confusion this week on 〜ば on Japanese.SE

Rilakkuma

10:24 AM

Maikeru probably meant これれば not これば.

Anonymous

Four people this week on Japanese.SE have left out that れ :-)

Rilakkuma

considering the discussion about 食べれれれれ...n...れます this is the week of れ.

Tim

1:28 PM

@Choko me too

Tim

1:43 PM

@Rilakkuma I think Maikeru is talking about the conditional (くらば, if you come）vs "conditional - potential" (こられれば, if you can come) but as you say, he is in (good company in) rare-nuki mode instead of ra-nuki. (Not sure if this is a real ra-nuki but I avoid them anyway.)

@Rilakkuma i look forward to when we tackle 使役and 使役受け身

@snailboat That's funny. When you said "not me" I began to have second thoughts too.

Choko

2:27 PM

@Rilakkuma 日本のレストランでそういうの、聞かれたことないので、なんと言ったらいいかなあ・・

イギリスでは必ず聞きに来るね、Is everything all right? みたいなかんじで・・・

あれって、味を聞いてるのかどうか知らないけど。。。

ここで、いろんな意見が・・・detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1342600643

やっぱり、みんな困るんだね・・・

@非回答者　さんならどうする？

非回答者

なにが？

Choko

レストランでお味はいかがでしたかって聞かれて、まずかったら？

非回答者

まずかったとは言えないな

Choko

そうねえ・・・

非回答者

2:42 PM

多分ネガティブなことは何も言わない。よほど気づいたことがなければ。

Choko

「可もなく、不可もなく」みたいな？

非回答者

いや、「おいしかった」という。

Choko

「まあまあでした」とかでも、失礼になるね・・・

非回答者

言えないでしょ。

Choko

「価格相応でした」もあかんな・・

非回答者

2:45 PM

おもろ

Choko

『お味はいかがでしたか？』『普通。』←やーさんみたいないかついにーちゃんなら言えそう

非回答者

せやな。しろとでは言われへん。

Choko

難しいね！！

非回答者

聞く方も決して相手が正直に答えてくるとは思ってないと思うけど？

Choko

なるほど・・・

あっちも社交辞令か・・・

非回答者

2:57 PM

でも関西って、店側からきかれなくても、「うまかったわ」言うお客さんおるって聞いたけど、ホンマ？あれ東京ではほとんどあらへんねん。（関西弁で関西のこと聞くのもなん‌やけど・・・）

Choko

私は言わないです・・・

「ごちそうさまでした」だけ言います

非回答者

そういう場面見かける？

Choko

う～ん・・・聞いた記憶がないですね

非回答者

そうなんや。「秘密のケンミンショー」で、久本とか、ほかの関西人もそう言ってたんだけど。

Choko

へえ・・・

非回答者

3:01 PM

で、それ聞いてワシも「関西人に生まれてよかった～」言うて・・

Choko

ファミレスとかチェーン店ではいわないでしょうね、対応がこっちもあっちもマニュアルだから。

機械的っていうか

非回答者

せやろな。

家族経営の小さい店ならあるかもな

常連なら、特に。

Choko

そうそう、そういうの、減ってるし

非回答者

あかん、べっどたいむや。

ほなおやすみ。

Choko

まあ、こんな時間

おやすみやす

Rilakkuma

3:13 PM

@Choko 僕も聞かれてちょっとびっくりしたけど、モンスーンって変わったレストランでしょう。

モンスーンはまずいて有名だから味はどうだったのは聞かれるがちょっと冗談っぽかった。

Choko

へえ・・モンスーンってイギリスの服屋さんなら知ってる・・・

Rilakkuma

日本では何処にもある。チェーン店でしょう。

monsoon-cafe.jp これ

ZestとLa Bohemeも同じ会社です。

確かに、何処にもあるのはちょっと言い過ぎだった。東京以外大阪の茶屋町にしかないみたい。

ま、もし東京に来るならモンスーンはまずいっす！ :D

Choko

おお・・・モンスーンと言う名前だけあって、

エスニック料理・・・

私、京都にいるんで、京都にはないのね

Rilakkuma

3:29 PM

タイ料理に様に作っている。ちゃんとしたタイ料理とは言えない。

それは良かった！要らない。

Choko

あはは

Rilakkuma

５年前位、タイ料理ブームが始まった時点にモンスーンはかなり流行っていた。どこにもタイ料理がなかったからね。

その後タイ人がやっているレストランがいっぱい出来てみんな本物の味が分かって、モンスーンの時代は終わりっ。

京都へいっぱい行った事あるけど意外と名物と言うものをあんまり食べた事はないです。

八つ橋は別。 :D

Choko

そおねえ、京都って、そんなに、『すごくおいしい名産品』って、ないよね・・

大阪とか名古屋とかのほうが、面白い食べ物がありそう

Rilakkuma

豆腐は有名と聞いた。後、京野菜でしょう。

Choko

ああ、そうねえ。。。

Rilakkuma

3:34 PM

京野菜は近所のスーパーで売ってて凄く人気です！

フムフム。。。大阪と言えばたこ焼きとお好み焼きしか出てこない

名古屋と言えば、手羽先？あ、！味噌煮込みうどんは最高。

Choko

まあ、「他府県の豆腐・野菜と比べて、京都の豆腐･野菜が特においしい」、ってことはないね。。。

Rilakkuma

美味しいと思う。見た目も奇麗。

Choko

そうそう、量は少なくて、見た目だけ。

Rilakkuma

特に茸はとても元気で大好き。

東京では殆ど東北と長野等の野菜しか売っていないから、京野菜はある意味特別です。

果物は殆ど山梨。

お肉は殆ど「国産」(怪しい）

3 to 5 business days

holy hell... 心中 = suicide pact

couldn't have guessed from the kanji

oops sorry for disrupting

[exeunt]

Choko

3:55 PM

心中(しんじゅう)・・・一緒に死ぬこと
心中(しんちゅう)・・・気持ち

心中 has two readings

なんで、「心中」(しんじゅう)が、「一緒に死ぬこと」って意味になったんでしょうねえ？

@Rilakkuma 「国産牛」と「和牛」は、違うからね・・和牛は高いね・・

Rilakkuma

もちろんです。

Rilakkuma

4:31 PM

んが。スイカ食べた〜

Anonymous

6:53 PM

Is んが your catchphrase?

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