Japanese Language

We also use 学部 in discussing majors. People ask colege students 何学部？ or 学部は？ It is as though "belonging to a department" is somehow culturally more important than "majoring in a certain area of study". Passive vs. active, sorta speak.

jkerian

@snailboat I thought Jurassic Park more or less pulled a geek troll there... wasn't it a Macintosh box (pre OSX, so it wasn't unix), showing a DOS or early windows screen that she identified as UNIX? Or am I thinking of another movie...

Anonymous

@jkerian I think it was IRIX, with some little-known graphical file browser as UI

Anonymous

One of us could ask a question on the site about 専門 and 専攻. It's great that we've got this discussion in chat, but people won't find be able to find our discussion very easily on Google (and of course, chat always contains some irrelevant messages :-)

Anonymous

But people who are confused about this sort of thing could find a question on Stack Exchange fairly easily, I think.

Anonymous

10:33 AM

My friend is taking a class that uses Jorden's Japanese: The Spoken Language as a textbook.

Anonymous

Her textbook introduced 〜し〜し this last month.

Tokyo Nagoya

Interesting. Hope she (or her teacher) does not elongate the shi. Doing that makes one sound very lazy --- makes one sound like a high schooler sitting and chatting in font of 7-11 after school.

Anonymous

Oh, I'll tell her that :-)

Tokyo Nagoya

Vowel length is SO imporant --- much more important than many learners ever get to find out..

Anonymous

It's difficult for me. I still mishear vowel length sometimes

Anonymous

10:39 AM

When I'm speaking, I sometimes draw things out because I'm trying to think of what to say next...

Tokyo Nagoya

I think I know what you mean. Did the same when learning English.

Except, it was not easy to do in English because words end in consonants. In Japanese, you can draw out the te, de, shi, ga, no, etc. --- in other words, ANY word.

Anonymous

2:01 PM

0

A: のに and のが. How do they differ in the context below?

The subject of ～だ in この本は読むのに～だ is "この本" and the subject of ～だ in この本は読むのが～だ is implicit "I". Grammtically この本は読むのに～だ = (この本は)(読むのに～だ) This book is ～ to read. and この本は読むのが～だ = (この本は読むのが)(～だ) It is ～ to read this book. (Hmm.. I can't find any differences between these English translatio...

Anonymous

jovanni wrote:
> この本は読むのが～だ
> = (この本は読むのが)(～だ)
> It is ～ to read this book.

Anonymous

I can't get my internal parser to work that way... Is that a contrastive は?

ちょこれーと

この本は・・・いや、

topical は　でええんちゃうかな

Anonymous

What I've read is that "topic は" can't appear in subordinate clauses (except in complements to a few verbs such as 知る or 言う)

ちょこれーと

It is~~ to read this bookは、

Anonymous

2:09 PM

That's why I guessed that ( ( ( この本は読む ) の ) が ) would contain "contrastive は"

ちょこれーと

直訳すると、この本を読むのは、とか

この本を読むことは・・とか

でも実際は『この本は、よみにくい」とか「この本は（子供には）難しい」とか

いうよね

『子供が読むには難しすぎる」とか

Anonymous

Uh-huh

ちょこれーと

「この本は、読むには易しいが、」とか

Now I'm reading the comments there

by いとうさん and とうきょうさん

ややこしい

紙に書いて、ちょっと整理しないと、まとまらないと思う・・

Ａｎｙｗａｙｓ

Anonymous

2:24 PM

Anyways :-)

ちょこれーと

この本は読むのに簡単だ sounds very odd

Anonymous

I was trying to figure out the grammar and all I came up with was gibberish again, hehe

ちょこれーと

I think「この本は簡単だ」is okay

Anonymous

This book is simple

Anonymous

[ この本は読むのに簡単だ ] sounds to me like "This book, although I read it, is simple" (but のに = "although" is wrong, right?)

Anonymous

2:29 PM

Tricky のに

Anonymous

It has to be the other のに

Anonymous

[ この本は読むのに簡単だ ] . . . This book is simple in reading @_@

Anonymous

My brain can't make sense of this sentence yet, hehe

Anonymous

I guess that's okay

Anonymous

Oh no, I'm writing more gibberish sentences

Anonymous

2:41 PM

I'm trying to come up with context that would make it make sense :-)

Anonymous

But I can't!

Anonymous

Oh, I gave up!

Anonymous

That question is too hard for me right now.

ちょこれーと

3:04 PM

@snailboat The のに is..

の=nominalizer に=for

かな

「この辞書は、品詞を調べるのに便利だ」is okay but
Is「この辞書は、品詞を調べるのが便利だ」okay...??

「彼女は料理するのに忙しい」means 「彼女は料理に忙しい」, right?

ssb

@ちょこれーと as a native what do you feel is the difference between 類義語 and 同義語？

Anonymous

Oh! I'm not a native, so I can't answer...

ssb

;)

ちょこれーと

日本語の「同義語」と、英語の「synonyms」って、違うみたいです

ssb

actually i was looking at that

Anonymous

3:11 PM

As a non-native, I think 同義語 are words with the same meaning, and 類義語 are similar (they're the same type of meaning)

ssb

'synonym' in Japanese is apparently 同義語

Anonymous

but 類義語 can be more different than 同義語

ssb

but someone said that Japanese people don't say 同義語

dictionaries, after all, show 類義語

then i looked here and found this: kotobank.jp/word/%E5%90%8C%E7%BE%A9%E8%AA%9E

Anonymous

Well, in English, synonym literally refers to words with the same (identical) meaning, but there are very few of those in English. Synonym turns out to be a little fuzzy

Anonymous

Because most "synonyms", if you think about it hard enough, you can figure out differences

ssb

3:13 PM

yeah that's what I just linked to

even though English dictionaries list synonyms

so apparently a 類義語 is a 'quasi-synonym'

Anonymous

2

A: Do synonyms exactly stand for the same

The late linguist Dwight Bolinger famously wrote in Aspects of Language (1968): A difference in syntactic form always spells a difference in meaning. To this day, many linguists take this as a basic assumption about language. One linguist, Arnold Zwicky, refers to this rule as Bolinger's D...

Anonymous

First two quotes, hehe

Anonymous

I want 類義語 to be thesauronym

Anonymous

But that word doesn't exist yet.

ssb

now it does

Anonymous

3:20 PM

Yay!

Anonymous

Also, sorry for intruding on the question :-)

ssb

oh, no

intrusions are always welcome!

it was an interesting intrusion

ちょこれーと

quasi-synonymって、日本語の類義語よりちょっと離れてて

日本語の類義語って、えいごのsynonymに近いみたいな

こないだ、たまたま調べてて、なんかそんな感じでした

ssb

but I guess the idea is that technically synonyms don't exist

Anonymous

That's because we use synonym loosely in English, isn't it? We say "synonym" means "has the same meaning", but really it just means "kindasorta has the same meaning"

Anonymous

3:22 PM

Although to me, lots of words are synonyms because I don't know the difference :-)

Anonymous

Basically any word for a polearm is a synonym in my mind.

ちょこれーと

そうそう、その、"kindasorta" な感じがあるので、類義語も同義語もsynonym扱いに・・・

Anonymous

Hehe!

ちょこれーと

たぶん、同義語っていうと、interchangeablyでないといけない、って思うかも

「彼女は料理をするのが忙しい」・・・???

どうでしょうねえ・・

「彼女は勉強に忙しい」「彼女は勉強が忙しい」両方いけそうですね

Anonymous

I was trying to make a ウナギ文 out of 「この本は読むのに簡単だ」

ちょこれーと

3:29 PM

×この本は読むのに簡単だ --you can say 本を読む --本 is object of 読む
○この本は～を調べるのに便利だ -- not 本を調べる but 本で調べる -- 本 is not object of 調べる

。。。だからかな、と思ってさ・・・

伊藤さんがコメントで言ってるのって、こういう話かとおもって

眠いので明日考えましょう

but you can say この本は、子供が読む（の）に「は」難しい

「には」sounds natural but not のに

Anonymous

彼女は料理をするには忙しい？

Anonymous

I'm still working on my project (that has nothing to do with Japanese)

Anonymous

So my brain is occupied :-(

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