My pet peeve is `desune', `desune' used ad infinitum. I hate you `know too' in English, you know!

Yeah using proper grammar eliminates the need, in many situations, for a pronoun. Even in (especially in?) keigo. All the 〜してもらう／くれる and co or passive verb tense are good examples.

Jawful Wrote:Yeah using proper grammar eliminates the need, in many situations, for a pronoun. Even in (especially in?) keigo. All the 〜してもらう／くれる and co or passive verb tense are good examples.

Haha, that way of putting it makes it seem a bit like programming.

"Using goto() is only for n00bs who can't write proper structured programming!"

Tobberoth Wrote:

Jawful Wrote:Yeah using proper grammar eliminates the need, in many situations, for a pronoun. Even in (especially in?) keigo. All the 〜してもらう／くれる and co or passive verb tense are good examples.

Haha, that way of putting it makes it seem a bit like programming.

"Using goto() is only for n00bs who can't write proper structured programming!"

Hah, in a way I suppose so. But I just mean that's the way the average Japanese person speaks. The grammar they use determines the subject quite often.

Maybe were are confused, but I have never heard a native Japanese speaker say something like 私は行く. It would also be 俺 or 僕 (or 私は行きます). I am aware that the neutral way to say it is with no pronoun.

行くぞ！

I always wonder why Japanese store clerks say ありがとうございました instead of ありがとうございます. Sounds a bit like "Was thankful before, but not anymore" . It makes sense to me to use "was thankful" when describing a past event - but giving thanks face to face seems like it is present tense to me.

Also, the fact that particle に can mean both "to" and "from" depending on the verb... is a pain.

alyks Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:I dislike all english loanwords in Japanese. It's not that I'm against the act of loaning words, all languages do it. It just sounds so dumb in Japanese when you know English since they are completely destroying the pronounciation, so the words don't fit into Japanese and they don't fit into English. It's horrible. On the other hand, it's really useful when you're a beginner at Japanese, but still. I would prefer a Japanese language without em.

I agree completely with this. What's ridiculous is when I run into loanwords where I don't even know what the original English word is.

What I dislike is when there is a way to say something in Japanese and I use that word and get corrected with a loanword instead.

like this?

ドア instead of 戸
ライス instead of 御飯
ミルク instead of 牛乳

Does ライス mean something different to 御飯 though? Like the way it's served. "American style" rice.

That's what you may think (trying to be rational), but when I go to the ラーメン屋さん, they still call the white stuff they put in a bowl ライス and not 御飯。

Maybe it has to do with whether or not the meal is "foreign" or not... ...but I've given up trying to figure these things out - I just use whatever the natives use.

kfmfe04 Wrote:like this?

ドア instead of 戸
ライス instead of 御飯
ミルク instead of 牛乳

Yep.

グレープ instead of ぶどう

vosmiura Wrote:I always wonder why Japanese store clerks say ありがとうございました instead of ありがとうございます. Sounds a bit like "Was thankful before, but not anymore" . It makes sense to me to use "was thankful" when describing a past event - but giving thanks face to face seems like it is present tense to me.

I don't think "grateful" is the literal meaning of ありがとう. Actually, it kind of doesn't have a literal meaning... at least, it doesn't have a literal meaning than "goodbye" has a "literal meaning" in English -- ありがとう is a corruption of the adverb form ありがたく (from the adjective ありがたい) in the same way that "goodbye" is a corruption of "God be with you". In other words, it's a phrase that's associated more with a custom than any literal meaning, so the literal meaning of the phrase shouldn't bother you.

- Kef

thermal Wrote:Maybe were are confused, but I have never heard a native Japanese speaker say something like 私は行く. It would also be 俺 or 僕 (or 私は行きます). I am aware that the neutral way to say it is with no pronoun.

Maybe it's an issue of location. Where I lived in Tokyo, everyone used わたし all the time, except for this one guy from tohoku who said じぶん as a pronoun (which I came to like quite a bit). And I never talked to people in teineigo.

I'll ask some of my Japanese friends next time I talk to them, but I'm pretty sure わたし is the standard and 俺 and 僕 are the exceptions. That's also what our teachers taught us when the issue came up.

My wild guesses on ありがとう is that ありがたい means "thankful" and ありがとう means "to be made thankful". Just like 困る means "to be made bothered". Thus, when they say ありがとうございました it would be similar to saying... ありがった or something. "You made me thankful".

Right now, I've got a pet peeve against vocabulary like this:

貴い
尊い

both are pronounced とうとい and both mean precious or priceless.

I suspect the word とうとい existed in Japanese beforehand and somehow got bound to the two Kanji.

Perhaps there is a subtle difference between the two, but I don't have to energy to dig out the difference.

kfmfe04 Wrote:Right now, I've got a pet peeve against vocabulary like this:

貴い
尊い

both are pronounced とうとい and both mean precious or priceless.

I suspect the word とうとい existed in Japanese beforehand and somehow got bound to the two Kanji.

Perhaps there is a subtle difference between the two, but I don't have to energy to dig out the difference.

Priceless itself has two opposite meanings on english. Is this a 聴く, 聞く example?

貴い = 貴重
尊い = 尊敬
Hovering over an IME selection will give you a brief and usually pretty clear description of these things.

Personally, it's actually one of the things that I find most interesting in the language, heheh.

DrJones: Yeah.

Tobberoth Wrote:My wild guesses on ありがとう is that ありがたい means "thankful" and ありがとう means "to be made thankful". Just like 困る means "to be made bothered". Thus, when they say ありがとうございました it would be similar to saying... ありがった or something. "You made me thankful".

ありがとう does derive from ありがたい ("grateful") and is written in kanji as 有り難う, coming metaphorically from the idea that it is "difficult" to be placed under such an obligation (by whatever favor was done for you). And as to the form itself, "ありがとう" is the same adjective form as you see in おめでとう = めでたい ("joyous") and おはよう = はやい = 早い ("early"), i.e., an archaic/more formal form of the adjective which only hangs around in set phrases nowadays.

Actually, the ending ō in ohayō, omedetō, and arigatō is from the adverb form. For example, arigatō started as arigataku (from arigatai), as I mentioned earlier. The "k" in "arigataku" was dropped, forming "arigatau", and "au" in Classical Japanese became "ō" in Modern Japanese; this shift from "au" to "ō" probably has something to do with why ō is usually spelled おう instead of おお.

Also, the original meaning of arigatai (and hence arigatō) isn't clear to me. I know the word is associated with "difficult", but Wiktionary suggests that "arigatō" actually means "difficult-to-be" -- i.e., "arigatō gozaimasu" essentially means "It's rare that this sort of thing happens" (in a positive sense, of course).

But, as I said, all this doesn't really have any bearing on modern usage of the phrase. I doubt many native speakers know the history of the phrase (just as not many native English speakers know that "goodbye" comes from "God be with you").

- Kef

Isn't arigatou originally from portugese obrigado?

Nope. It appears in Japanese writing from before Japan ever had contact with Portugal.

Tobberoth Wrote:Isn't arigatou originally from portugese obrigado?

I thought that hoax was only known in Portuguese-speaking countries.

iSoron Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Isn't arigatou originally from portugese obrigado?

I thought that hoax was only known in Portuguese-speaking countries.

Well, my sisters boyfriends sister lives in Portugal, it's from that part of the "family" I learned about it

kfmfe04 Wrote:like this?

ドア instead of 戸

Haha. Funny you mention this, as the opposite happened to me while I was in Kyoto a few weeks ago. All of the announcements on trains/buses said "扉が閉まります" whereas in Kanto, things like train doors (heck even most any door) is just ドア. 扉 isn't often used, and the image is a bit different. Drove me nuts by the end of the trip.... I realize it's correct in the dialect there... but when you're used to Tokyo Japanese and the crazy mix of Koshu-ben and backwater West Kanto-ben that people speak where I live 扉 (among other things) sounded really out of place.

Damn dialects.


While we're on the topic of arigato/arigatai, I'd like to mention the three Japanese words that I hate... mostly because they're the three that (I feel) you can't really respond to/fight back if someone says them

1) せっかく
2) ありがたい　(especially when someone's making a request of you...)
3) しょうがない