Hi, new here. First, I want to thank to this forum and people, it has helped me to keep motivated, and most importantly, to finaly focus. I am now drilling kanji with kanjidamage (I like it a lot), and I am trying to read things that keep me motivated. And while reading merrily I stumbled on this phrase:

山岳部、緑の多い山々の上に広がる空だった。

The problem is the first word, 山岳部, whose meaning appears as 'mountaineering club' everywhere I searched, still, it does not make sense in this context at all (it is describing a landscape). I have done some research, and a non-official translation of the source translates it as mountanious region.

Perhaps is that I can't manage to find a decent dictionary?

Either way, 部 is just a suffix. So it could mean (roughly speaking) 'mountain club' or it could mean 'mountain area'. I suppose all your dictionaries are using the same EDICT file for their definitions.

The primary definition seems to be mountainous region.

http://dic.search.yahoo.co.jp/search?p=%...l&ei=UTF-8

さんがく‐ぶ【山岳部】-日本国語大辞典
〔名〕「さんがくちたい（山岳地帯）」に同じ。＊最後の旅〔１９６９〕〈加賀乙彦〉「ラジオは山岳部の雪を予想していたけれど」学校、会社などで、登山を愛好するものの集まり。登山部。＊西堀南極越冬隊長〔１ ...

Came across this line in a game :
もしかしたら…まだ何か言いたかったんだろうか…。

Seeing how the line refers to another person's desire to speak, shouldn't it be using たがる instead?
もしかしたら…まだ何か言いたがったんだろうか…。

The underlying reason beyond the use of the たがる grammar is that in Japanese you can never speak in such a way that you know what another person wants to do. However, you can say that someone said they want to do something, or they seem like they want to, and so on.　　There are multiple ways to get around it,　たがる being just one of them.

So, the だろうか (with emphasis from the もしかしたら, though it's not necessary) is accomplishing that. The sentence is "I wonder if it could be that he still had something he wanted to say?" As you can see, it's not saying what another person wants to do, it's just speculating, so it's okay.

And in fact, using たがる might change the meaning because it would indicate that he was showing in some way that he wanted to say something.

If you were taught that －がる is just the general way to use たい forms with other people, you should unlearn that.

yudantaiteki Wrote:If you were taught that －がる is just the general way to use たい forms with other people, you should unlearn that.

Yes. This is one of the things Tae Kim teaches that is just wrong. たがる means something else, and is almost certainly not what you mean. There is nothing incorrect or rude (in informal settings) about using たい for someone else's desire if you're asking a question or hypothesising.

fakewookie Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:If you were taught that －がる is just the general way to use たい forms with other people, you should unlearn that.

Yes. This is one of the things Tae Kim teaches that is just wrong. たがる means something else, and is almost certainly not what you mean. There is nothing incorrect or rude (in informal settings) about using たい for someone else's desire if you're asking a question or hypothesising.

Where in 『Showing outward signs of an emotion using 「～がる」』 does it say がる is just たい for other people... ?
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/signs

Or perhaps you meant the 『Verbs you want to do with 「たい」』,
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/desire
Where it clearly says "Of course, if you're asking a question, you can just use the 「たい」 form because you're not presuming to know anything."

what exactly does 硬い言葉 refer to?

Someone advised me on Lang-8 to use けど　instead of が because が is 硬い言葉. I assumed this was to do with the subject matter, so it sounded out of place because i wasn't talking about something formal.

But then i wrote something more formal and used it, and it was corrected to けど　again. This time, it was because i hadn't put the ます ending before the が.

Anyway, so is 硬い言葉 just refering to the ます ending? Or is it the type of thing you're writing as well?

Hope you can help! thanks

IceCream Wrote:so is 硬い言葉 just refering to the ます ending? Or is it the type of thing you're writing as well?

I think 硬い言葉 refers to more 'formal' words and phrasing in general, so it includes word choices like やや vs 少し as well. So it's not subject related particularly, but it is wider in scope than just masu/plain-form distinctions. If you look at the chiebukuro questions tagged 硬い言葉 you see things like "what's a politer/more formal way to say 打ち合わせ?".

My guess is that maybe the person correcting you felt that this particular bit of the sentence was out of place with the rest of your choices of grammar/vocab/phrasing. (Or possibly they think formal writing on lang8 is a bit out of place in general? I'm not really familiar with what people use it for.)

IceCream Wrote:what exactly does 硬い言葉 refer to?

You find in some grammar books, f.e., too:
～際に　〔「～とき」の硬い表現〕. As pm said, I also guess it means formal and on top of that, that it is used as an expression only in very few/special occassions.

彼はうわさを打ち消したわよ。

This is a sentence in the Core6k deck. Supposedly its for the word "打ち消し" however based on the た at the end, I'm thinking the entry is completely wrong and it should be 打ち消す. Am I right?

I mean, 打ち消し and 打ち消す are the same word, just in grammatically different forms (noun vs verb). If you were making a learning resource you would think you would choose an example sentence in the same part of speech as the entry... so in that sense it's a mistake on their part. But it's not exactly 'completely wrong.' 打ち消す　is just a step away from 打ち消し, and 打ち消した is just a step away from 打ち消す.

My suspicious suggest that 「彼はうわさを打ち消したわよ。」 should be either 「彼はうわさを打ち消すわよ。」 or 「彼はうわさを打ち消したわ。」.　I just can find any example of ～たわよ／～だわよ. Maybe more information could be provided.

打ち消したわよ is correct as it is (Core 6000 also has audio read by a native speaker to prove it)

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:

fakewookie Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:If you were taught that －がる is just the general way to use たい forms with other people, you should unlearn that.

Yes. This is one of the things Tae Kim teaches that is just wrong. たがる means something else, and is almost certainly not what you mean. There is nothing incorrect or rude (in informal settings) about using たい for someone else's desire if you're asking a question or hypothesising.

Where in 『Showing outward signs of an emotion using 「～がる」』 does it say がる is just たい for other people... ?
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/signs

Or perhaps you meant the 『Verbs you want to do with 「たい」』,
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/desire
Where it clearly says "Of course, if you're asking a question, you can just use the 「たい」 form because you're not presuming to know anything."

Oh, maybe it wasn't Tae Kim.

「つもり」と言う文法の使い分けの質問がありますので、説明してくれると嬉しいです。
次の例文の気持ちで、違いがありませんか？

行かないつもりです。
行くつもりはない。

私の心は前者の方は「絶対に行きたくない」と言う感じがします。
後者の方はあんなに行きたくない感じがないと思います。
たとえ、行くつもりはなかったけど、友人にそそのかされて、結局行った。

当たりますか？逆ですか？

それに、この分はどんな気持ちを持ているですか？同じですか？
行くつもりがない

確信はないけどあなたのおっしゃった通り、私もちょっとニュアンスが微妙に違う気がする。でもなんとなく後者のほうが行くことに対しての嫌感があると思う。前者はただ既に別の予定を立ててるから行かないことを伝えるのに対して、後者は行けるけど別に行く理由はないみたいな気がする。面白くなさそうだからとか

なんかもふもふしてそうだもん！

I can't figure this one out. I know もふもふ is like fluffiness, but the grammar confuses me. Unless I'm just making it way too difficult. >_< Which is very possible.

TheSlyPig Wrote:なんかもふもふしてそうだもん！

I can't figure this one out. I know もふもふ is like fluffiness, but the grammar confuses me. Unless I'm just making it way too difficult. >_< Which is very possible.

These kinds of short all-kana casual sentence can be remarkably opaque... Here's a breakdown which might help:

なんか : somehow
もふもふ(する) : to be fluffy
してそう : ている form of suru => its masu-stem + そう seems like, looks like (note the い has dropped, as is common in casual speech; this isn't specific to ~そう at all)
だ : copula; you need this between a na-adj (which is what ~そう is) and もの.
もん : emphatic, shortened version of もの.

PS: I've just spotted that if you google for していそう google helpfully also returns hits for してそう...

So basically, "somehow, it's just looks so fluffy!"?

Thank you, I don't think I'd seen もん before.

I have another one from the Core2k:
日本での生活は楽しいです。
That provided translation is "Life in Japan is fun."

I haven't seen での before. Looking at it as the で + の particles kind of makes sense, but trying to retrofit my understanding of those two particles to produce the translation feels awkward... It seems like 「日本で生活のは楽しいです。」 would make more sense. But then again, this is the only example of 生活 I have seen so it may be an incorrect use of the word.

Hopefully someone can clear this up. Thanks.

If you want to say "Life in Japan", just like in English, you need to make it a noun phrase. 日本での生活 is the way to do that. の can follow other particles as well (i.e. you can say 先生への手紙 "the letter to the teacher", 母からのプレゼント "a present from my mother", etc.)

Your suggestion doesn't really work; even if you remove the の, what you end up with is "In Japan, life is fun", which has a slightly different emphasis.

sikieiki Wrote:「つもり」と言う文法の使い分けの質問がありますので、説明してくれると嬉しいです。
次の例文の気持ちで、違いがありませんか？

行かないつもりです。
行くつもりはない。

私の心は前者の方は「絶対に行きたくない」と言う感じがします。
後者の方はあんなに行きたくない感じがないと思います。

日本語文系辞典によると、「V-ないつもりだ」は、ただある行為を行わないという意志を示す。それに対して、「Vつもりはない」は話し手の「...しよう」という意志の存在を否定するのに用いる。その表現を用いる場合、話し手は、その状況で聞き手が予想あるいは期待しそうな行為を想定した上で、そのようなことをする意志はないと否定する。

(この部分は私の意見だけなんだけど、後者のほうは相手の予想や期待を否定するので、nadiatimsのいう通り、嫌感や強い否定というニュアンスがよくあるかなと思います。)

I've been chewing on this one for a while:

「別にどうもしねーよ」

It was in reply to something like「どうしたの」or some such similar way of asking what was going on / if something was going on, I don't remember exactly. I get that it means something like, "Nothing really," or something like that, but I'm wondering about the exact nuance. What does 「どうも」 mean here?

I'm afraid it's really obvious and that I've just been cramming so much technical vocab lately that casual speech no longer makes sense to me, haha. Anyway, よろしく！

Tzadeck Wrote:打ち消したわよ is correct as it is (Core 6000 also has audio read by a native speaker to prove it)

I was told that it is used by women,　that is わ,　わよ. I don't know if their was any indication about that.