yudantaiteki Wrote:It's mostly used in captions or voiceover narration. It's almost like "Nirasu is on the screen right now, he is full of curiosity."

Like you say, I think it's exactly like a caption. Sort of like if you saw a picture of a kitten in a book, it may have a caption that's a sentence fragment, like "Mittens full of curiosity."

I'm not sure why narrators do that so much, actually. It sounds perfectly natural when you hear it on TV, but no one actually talks like that in conversation.

It sounds similar to the English style of narration to me.

"The Nirasu, full of curiosity..."

With the end of the sentence being whatever action is happening on screen. It sounds natural in English in context too. In fact, it's and often parodied aspect of nature documentaries.

Do you know the マルマルモリモリ song?

悲しくて泣いていた 一人歩く帰り道
こんなとき ほんわかな？
みんなに会いたいな～

From the 'book' I get that 一人歩く帰り道 = 'way home which I walk', and the whole line should ideally be saying something like "I got sad and cried on the way back home.", but that's not what it's saying… but if it is then I am hopeless because I don't think I could ever be able to produce a sentence so open ended like this.

EDIT: ええ？, but if I reorder it… 一人歩く帰り道で悲しくて泣いていた. Does it make sense to do this?

If you're asking if your inversion of the sentence has much the same meaning as the original line then yes, it does. (Of course the original line is a copula short of being a sentence.)

Not really a question, like a true or false question, just asking someone to look at the sentence a bit and make some comments about it. That should help me tons.

Tzadeck Wrote:That was my first guess, but when I googled this it seems he got it from an example sentence for じょう. Sooo... at least one of these is read じょう, haha. I would guess じょうのじょう just because it's kind of cute.

My guess is じょうのうえ. I've also found the expressions 上の中, 上の下, 中の上 and so on in connection with the looks of celebrities and the strengths of sports clubs.

Well, I don't really know what's confusing you, so it's hard to comment, but,
悲しくて泣いていた 一人歩く帰り道
is not really a sentence, it's a noun phrase and a song lyric line. If you put a copula on the end it's a sort of unnatural sentence; it's not unusual to do this in song lyrics or in poetry though.
Anyway,
道 is a road
帰り道 is the road back home
一人歩く is walking alone (and to be textbook-grammar should be 一人で歩く, but this is a song lyric not a textbook dialog.)
一人歩道 is the road one walks, alone.
泣いていた道 is the road one is walking on when crying. (It's ambiguous, of course, but unless you're reading a fantastical children's story or some strong metaphor, it's unlikely to mean a road was in tears.)


悲しくて doesn't really grammatically attach to 道, it prefixes the line saying basically 'I was sad and... '. If it was 悲しく泣いていた then it would be 'crying sadly' but since it's the て form it's instead a conjunction.

So basically, most terms are simply describing 道 except for 一人 which is describing 歩く and 悲しくて which is more or less and independent clause.

I might translate it 'Sad and alone, crying as I walked home' although I don't know the song, but, something with that feeling anyway.

A wind dragon from Zero no Tsukaima: 風竜 Is かぜたつ or ふうりょう more likely? Thanks.

This might help. Googling ふうりゅう, this page came up among the results:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A2%A8%E9%BE%8D
(EDIT: Sorry...that was related to Shogi... perhaps someone else might help you, but りゅう is dragon, at least...)

I've got a question myself, I find that 風車 can be read as both ふうしゃ and かぜぐるま. Which one is more common?

apirx Wrote:A wind dragon from Zero no Tsukaima: 風竜 Is かぜたつ or ふうりょう more likely? Thanks.

the general rule is that kanji in compounds use the 音読み on'yomi rather than 訓読み kun'yomi. that rule doesn't work 100% of the time (see Stian's example), but it's still common enough to use as a guide.

when you lookup the readings of a kanji, you can tell which is which because 音読み are in katakana while 訓読み are in hiragana.　リュウ is the most common 音読み for 竜 (it's listed first) so I'd guess ふうりゅう. also, check this out: https://www.google.com/search?hl=ja&safe...q=風竜&oq=風竜. for me, the fourth result on that says 竜（ドラゴン）／風竜（ふうりゅう）, a page for a dragon from some capcom game. which means a japanese person somewhere thought ふうりゅう would be a reasonable reading.

Stian: based on that same rule I mentioned above, and because it's less syllables, I'd guess that ふうしゃ is more common; wouldn't quote me on that though. fwiw, http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A2%A8%E8%BB%8A names that reading first.

I always read 風竜 as 「かぜ...りゅう」. I thought of them as if they were just separate words, like "wind dragon" is in English. I didn't know there was a special reading... Can you say it like that, or is should I go for the 音読み 「ふうりゅう」?

Standard rule is on-on, so I'd go with that.

Also, opposite of you, in my langauge, it is "vinddrage" which is one word, so I looked upon it as such. :p

I think I've heard かざぐるま used more often, and, I believe, more in the sense of pinwheel than anything else, but I'm not too sure.

Også, Stian, glad for at du ikke har engelsksyken.

[Zgarbas]

I ran into "待てど暮らせど..." in DoAJG, and it stirred my curiosity. I know it means "I waited for so long, but..." but I'm curious whether it's a single-use expression or if it's just part of some rule regarding to 暮らせ(ど) that I don't know of yet. Can 暮らせ be generally use in this way, or is it just a one-time thing?

[Context: a book about English acquisition of Japanese children]

I find this sentence contradictory or maybe I am reading it wrong, if someone could please help:

しかし、まだまだ宇宙人的な部分もあり、英語のやりとりをしっかりするといったことは困難です。

Here is a rough translation: However, still possessing a universal persona/nature, properly doing the back and forth of English is a difficulty.[/i]

I'm confused because I would expect that still having such universal character would rather make the "English exchange process" not a difficulty.

McKern Wrote:[Context: a book about English acquisition of Japanese children]

I find this sentence contradictory or maybe I am reading it wrong, if someone could please help:

しかし、まだまだ宇宙人的な部分もあり、英語のやりとりをしっかりするといったことは困難です。

Here is a rough translation: However, still possessing a universal persona/nature, properly doing the back and forth of English is a difficulty.[/i]

I'm confused because I would expect that still having such universal character would rather make the "English exchange process" not a difficulty.

Unless I'm not aware of some metaphorical use of it, doesn't 宇宙人的 mean 'space-alienish' rather than 'universal'?

Yeah, but not possibly here lol, the way I interpret it is 宇宙 = universe and 人的 = humanlike = universal person = global individual = someone that has no particular attachments to a particular culture = a person of the world.

Without seeing the surrounding context I guess I can't be absolutely sure, but that seems unlikely to me. I don't see any other way to read 宇宙人的 than "alien-like". I can't say I've ever seen 宇宙 used in to mean "universal" in the non-literal sense.

It sounds to me like the author is using "alien-like" as a metaphor for the child being a little strange (to an adult).

EDIT: Looking at the google hits for 宇宙人的な部分, I only see it used to mean literally "part alien", or as a metaphor for being strange or odd.

EDIT 2: I'm also suspicious of the idea that 人的 can be taken as a unit by itself meaning "humanlike"; I think you need 人間的 or something like that.

yeah, my dictionaries don't include a 'universal' meaning for 宇宙. If the author meant something like 'cosmopolitan', you'd think they'd have used a Japanese equivalent.

I initially thought it was describing the children's language ability. i.e. parts of the language are still strange/incomprehensible/garbled, so we can't really describe them as being proficient in spoken English. Wasn't sure if it was the children's language that was flawed or the language was incomprehensible to them. Perhaps related to this sense?
宇宙語 〔宇宙人が使いそうな, わけのわからない言葉〕 gibberish; gobbledygook; alien talk.

But I can see how it might refers to more general awkwardness which makes their English interaction unnatural. Hopefully the context will clear up the meaning.

ま....
一つ確かなのはあんたなんかとの
キスだけは死んでもお断りって事ね

can someone help me with this sentence? The って事ね　at the end is driving me nuts. I have a feeling that its like 事がない. Am I wrong? And if it is...it feels kind of awkward that way...and that's whats holding me back.

ね　is a sentence ending that is used to seek agreement from the listener the same way English speakers tack questions on to the end of our sentences.

って事 should be easier to understand if you look at the sentence structure. It links with 確かなのは to define what is "the thing" that is certain, so:

確かなのは___って事 = ___ blank is the thing that is certain.

So:

一つ確かなのはあんたなんかとの
キスだけは死んでもお断りって事ね

is something like

"The one thing that is certain is that I would die rather than kiss someone like you."

I wonder if the problem was that you've gotten used to adding in the stuff that Japanese normally leaves out and English doesn't, so you automatically understood the sentence without the って事　as "The thing that is certain..." and then were confused by the "extra" って事 tacked on to the end. The sentence would mean the same thing without って事, it's just a case of implied vs explicit meaning.

Thank you! That was a BIG help! I couldn't figure that one out to save my life.

Well, thanks everyone, it'll remain a puzzle I guess.

Here is one more (from a promotional poster):
単語マラソンでよい結果を得たいと言う方に最適のCDです。

What's 言う方 in this sentence? I can't figure out the actual meaning of the sentence because 言う方 doesn't make sense to me here.

よい結果を得たいと言う方 : people that want to get a good result. 方 (かた) is a polite way of saying 人. XというN　is a common construction where the clause X is characterizing the N.

Ah, I see, but I thought I could express the same idea with just よい結果を得たい方

EDIT: What's wrong with just よい結果を得たい方?