Thank you Jarvik, magamo, yudantaiteki, you are great.

These two (parts of) sentences (from drama Gokusen):

最も問題のあった生徒達。
実績のある方ですから。

I'm puzzled about the の in both sentences. Is the particle, that is normally needed here with の (for instance は or　が), omitted, because it is colloquial language?

Thanks

kame3 Wrote:These two (parts of) sentences (from drama Gokusen):

最も問題のあった生徒達。
実績のある方ですから。

I'm puzzled about the の in both sentences. Is the particle, that is normally needed here with の (for instance は or　が), omitted, because it is colloquial language?

No. In sentence modifiers (relative clauses), が can be replaced by の. This is not colloquial; it is used in both informal and formal Japanese.

There is no particle that is "normally needed" here; you can't put in any particle after の in these contexts (either のは or のが here would turn the sentences into nonsense).

立てて : Whats the meaning behind that second て？

Thanks

vix86 Wrote:立てて : Whats the meaning behind that second て？

Thanks

To my beginner eyes, it looks like the -te form of the verb 立てる.

kame3 Wrote:To my beginner eyes, it looks like the -te form of the verb 立てる.

To mine too, and WWWJDIC says so as well. It also gives a special meaning for this particular form, so it can be used as more than just literally the verb's te-form, but also to mean "especially" or "wholeheartedly".

So I had a question of my own again.
「本郷にはいるとまもなく、道ばたに下駄屋さんがあります。」
I'm confused about the さん in that sentence. Why a getaya-san? I didn't now you could do that with stores as well as people? Is it just kind of meant in the same way (or is it not the respectful さん-suffix at all and does it mean something else here)? Thanks.

When you add things like さん to a shop or something, it refers to the person that works there.

kame3 Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:立てて : Whats the meaning behind that second て？

Thanks

To my beginner eyes, it looks like the -te form of the verb 立てる.

Knew I should have looked it up in my Kanji dictionary before posting. I was only thinking 立つ. Guess I'll be sure to check from now on. Guess the search for bizarre forms continues, here I thought I found something interesting.

EDIT: Which now that I think about it would have only been 立って in て-form, stupid blunder.

No worries, mistakes help us learn

I just read 誘うて in a book.

Is this some sort of construction I've yet to come across or a typo?

vix86 Wrote:

kame3 Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:立てて : Whats the meaning behind that second て？

Thanks

To my beginner eyes, it looks like the -te form of the verb 立てる.

Knew I should have looked it up in my Kanji dictionary before posting. I was only thinking 立つ. Guess I'll be sure to check from now on. Guess the search for bizarre forms continues, here I thought I found something interesting.

EDIT: Which now that I think about it would have only been 立って in て-form, stupid blunder.

Rikaichan:

立てて たてて
(adv) especially; particularly; wholeheartedly
立てる たてる (< -te)
(v1,vt) to stand (something) up; to erect (something); to make (a noise, a sound); to put (tooth, claw, pointed object) to; to set (a plan, etc.); to decide (objective, schedule); (P)
立つ たつ (< potential < -te)
(v5t,vi) to stand; to rise; to stand up; to find oneself (e.g. in a difficult position); to depart (on a plane, train, etc.); (P)

kazelee Wrote:I just read 誘うて in a book.

Is this some sort of construction I've yet to come across or a typo?

It might be a dialect form, but a typo is possible also. What's the whole phrase or sentence?

Another quick translation check if anyone could

「そして、クラスの中で、唯一俺が心を許して話すことのできる人間だった。」
"And so, in the class, he is the only person I could trust."

It's just confusing for me if 唯一 modifies 俺 or 人間 (or I'm missing the point of this sentence entirely)

Edit: Also another one I just ran into:

「不良のレッテルを貼られている俺相手に、平気に話しかけてくる数少ない生徒だ。」
"Few students can calmly talk to me (being labeled as a dilinquent)"

Whatsifsowhatsit Wrote:So I had a question of my own again.
「本郷にはいるとまもなく、道ばたに下駄屋さんがあります。」
I'm confused about the さん in that sentence. Why a getaya-san? I didn't now you could do that with stores as well as people? Is it just kind of meant in the same way (or is it not the respectful さん-suffix at all and does it mean something else here)? Thanks.

I'm curious where that sentence came from because I recall there being a few 下駄屋さん along 本郷通り in Tokyo but probably just coincidence.

Quote:I was browsing through random jp blogs when I noticed something I had never come across before. This guy is using 号 instead of 日 for counting days and 一、二、三 and so forth in place of 月，火、水（曜日）- by the way, 天 replaces 日（曜日）. Hopefully that makes sense too ;>__>

Now, of course this is just out of curiosity...anyone care to explain what's up with this slightly different calendar? I've made some research on wiki and I guess this has something to do with 年号 but can't come up with a definite answer. Thank you!

This is Taiwanese (maybe Chinese too) convention, not Japanese. Not sure what it was doing on a Japanese blog

Thank you and sorry for the late response. He never mentions being of chinese/taiwanese heritage, however there's a few posts where he rambles about 水滸伝 (perhaps the best known chinese classical novel) so he may just be a chinese enthusiast

FooSoft Wrote:「そして、クラスの中で、唯一俺が心を許して話すことのできる人間だった。」
"And so, in the class, he is the only person I could trust."

It's just confusing for me if 唯一 modifies 俺 or 人間 (or I'm missing the point of this sentence entirely)

The 唯一 is most likely modifying 人間, so I think your translation is all right. If you want to make it clear which noun it's modifying, you can say:

唯一俺だけが... (modifying 俺)
俺が心を許して話すことのできる唯一の人間... (modifying 人間)

Grammatically speaking, it could be modifying 俺. But it's rare to choose the wording if the speaker wants to say, "Only I was able to..."

FooSoft Wrote:「不良のレッテルを貼られている俺相手に、平気に話しかけてくる数少ない生徒だ。」
"Few students can calmly talk to me (being labeled as a dilinquent)"

The equivalent of the sentence subject is omitted in the original Japanese sentence, so you have to fill it in your English translation. If the speaker is talking about a friendly guy and other snobs who look down on delinquents, it'd be something like:

He's one of the few students who talk to me without hesitation, when everyone sees me as just another delinquent.

Thanks magamo, I'm glad I wasn't horribly wrong on those

theBryan Wrote:

Whatsifsowhatsit Wrote:So I had a question of my own again.
「本郷にはいるとまもなく、道ばたに下駄屋さんがあります。」
I'm confused about the さん in that sentence. Why a getaya-san? I didn't now you could do that with stores as well as people? Is it just kind of meant in the same way (or is it not the respectful さん-suffix at all and does it mean something else here)? Thanks.

I'm curious where that sentence came from because I recall there being a few 下駄屋さん along 本郷通り in Tokyo but probably just coincidence.

It's from an audiobook of a story called 狐 or The Fox Boy.

So about my question, does what you said mean it is just kind of the same respectful さん-suffix one might use after a name? And it just works for stores too? Any type of store?

Smackle Wrote:When you add things like さん to a shop or something, it refers to the person that works there.

I'm not sure about that, because in KO 2001, there is also a sentence with "お米屋さん”, where they translate it as "rice shop" and not as "rice shop employee" or something.

KO Sentence:
お米屋さんでいろいろな種類のお米を売っている。　これは米国のお米だ.
They sell many kinds of rice in this rice shop. This is American rice.

But maybe I'm misinterpreting the translation?

EDIT: I also found this sentence on tangorin.com:
お米屋さんは、言わずと知れた斜陽産業。
Rice dealing is, as you know without needing telling, a declining industry.

No, you're not misinterpreting -- store+さん can sometimes refer to the store itself rather than the person running it or the people there. I think it tends to refer to smaller "mom and pop" type of stores (like a 米屋).

Yep, you think correctly When it refers to the store, it has more of a small town, intimate feel, as opposed to a cold-hearted, inanimate chain like Walmart or McDonalds

Here's a good example: in the first scene of Beauty and the Beast, when the breadmaker is asks her, 「どこへ?」 she responds, 「本屋さん!」because in that type of small town everyone knows each other on a first-name-basis, so the store itself almost becomes a person in the town, if that makes sense. It becomes more than just a lifeless mechanism of economy, because the owner will be friends with the customers and know them, and it has that social, intimate, HUMAN feeling to it.

So in a way I suppose you can think of さん as almost making the shop anthropomorphic in a sense, which is why you're using a title normally reserved for human beings to an inanimate place: because the さん recognizes that aspect of humanity. It's not giving respect or acknowledgment to the shop itself, but the interactions of that shop, the people in it, the place it has in the community, etc.

Sorry, I've been having trouble with the word 'くらい' for sometime, and would like to know what this phrase means exactly x_x:
"身だしなみじゃないですか？大人の男の。そのくらいは最低限知っておかないと。"
I have put the rest for context understanding only, but my problem is with "そのくらいは最低限知っておかないと" mainly. What's being said here exactly?
Thank you in advance.

くらい usually means something like "level" or "degree" -- so here it's "You at least need to know that" (more literally "to that level, at minimum, if you don't know it [for future use], then [something bad will result]")

Hmm. I just read the question about 本屋さん and replies to it, but I think you're confusing several different grammar points...

Before addressing the さん in question, I think we should start with 屋 in 下駄屋, 本屋, etc. By attaching 屋 to things, services, and so on, you can make a noun that refers to a shop, person, family, etc. that deals in/provides them, e.g., 本 + 屋 becomes a bookstore in general, the family-run bookstore near my house and so on.

屋 can also be used in a similar way to generate a noun that means an expert or a person who has a distinctive character, e.g., 技術屋 refers to professional engineers, 数学屋 is a mathematician, and 寂しがり屋 means a person who doesn't like to be alone. Unlike the first use of 屋, this can carry a negative connotation that the person can only do that, though it can be positive too. The negative sense of the expert usage probably comes from a stereotype that an expert is a myopic geek who doesn't understand anything outsides his expertise. When a character + 屋 has a negative sense, it's like "He's always like that!"

There are other similar usages such as 屋号 (やごう), 雅号 (がごう), and nouns that happen to end with 屋. They can look exactly like the above 屋s, e.g., 越後屋 (a famous clothing shop in the edo era), but technically they're different. You don't use さん for these kinds of nouns. For instance, 居酒屋 (いざかや, bar) is a noun that has 屋 at the end. But you don't say 居酒屋さん because it's not 居酒 + 屋. A quick, dirty way to know if it's ok to attach さん to ~屋 is to look up the stem part without 屋 in a dictionary. If there isn't an entry for its 屋-less version or it's a proper noun, most likely it's not the kind of noun + 屋 you can attach さん to. Actually, 居酒 isn't a word, and 越後 is a proper noun.

さん can be added to the first two usages of 屋. The ~屋さん with the second kind of 屋 is just adding politeness and/or affection. The ~屋さん with the first kind of 屋 is basically the same, but I guess it looks more complicated because the fist kind of noun+屋 can mean various things such as shops, agents, small family-run stores, etc. Actually a lot of things others said about さん in this thread are incomplete explanations of this kind of 屋.

I guess someone could make a huuuuge list of all the nouns that can be used with the first kind of 屋 such as 本 and 下駄 and classify them according to the types of resulting nouns like "type 1 noun + 屋 means shops of that kind in general when context is either X or Y or a family-run shop dealing in the noun when context is Z." But I don't think it would help learners much; it's an interesting aspect of language, but honestly I think memorizing that kind of list is the stupidest way of learning a language. The rule of thumb is that if a noun is a concrete thing like 本, it tends to be a shop and that if it's an abstract noun like service, it tends to mean a person and it becomes difficult to distinguish it from the second 屋 usage.

Anyway, the first kind of 屋 is ambiguous in a sense. Semantically the 下駄屋 in question most likely refers to an actual shop. But probably the shop is kind of small, and the speaker is also picturing the faces of the shop owner and/or clerks in his mind. When you attach さん to it, it adds affection etc. just like 屋さん with the second kind of 屋, but it can also work as a suffix for sort of personification to an extent. This doesn't mean the shop becomes a person in the speaker's mind. It's more like the image of the people working there gets stronger in the speaker's mind. So if you analyze a sentence using grammar, it might look like a shop is treated as a person. But it's just that 下駄屋 is already a mix of the shop and the workers in the speaker's mind and that the people part becomes stronger in 下駄屋さん, which can still semantically/grammatically mean the shop in translation.

So Smackle's explanation is right in a sense, but it may not appear so in translation. The emphasis on people is clear in translation when you attach さん to a 〜屋 compound that has a stronger "people" image because, for example, the service doesn't evoke a shop-like building image. For instance, 郵便屋さん is definitely a mailman. 郵便 means postal services like USPS. 郵便局 is a post office while 郵便屋 is more like workers/companies in the mailing industry. And when you say 郵便屋さん, it's a person/people who collect and deliver your letters and packages. I suppose you could say this 郵便屋 is the second kind of 屋 like 技術屋, especially when you mock a company or a person by the word. But I think it's ambiguous so you can't say it's definitely the first or second kind of 屋.

Aijin mentioned Walmart and McDonalds. It seems that usual explanations about さん say you can't use it for that kind of noun. But actually you can. The difference is that it's not the noun+屋+さん combo, so the context you use it in is very different. Walmart, McDonalds, etc. are companies' names, hence they're proper nouns like Toyota and Sony. Usually you don't use さん for a company, but it's possible when you talk about your rival company and such. For example, a CEO of a large supermarket chain might say in an interview, "ウォールマートさんはねー、まぁ、アメリカでは成功されているようですが、日本ではどうでしょうねぇ。我々が見習うところもたくさんあるとは思いますよ。ただ、例えばIKEAさんのように一度辛酸をなめている外国企業もありますし、いきなり日本で成功するのは難しいと思いますよ。" Another example is that a travel agent might use さん when he addresses his rival travel companies, e.g., "H.I.S.さんのプランは確かに安いんですが、うちは24時間電話対応なので旅行中にトラブルがあっても安心ですよ。" This kind of usage of さん has nothing to do with the emphasis on workers. It's a straightforward grammatical personification.

Just something quick @ magamo:

I've always thought of 居酒屋 as falling into the same category as 本屋. It's just a 酒屋 where you stay (居) to consume your drink instead of carrying it home. That makes it 居+(酒+屋). I have heard 居酒屋さん before, and there are half a million matches on Google for it...