Can someone please explain to me the significance of the -zu ending. I've seen it a number of times in idioms and expressions, and do not know its significance.

Thanks.

It's another negative form. It's like a replacement for ないで or ない.

It's one of the classical negative endings; in modern Japanese it shows up only in formal language, fixed phrases/proverbs, and the structure ずに which is equivalent to ないで (i.e. "without doing X...")

If you see ず outside of the ずに structure, you can just replace it with ない (although する is irregular, it's せず instead of しない).

(Although ず alone is formal/archaic, ずに is not, for some reason.)

Thank you all very much for the swift replies. It makes much more sense now.

Afaik it's only used in written, you won't see it much outside of written Japanese. Well that's what I learnt so far anyway.

Just came across this playing pokemon!
Had the sentence: 後ろから気づかれずに捕まえた！come up (in kana only of course ) and put it into my deck for mining. I loosely translated it as "Caught from behind without realizing!" in my deck, is this the gist of what it means since I'm a little dubious of mining from things I don't have the translation of.

liosama Wrote:Afaik it's only used in written, you won't see it much outside of written Japanese. Well that's what I learnt so far anyway.

i think it is used in speech too, just not as much as the other forms. one time i remember specifically, a kid was in the way on the sidewalk and his mother told him
邪魔せずに

theBryan Wrote:

liosama Wrote:Afaik it's only used in written, you won't see it much outside of written Japanese. Well that's what I learnt so far anyway.

i think it is used in speech too, just not as much as the other forms. one time i remember specifically, a kid was in the way on the sidewalk and his mother told him
邪魔せずに

As yudantaiteki explained, ずに is still used even though the ず ending alone is considered archaic in most cases (fixed phrases like とりあえず and あいかわらず being common exceptions). However, I hear it in a lot of song lyrics - it may be a style choice, but I think more often it's used when one syllable fits better than two.

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/gra...tiveverbs2

second half of the first section

Kewickviper Wrote:Just came across this playing pokemon!
Had the sentence: 後ろから気づかれずに捕まえた！come up (in kana only of course ) and put it into my deck for mining. I loosely translated it as "Caught from behind without realizing!" in my deck, is this the gist of what it means since I'm a little dubious of mining from things I don't have the translation of.

I think it's "You caught it from behind without it realizing!" 気づかれる is passive.

I thought that just ず was still used in reports and stuff. The same kind of situation where you would use things like　大きくて＝大きく／名詞で＝名詞であり／いて＝おり／いなくて＝おらず to connect sentences.
And things like:
ドアを閉めずに出かけた。
ドアを閉めず、出かけた。
actually have different meanings/nuances. I'm not 100%, but the first one is more "connected," I guess.
"I went out without closing the door" as opposed to "I didn't close the door, and (then) I went out"

It's been a while, and I don't use these too often, so I could be wrong...

You might want to try jgram.org.
They have commentaries on every grammar point from JLPT4 all the way to JLPT1.

Here is the page for ずに:
http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php?tagE=zuni

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Kewickviper Wrote:Just came across this playing pokemon!
Had the sentence: 後ろから気づかれずに捕まえた！come up (in kana only of course ) and put it into my deck for mining. I loosely translated it as "Caught from behind without realizing!" in my deck, is this the gist of what it means since I'm a little dubious of mining from things I don't have the translation of.

I think it's "You caught it from behind without it realizing!" 気づかれる is passive.

Ah yes thank you that sounds better! I'm still getting the hang of translating back into English since these two translations sound the same in my mind, but there is a difference .

Asriel Wrote:I thought that just ず was still used in reports and stuff.

It probably is, what I said in the second post:
"in modern Japanese it shows up only in formal language, fixed phrases/proverbs, and the structure ずに which is equivalent to ないで (i.e. "without doing X...")"

Perhaps I should have said "formal or written language".