I'm not 100%, but I think I might say "listening to THE TV" as opposed to "listening to TV," but I would never say "watching the TV."

but zachandhobbes -- you're english isn't "native enough?" Your little thing says you're from California...?

@zachandhobbes:What so you can only listen to sounds? not objects?
Does that mean that "Listen to your mother!" is incorrect. Do I really have to have to say "Listen to what your mother is saying!"? or I'm not speaking correctly. This would seem rather tiresome after a while.

@asriel: Are you serious you'd never say watch TV. I'd say watch if I was watching it, and listen if I was just listening while doing something else.

No, I'm making a distinction between including 'the' or not.
I generally watch TV [no 'the'], but then
I listen to 'the' TV.

Unless there's a specific rule for Japanese that requires you to use みる even when describing the experience of hearing/listening to the sound coming from an audiovisual medium i.e. television, I'm not sure that agreeing there's an elementary logic that it *could* be written with みる is worth noting.

The sentence is correct, no? って as a commonly used topic marker, referring to the aural experience of a specific audio element, i.e. the Japanese on an American show, as discussed amongst Japanese speakers.

From what I understand, the constructions and terms used are utterly common and it would be odd for a listener proficient in Japanese to not get the intended meaning immediately or for them to think “A character named Heroes, what? And hey you can't say you listened to the spoken lines on the show, you have to say you saw/watched them.” Not sure there's anything worth salvaging from most of this thread with regards to that argument or similarly for the other sentences.

By the way, this person on this non-English television show yesterday was sometimes speaking in English, and looking at it was amusing. I mean seeing it. No I mean watching it. Viewing it. What's that, was the scene itself funny to watch? The situation I was watching it in? Their reactions? The way the person looked as they spoke? The setting, the costumes? No, I obviously meant the audio properties of their speech, wasn't that clear from using see/look/watch/view? Sorry, I couldn't use any other word, since TV is audiovisual and thus, occupying two modalities, I must always refer only to the visual one since English-speakers are incredibly discriminatory that way. Oh woe is me, if only English didn't have this rule!

@asriel:
"watch TV" has become idiomatic, which is why no one cares when the article (a,the) is ommitted. Same is true for "go to school", "go to bed" "suck d*ck" etc etc. Generally speaking though English speakers expect a word to come before any noun to specify 'which' one is being spoken about.
eg. I walked THE dog. (implied: MY dog)
He ate A hamburber.
This is MY car.

compare:

I walked dog.
He ate hamburger.
This is car.

"Listening to the TV" is actually used quite commonly in English, but only in situations where you want to emphasize that you were not actually looking at the screen or are concentrating on the audio more than the visual.

I was listening to the TV while doing my math homework.

I was cooking dinner while listening to the TV.

Don't turn the TV down, I'm trying to listen.

All of these could be replaced with "watching", but outside of a language discussion you wouldn't bat an eyelash if you heard someone say one of them.

In the situation given at the beginning of this thread it would be just fine to use 'listening' in the English version.
"The characters in Heroes sometimes speak Japanese, and it's interesting to listen to."

"Don't turn the TV down, I'm trying to listen."
Would hurt my ears

You would say
"Don't turn the TV down, I'm trying to listen to what he is saying."

You just don't... listen to TV.

I'm sorry maybe I'm being irrational. But it just seems WRONG!

It's like saying

"I just watched a plane."
Instead of
"I just saw a plane"

Maybe it's technically right, but you would pretty much never say it unless it was completed in some other way like
"I just watched a plane take off", in which case "saw" would still sound more natural.

Also I didn't know that was the sentence in question - it sounds perfectly normal there because he's listening to the way they speak, not 'listening' to the show itself.

Okay, you can all stop arguing now. My wife, who is JAPANESE has offered her definitive pronunciation on the subject. She reckons the most natural translation would be

ヒーローズは時々日本語が出てくるから聞いてて面白い

And trust me, you don't want to argue with my wife.

Can we get a second opinion on that?

Look what you've done, Thora.

zachandhobbes Wrote:"I just watched a plane."

You could totally say that, it just conveys a different message than "I just saw a plane".

"I just saw a plane" implies a plane just flew past and I saw it.
"I just watched a plane" implies I was just observing a plane somewhere. eg. I'm a spy or something and was just watching a plane waiting for something to happen or something, take-off or whatever. This one kind of stretches the imagination but it is possible to think of some situation in which one might say it and it would make sense.

That's what I'm saying.

If you're going to say "I just watched a plane..." you have to end the sentence with whatever you watched aka:

"I just watched a plane take off"
"I just watched a plane crash"
"I just watched a plane fly past me"

Guys, guys... do you want me to ask my wife about this?

Taurus Wrote:Guys, guys... do you want me to ask my wife about this?

do it! I will accept her and only her final judgement on this matter.

Okay, now I'm scared to ask her though.

Nest0r Wrote:Look what you've done, Thora.

uh oh ... now we're having the same debate about its English usage? :-)

zachandhobbes Wrote:A TV is a device made for watching, not listening...

well, how about テレビを視聴? both watching and listening? :-)

nest0r Wrote:From what I understand, the constructions and terms used are utterly common and it would be odd for a listener proficient in Japanese to not get the intended meaning immediately or for them to think “A character named Heroes, what? And hey you can't say you listened to the spoken lines on the show, you have to say you saw/watched them.”

To be fair, that wasn't Iryoku's suggestion. Their point was more like you can "listen to the dialogue of a TV show" and you can" listen to a TV show on the radio", but you wouldn't normally say "listening to [hearing] a TV show" ([TV番組]を聞く)　if you're also watching it.

The OP's sentence isn't one where they're only listening to audio, though (I assumed). So it became a question of whether [its sufficient clear that it's the "dialogue" that's being heard not the show.] Magamo says it's naturally understood. Iryoku agreed wrt sentence #1, but not #2. (Not sure if they agreed to #2 as well after Magamo's explanation.)

Yeah, I also think there's a difference between:
It's amusing to watch Heroes because it's partly in Japanese.
It's amusing to hear (a) character(s) on Heroes speaking in Japanese.

I feel Iryoku's translation ignores that difference and in doing so avoids the issue.

@nadiatims: Incidentally, I've been referring to you as "she" b/c of the name Nadia. Let me know if I've got that wrong. (And please please don't put me on the spot with the translation test when I get on your nerves. yikes.)
edit: reworded part in [ ]

@Thora - You're right, I conflated multiple sentences in my sarcastic dismissal. Iryoku said things like ‘って is a topic marker there but it also implies there's a character named Heroes’ (which could be an English issue, but doesn't make the tone/confusion any better) and said it's grammatically incorrect to say you hear a ‘movie’ on TV in Japanese (presumably movie means anything on TV) unless you say exactly what you heard, and then apparently ‘exactly’ just meant something like having an element like 言って in there, but that #2 and #3 (where we're talking about Japanese dialogue on a TV show or Japanese 出てくる-ing from the show [however you want to translate that ;p]) are entirely and half wrong, respectively. Except they aren't.

So we have this nasty tone, confusing English, and simple wrongness that could be boiled down to, if you want to salvage what they're saying: that when you're talking about the audio from an audiovisual medium you should use an audio term? Is that really worth noting? Seems like they didn't tell anyone anything a)applicable/relevant or b)new. Only thing I learned from this thread, as n00b as I am, was that in a different context and sentence, you could use って without いう to mean ‘called/named/termed’, which I actually already knew but forgot, and doubt I'll ever or more than rarely use. I also learned a word for ‘characters’.

But at least we got another couple pages out of this thread. ;p

Also the OP was talking about the audio, i.e. hearing the Japanese from the TV, for the record. I finally read the OP. ^_-



A: Listening to the Japanese from @#$@#% is interesting.
B: I'm so confused. Is @#$@#% a novel or lines of Japanese text on a video? You can't use listening then! [No one would respond this way.]

A: Listening to the Japanese lines on @#$@#% is interesting.
B: @#$@#% is a video and thus you must specify that you were listening to spoken Japanese lines, because otherwise I'll assume you meant written Japanese lines on the video and that you used listen/hear instead of read/saw. [No one would respond this way.]

I feel like there is a slight difference between Japanese and English when it comes to the watch vs. listen problem.

This is really subtle and has to do with the ウナギ文-ish grammar point, which doesn't exist in English and is a notoriously difficult concept for monolingual English speakers to grasp. But I'll do my best to explain it.

The most important thing is that ヒーローズ in the three examples (and the one given by Taurus's wife) isn't the direct object of the verb 聞く. So claiming that it's ungrammatical because 聞く can't take TV is wrong in the first place. In those Japanese sentences, 聞く isn't taking a direct object.

As we have already seen in this thread, "ヒーローズ" is followed by either は, って or zero-particle. These particles all have the topic marking function. This will explain why ヒーローズ isn't the direct object.

Take a look at the ウナギ文.

私はウナギだ。

The は here is also a topic marker. You can also reword it with zero-particle so it reads 私ウナギ。(Using って requires a particular kind of context because of the slight difference between は and って. But let's forget about it because it's not important for our purpose.) The important thing this sentence tells us is that after setting up a topic, you can say pretty much anything. And the topic may not be the target, object or whatever of the main verb. Xは simply means that "Whatever follows in this sentence is kind of related to X. Make an educated guess to make sense." That's why 私 isn't an eel. It's like, "Ok. I'm talking about myself. And the main idea of this sentence is that something has to do with 'eel.'"

So if you say it when a waiter is taking your order, he would never take it that you are not human. There are many other realistic situations where the sentence doesn't mean you're an eel too, e.g., you're talking about your most favorite food. And because native Japanese speakers don't have any bias towards a particular interpretation, it's kind of difficult to take it as "I'm an eel" even if it's taken out of context because the meaning would be bizarre.

English speakers who learned Japanese as a foreign langauge might feel like "I'm an eel" is more straightforward or more likely. But that's just a false impression coming from the fact that its word-for-word translation done by basic grammar rules taught in Japanese101 is closer to that interpretation.

For the exact same reason, a Japanese person learning English might say he's an eel when he means "I'd like broiled eel"; it's the word-for-word translation of the original Japanese sentence he had in his mind. In fact, a lot of so-called "Engrish" involves the exact same kind of error.

Let's get back to the ヒーローズ sentences. All sentences given by native speakers in this thread put a topic marker to ヒーローズ (Zero-particle is also counted as a topic marker here.). This means that it should be interpreted as "Whatever follows in this sentence is kind of related to ヒーローズ. Make an educated guess to make sense." Just like Xはウナギだ doesn't mean "X is an eel," Xは聞いてて面白い doesn't mean "It's funny to listen to X." It's more like "I'm talking about X. And the following is related to it so make an educated guess: 聞く and 面白い."

Of course, normally you "watch" TV. So when "listen" is given as a keyword together with Heroes, your brain might have to do a little more guess work at the "making an educated guess" stage. But it doesn't mean it's harder for native speakers to understand, sounds a bit strange or requires unusual context. It's just means the sentence works for a narrower range of situations.

I guess native English speakers' brains may find that the "making an educated guess" stage gets harder because of the word choice, i.e., "聞く" in a sentence about a TV show. But it doesn't for native Japanese speakers because that's how the Japanese language works; it's almost always highly dependent on context.

Now we move on to the slight difference between English and Japanese. (I'm not a native English speaker, so I could be wrong when it comes to how English works. So be careful!)

Probably you wouldn't say, "listen to Heroes" if you watch the show. But in Japanese there are many valid situations where you say, "ヒーローズは聞いてて面白い" but you *watch* the show on TV. An example of the possible contexts is that you mean its dialogue is interesting but all other aspects are mediocre at best. Here is an example sentence: 日本語しゃべるやつ出てくるしヒーローズは聞いてて面白いんだけど、肝心のストーリーがいまいちだし、その上超能力のエフェクトがしょぼいからあんまりお勧めできないな。Because the situation is that you're talking about Heroes after watching the show, literal translation fails miserably just like "I'm an eel."

Of course, you can still use grammar from your Japanese101 class by assuming that there is an omission e.g., ヒーローズ（のセリフ）は聞いてて. This way, you can reach a translation that kind of makes sense. But this is not how actually the Japanese language works. The example sentence doesn't omit anything. It's a complete standalone sentence with no omission. If you fill something just to make sense of it through literal translation, it'll be quite difficult to understand the actual nuance the original sentence has because you skewed it by inserting unnecessary words to the already perfect sentence.

So I don't think Iryoku's claim that "聞く" can't take "TV" is valid in this sense. Of course, most of the time, みる, 視聴する and such are the best verbs for TV shows. And it might look like how you almost always "watch" TV but not listen to the TV in English. But the reason that those verbs are preferred in Japanese is different.

This long explanation could have flaws. But at least we know that so far not a single native speaker has found the 聞く and TV combination in the ヒーローズは聞いてておもしろい sentences strange. I think that's because the Japanese sentences are like "The topic is Heroes. Keywords are 'character speaking Japanese,' 'listen,' and 'it's funny.' Ok. Now do the math." And when you do the math, you should note that the Japanese version of "listen to the TV" doesn't exclude "watching." 聞く isn't the exact same word as "listen." They ARE different in the sense that 聞く here only means that you use your ears to catch the dialogue (while NOT excluding the possibility that you also use your eyes to watch actors play at the same time).

Edit: Here is the canonical example of this feature of Japanese everyone who leaned Japaneses linguistics a little seriously knows:

象は鼻が長い。

This is a very famous example to illustrate how "subject" doesn't even exist in Japanese (Note: some disagree with this. And some admit a different notion, called 主格, similar to "subject" in English grammar. But the majority, including those who admit 主格, deny the English-like concept of "the subject of a sentence" in Japanese). If you parse this sentence by English-like grammar and translation, it'd be:

"Elephants are, noses are, long."

But what it really means is:

"I'm talking about elephants. The key idea is 'Noses are long.'"

Of course, it means, "Elephants have long noses."

Isn't the subject of the clause just 'nose'? So you got the は setting up the topic and acting kind of like a comma. Then what follows is a comment about the topic. This comment is a complete clause with subject 'nose' (marked by が), and predicate 'long'

象は鼻が長い。
elephant, nose (is) long.

This has come up before on the forum a few times and I don't really see why this is a difficult concept. Maybe my definition of grammatical subject is wrong? I also don't think Japanese is really that much more context dependant than English a lot of the time. I mean you could say the English sentence is context dependant because it's lacking a grammatical topic:
elephants' noses are long. (that's great but what is this comment in relation to?)

English lacks that convenient little word は to bring up topics so easily so we frequently don't bother. But we compensating by making sure to declare our grammatical subjects. Japanese on the other hand can afford to be lazy and drop subjects frequently but compensate by keeping the topic clear.

@thora: Your intuition serves you. And don't worry I won't challenge you to a translation test unless you start telling people how to speak 'proper japanese'

nadiatims Wrote:Isn't the subject of the clause just 'nose'? So you got the は setting up the topic and acting kind of like a comma. Then what follows is a comment about the topic. This comment is a complete clause with subject 'nose' (marked by が), and predicate 'long'

象は鼻が長い。
elephant, nose (is) long.

This has come up before on the forum a few times and I don't really see why this is a difficult concept. Maybe my definition of grammatical subject is wrong? I also don't think Japanese is really that much more context dependant than English a lot of the time. I mean you could say the English sentence is context dependant because it's lacking a grammatical topic:
elephants' noses are long. (that's great but what is this comment in relation to?)

You can reword it as 鼻と言えば象が長い。Also, 鼻は象が長い makes sense too, though the kind of situation you use this form in is different. Anyway, if が marks a subject which works like the subject of an English sentence, these examples would mean, "As for noses, elephants are long," which is obviously strange.

But yeah, が is a marker of 主格. And often it works like the subject of an English sentence.

As for context dependency, what I mean is how much you can omit (though it's not actually omission in a stricter sense) or how much grammar requires the speaker reveals information. It's like generally you can't drop "I" from "I speak English" in written, proper English (Please don't say what proper means!) while in Japanese generally it sounds odd or traslationese if you reveal this trivial information "I." Of course I think there are many opposite examples where English requires less information. But I think it's safe to say that a Japanese sentence tends to have less explicitly expressed information.

Only on this forum there can be a 6 pages long discussion about translation of a single simple sentence and a heated discussion about whether you can listen or watch television in various languages. You'd think that having multiple inputs from natives and a few people doing translation for a living would put out the flames out pretty quickly but not here, here its like pouring gas on a burning oil tanker.

I love it

If I recall correctly, the elephant switcheroo type example only works when it involves a possessive, right?

Like　彼女は髪の毛が長い。 　　　　
　　　　髪の毛は彼女が長い。　

Nadia, good, I figured you would have set me straight by now.

Thurd, you must have missed the は　ｖｓ　が　thread. :-)

Thora Wrote:If I recall correctly, the elephant switcheroo type example only works when it involves a possessive, right?

Like　彼女は髪の毛が長い。 　　　　
　　　　髪の毛は彼女が長い。　

Nadia, good, I figured you would have set me straight by now.

Thurd, you must have missed the は　ｖｓ　が　thread. :-)

I'm not sure exactly what a possessive means in this context. But if you're referring to the relation between 髪の毛 and 彼女 or some other special relation that limits possible nouns X, Y and Z for XはYがZだ, then I think it's most likely yes in the sense that you can avoid many exceptions that way by introducing your "possessive" rule. But it shouldn't mean there must be a possessive or something for the switching to work. It should be more like, "With a possessive, it probably works. And there are examples where switching works without a possessive too."

Here are examples to show how it's difficult to form a simple rule.

彼女はこれが出来る.
これは彼女が出来る.

Both are "She can do this." The former might mean something like "What she can do is this," which the latter generally can't. The latter can be interpreted as "The person who can do this is her," which isn't within the range of possible interpretations of the former in normal context.

The next example is:

彼女はこれが欲しい
これは彼女が欲しい

The former may be a reply to the question "What does she want?" while the latter may appear as an answer when the speaker is asked, "Who wants this?"

Now consider that これ and 彼 must be grammatically the same. So it should be ok to swap これ with 彼. But then, you would run into a problem like this:

彼女は彼が欲しい
彼は彼女が欲しい

Obviously switching doesn't work well here, though in speech you can make a distinction by using your tone of voice and whatnot. So, if we make a rule that allows sentences like 彼女はこれが欲しい, we get the 彼女は彼が欲しい exception as well unless the rule is very sophisticated.

If the definition of a possessive in your mind forbids the above troublesome examples but allows 象は鼻が長い and 彼女は髪の毛が長い, most likely it's a good rule of thumb, I think.

The meaning of life is 42.

Thanks Magamo. I should have refreshed my own memory, though. I didn't mean for you to go to more trouble. I recall looking into 象は鼻が長い　when it came up previously. "Possessive" popped into my head. Probably because some categorize those sentences by their ability to be converted to 象の鼻が長い　(as Nadia had already mentioned, it turns out) and a bunch of theory on はーが　sentences and the relation of X,Y and Z gets into the historical links of の　and　が. My memory was fuzzy.

About the うなぎ文, I'm not sure it is so difficult for English speakers to comprehend. The example given is to imagine you're at a restaurant and the waiter returns with all the meals but no idea who ordered what. A diner in that situation might say, "I'm the salmon."

I think we've gotten a bit sidetracked, though. :-) I'm guessing you brought up these little theoretical puzzles to show that Grammar101 cannot adequately explain 'real' Japanese and many of us learners basically don't get it. In terms of the example sentences in this thread, however, I don't believe an inadequate understanding of the operation of topics was the reason for Iryoku's comment. Your comments on direct object strike me as getting closer to the unanswered question.

So...if it's possible, maybe we could wrap up this thread by trying to clarify that more specific issue? Edit: I'll bump this thread again with the question just to entertain sliver and thurd. ;p