Pointless or not, even if we translate the phrase "I'm not gonna make you let me hold your hand", it's extremely doubtful a Japanese person would express themselves like that.

For example, they could probably say 手を繋がせてしないよ or something like that. Point being, most of us have no idea what a Japanese person would say in this situation, all we know is what an English person would say. Translating it straight over is not a good idea since it's a pretty advanced phrase.

I agree with you both in that a Japanese person wouldn't say that, it was merely out of curiosity that I was asking such a question.

Thanks samesong about the 握り合う rather than 繋ぐ i'll keep that in mind!

Has anybody read "Making sense of Japanese"? I think it used to be called "Gone fishing" - in that book it talks a lot about the causitive as well as the passive-causitive and the passive-causitive-directional (which really confuses me)....

本日は休ませていただきます - amazing if I could work these type of sentences out without trying to analyse them, I guess that's part of the fun!

EDIT: typos!

Last edited by hanzy (2008 November 04, 7:07 am)

burritokun wrote:

Make you let me...I don't think I've ever heard anybody say it in English before, to be honest. What does it mean? Even after reading your example I'm still pretty confused. Note that I am a native English speaker My guess is if you paraphrase it, the translation might be easier to parse out.

What's kind of funny is that I googled "make you let me" to see common usage of it, and the first result was actually this thread. No joke: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … =f&oq=

As a native English speaker, I find the phrase to be very awkward.  I had to read it 3 times to make it make any sense, and a few more to make sure that was really what it was saying.  It says you're forcing someone to cooperate, when that's not actually possible...  It's either voluntary or it's not.  The only way I can imagine it being used is jokingly.

Others have already said it, but I'd like to reiterate:

You shouldn't be translating things into Japanese.  You should just be expressing yourself in Japanese directly.  (That could be by mimicking other, or by creating your own sentences based off how things flow in Japanese, which is learned by first mimicking others.)

burritokun wrote:

Make you let me...I don't think I've ever heard anybody say it in English before, to be honest. What does it mean? Even after reading your example I'm still pretty confused. Note that I am a native English speaker smile My guess is if you paraphrase it, the translation might be easier to parse out.

What's kind of funny is that I googled "make you let me" to see common usage of it, and the first result was actually this thread. No joke: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& ? =f&oq=

hahaha that's hilarious!! google got that pretty quick eh? I know it's a weird sentence but where as forcing someone to cooperate may be impossible think about it where there's 3 people involved just like in samesongs example (which was a much better example than mine).

vosmiura wrote:

I'm confused.  Are you trying to translate the odd sentence "I'm not gonna make you let me hold your hand" to Japanese, or are you translating "手を繋がせさせないよ" to English and finding it odd?

I was translating from English to Japanese, which is why it looks weird.

wccrawford wrote:

You shouldn't be translating things into Japanese.  You should just be expressing yourself in Japanese directly.  (That could be by mimicking other, or by creating your own sentences based off how things flow in Japanese, which is learned by first mimicking others.)

I totally agree with you there, that's what I've been doing, I was studying and was just curious that's all - thought it would be interesting to share! The causitive is quite a challenge to master let alone the passive causative...