方 can mean person. It's more polite.

ある方＝Person that has
方=Person　（かた）

The grammar here is plain/dictionary form+noun="That kind of thing" so in this case a person that has something. Another example would be 食べられない本=Book that can't be eaten.

So adding 質問 in there= A person that has a question=質問のある方
どうぞ Here is basically just the "feel free" part.
So a more literal translation might be: Person that has question, feel free to ask.

Last edited by CerpinTaxt (2009 November 13, 12:46 am)

What a super sentence to think about, you will hear this all the time!

Well の wouldn't work for that sentence because your literally saying "The book's person that read." Gonna need a　を in there for it to work so:　本を読んだ方

Any sentence, minus sentence-final particles, can modify any noun (grammatically).  The only exception is that if the sentence ends in a na-adjective you use な to modify, and if it ends in a noun (or "no-adjective") you use の.

So in this case the basic sentence is 質問がある, which is "[someone] has a question/questions".  All you have to do to create "A person who has questions" is just stick 方 after that, and you get 質問がある方.

But wait, the original has の -- that's because when a sentence modifies a noun, の can replace が.  I think it's best to consider this to be a totally separate thing from the の you're probably used to seeing in other contexts.

Although learners usually learn 赤い本 as adjective + noun, it's really just a special case of the general rule "sentence + noun = sentence modifies that noun", since 赤い is a complete sentence in Japanese ("it is red").

This is a major aspect of Japanese grammar, and it's one that takes some time since (1) the modifying sentence can have a very wide range of relations to the noun it modifies, (2) the modifying sentence can be very long and have additional modifiers inside it, and (3) because the modifier comes first, you really have to be attentive to the context to know that you've just started reading a modifying sentence and not a stand-alone sentence.  I really think that dealing with modifying sentences is one of the major barriers to an advanced, fluent level of reading.

(Sometimes these are called "relative clauses" or "subordinate clauses" by analogy to English, but I think this obscures the fact that the modifiers are all grammatically complete sentences, unlike English.)

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 November 13, 1:24 pm)

You got it. Whatever is being modified will come at the every end.

In this case, book is being modified:

赤い本
The red book

昨日読んだ赤い本
The red book I read yesterday

But Japanese gets tricky when you have modifiers stacked on top of modifiers


昨日読んだ赤い本の内容が(の）難しいところ。

The part of the red book that I read yesterday that was difficult to read.

In this case, everything is serving to modify　ところ

Last edited by samesong (2009 November 14, 2:54 am)

I have another question from my Core2000 deck for you fine folks here.

「家に遊びに来てください。」

The English translation in the deck says:
Please come over to my house.

There's nothing in the English translation that makes a reference to the word 「遊び」- at least not from what I can tell. Is this just a very loose translation, or is there something about that word that I should know?

Ben_Nielson wrote:

遊ぶ also means "hang out" as well as "play" - which leads to tons of Japanese people asking you in English if you "Want to go play sometime?"...  sounds like they're about 7 years old when they ask that question.

So anyways, that's a loose translation...   they might also have said:  "Please come over to my house for a visit sometime."   or   "Come hang out at my house sometime."   Or something like that.

Ooh, I see. That explains a lot. Thanks!

Got another sentence that I'm not quite figuring out on my own; lets see if ya'll can point me in the right direction here as well.

The sentence is: 「彼女は耳がよく聞こえません」
Translation is: Her hearing isn't very good.

The part that has me confused is the word　「聞こえません」 according to the dictionary, the plain form 聞こえる means: "to be heard, to be audible", the dictionary also says it can mean "to be said to be, to be reputed".

I'm not understanding how either of these definitions make this sentence say "Her hearing isn't very good."

If I didn't see translation first, I would think it means: "Her ears can't be heard very well.", which would not make a lick of sense. Obviously I'm missing some nuances here. Anyone wanna enlighten me once again?

Last edited by brandon7s (2009 November 18, 1:00 am)

CerpinTaxt wrote:

In this case 聞こえる does take the first definition of "to be heard, to be audible." Well addressing the question it might be better to split the sentence up.

よく聞こえません- "Can't hear very well." Would be a good translation of that part.

Breaking it up further-
よく-Properly/well
聞こえません-Not being audible, not being heard

So the negative of 聞こえる is listed above and then modified by よく　you could get a literal translation of "Properly can't hear/not being heard"

　Well, I understand the sentence from a grammatical viewpoint, the part that makes me wonder was the "きこえません” meaning "not being heard".

For instance, In English, I can saying "My ears can hear well" makes perfect sense, but if I said "My ears aren't heard very well", that doesn't make any sense. I would expect them to use 「聞きません」 instead of 「聞こえません」 in this sentence.

So I guess my real question is: does 聞こえる mean "to be heard" as well as "to hear"?

Last edited by brandon7s (2009 November 18, 1:47 am)

CerpinTaxt wrote:

Oh, that makes it a lot easier than. 聞こえる Is strictly used to mean "Being able to hear, to be heard" while 聞く is strictly "to hear/listen etc."

Aha, I get it now. "Being able to hear" makes sense. Though, I would have expected 聞ける in that case.

*EDIT* D'oh! I just looked back at the Tae Kim guide and saw there's a section about 聞こえる in there, and it explains the differences pretty well. Better late than never I guess.

Last edited by brandon7s (2009 November 18, 1:56 am)

Thanks for your help, Cerpin. I'm glad someone else besides me stays up this late on here.