Dear Magamo™,

What is the difference between 寝る and 眠る? When do I use which?

是非教えてください。

magamo wrote:

I think your first translation is already good. It carries the meaning of ばかり well. I didn't check the context, but probably it's the "as if" kind of ばかり you mentioned in the linked thread. Here are the original text and my translation:

この人は間違いなくある種の狂気の中にいる、と青豆は思った。しかし頭が狂っているのではない。精神を病んでいるのでもない。いや、その精神はむしろ冷徹なばかりに揺らぎなく安定している。

"She lives by a different kind of reason," 青豆 thought. She is not a maniac or being mentally ill. If anything, her calm mind reflects serenity and acuteness.

By the way, translation requires a whole different skill set than speaking two languages. I don't think understanding a foreign language through translation helps much. It may be a good stepping stone for total beginners. But it seems too different to be of much use to serious learners.

Thank you, magamo™!

Ah ha! You're right, I guess I did have it right and translations I usually avoid, but I latched onto the answer too late and was in prescriptive translation mode. So when read about ‘as if’ ばかり(に) more closely I relied on superficial stuff and ended up thinking it couldn't be used that way. Now I've read more about 連体形 in this instance, with 形容詞, not just ‘verbs’ in the English sense.

Translation mode is the evil place I go to as a last resort, when I end up trying to create a completely detailed semantic structure and then through a literal breakdown try to disprove that structure. Sometimes it works, most of the time it's just a reflection of me being lost.

Now I have a better ‘feeling’ of ばかり to fit into my mental corpus, so I guess all's well that ends well. I haven't slept a wink since FooSoft posted that sentence. Finally, I can die in peace, thank you! ;p

astendra wrote:

Dear Magamo™,

What is the difference between 寝る and 眠る? When do I use which?

是非教えてください。

They share some meanings, but each has its one meanings and usages the other doesn't.

A popular explanation is that 寝る is "to lie down" while 眠る is "to sleep," though you'll come across tons of exceptions like 立ったまま寝る. A slightly more versatile explanation is that 寝る is more about taking a rest while the focus of 眠る is the state of sleep. Also, spoken language tends to prefer 寝る so it might appear when 眠る is more appropriate in informal conversation.

Maybe the difference becomes clearer if you attach 〜たい to express desire: 寝たい and 眠たい. For example, you use the former when you want to go to bed because you've been working so hard for many hours. But the latter simply means you're sleepy. So if you've slept for 12 hours and still sleepy for some reason, then you're still 眠たい. But probably you're not 寝たい.

Also, as the popular explanation suggests, 寝る doesn't necessarily imply sleep. It can be just lying down to sleep. This is one of the meanings 眠る doesn't have. Another meaning exclusive to 寝る is "get laid," e.g., あの子と寝た (I slept with the girl). But 眠る doesn't have this meaning.

"Die" is one of the meanings of 眠る, but 寝る doesn't have this sense. Because 眠る is more about "sleep," its figurative usage tends to be related to a state of being calm, still, not active and so on. For example, viruses, volcanoes and such may have long been 眠ったまま (dormant). When something useful has been lying idle and gathering dust, it's also 眠っている.

And I just noticed Aijin already posted a concise answer. Argh!

Last edited by magamo (2011 February 19, 2:16 pm)

Dear Magamo™,

Assuming that you know what academic jobs in Japan are like, what are the main differences between applying to and working at a Japanese and American university? What I'm specifically interested in are things such as academic culture and policy.

Example of a question about cultural differences:
Are there any differences in how academic discourse takes place (whether in journals, classrooms, or conferences)?

Example of a question about academic policies:
Are the tenure systems different?

Hopefully those examples help give you an idea of what kind of questions I'm interested in. Any help will be highly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Vileru

Hello Magamo,

I have a question about the following sentence:

私が場所を伝え間違えました。

My question centers around the 伝え間違えました part.  Id like to know what the rule about using a verb to talk about another verb. Up until know I have learned that if you want to use a verb to talk about another verb, you must nominalize the first verb by using either の or こと or って (or something of the like) before using the second verb.

In this case, 違え doesn't get nominalized nor is it a noun by itself either.

Thx

dusmar84 wrote:

私が場所を伝え間違えました。

My question centers around the 伝え間違えました part.  Id like to know what the rule about using a verb to talk about another verb. Up until know I have learned that if you want to use a verb to talk about another verb, you must nominalize the first verb by using either の or こと or って (or something of the like) before using the second verb.

In this case, 違え doesn't get nominalized nor is it a noun by itself either.

I'm not sure what you mean by "talk about another verb" or what 違え not being nominalized has to do with it. If anything, if you see 伝え間違う as a combination of two verbs, isn't 伝える the first verb? Or are you talking about how 間違う is connected to ました?

Technically ます is an auxiliary verb. But as far as I know, most textbooks don't teach this and introduce masu-form instead. If you learned auxiliary verbs and want to learn how to connect a verb to them as in 間違える + ます = 間違えます, probably this is treated in the verb conjugation section of your textbook. If you haven't learned an auxiliary verb, most likely your textbook expects you to see 間違えます as kind of a transformed version of a verb 間違える. In this case, you're supposed to memorize the form instead of general rules. It should be treated in a section which introduces masu-form.

If your question is about two verbs 伝える and 間違う, then 伝える is the first verb so it's the one which should get some sort of modification. If you already learned auxiliary verbs, then you must have learned verb conjugations instead of te-form, masu-form and whatnot. In this case, 伝え間違う is simply understood as just a combination of 伝える and 間違う where 伝える is conjugated to its continuative form (or 連用形 if you're learning grammar in Japanese). Because connecting two verbs is one of the main functions of the continuative form, what's happening is a basic rule applied straightforwardly.

If your textbook uses masu-form to explain grammar, this is a bit tricky. In this case, don't even try to understand anything about this and simply accept that there are a gazillion of verbs which look like "masu-form without masu" + "dictionary form" as in 伝え間違う; 伝えます is the masu-form, and you drop masu so you get 伝え. And you attach another verb 間違う so the end result is 伝え間違う.

If you introduce a new term "masu stem" to mean the masu form without masu, then it can be understood that Japanese has tons of verbs of the form "masu stem of a verb A + dictionary form of another verb B." Their meanings are more or less mixes of the ingredients. Oft-used combinations are considered standalone words on their own and have idiomatic meanings. Actually there isn't a clear cut line between a full-fledged single word and a combination of masu stem and another verb.

Also, you might have learned this as "X-verb words" such as 〜込む words and 〜忘れる words. It's hard to say if a given combination is a grammatically formed combination or a standalone word unless it has an idiomatic usage which can't be predicted by the two ingredient verbs. But there are many idiomatic ones, and usually they appear in any kind of text and conversation very frequently. So it kind of makes sense to list frequent combinations and memorize them as single verbs rather than grammatically connected pairs.

AlexandreC wrote:

I am told certain rules allow you to take a Tokyoben word or phrase and predict the pitch accent in Kansaiben.

Can you give me a quick overview of these rules.

It'd be easier to predict the pitch pattern of a given word in the Tokyo dialect from that of the same word in the Kansai dialect. To understand the relation between the two pitch accents, you need to know some basic facts on Japanese pitch accent first.

Standard Japanese has word classes according to pitch. Each word class has its own unique pitch pattern. For example, if you know a word and its pitch pattern, you can predict how to pronounce any word of the same class as far as pitch accent goes. So roughly speaking, if you have a dictionary that shows the class of each word, you only need to learn pitch patterns of a small number of representatives.

Most of the dialects in Japanese work this way too when it comes to pitch accent. If words are classified the same way between your dialect and the one you want to learn, then you should be able to predict new pitch patters of all words by learning the pitch pattern of one representative of each class; "This word belongs to class A, and this guy from Tokyo says it with this pitch pattern. So, my favorite word, which happens to belong to class A too, must be pronounced the same way. Oh, my name is also class A. So that's why he calls me with that pitch pattern!" So, in an ideal situation, if you already mastered one dialect, all you have to do to speak with another pitch accent is "shift" the patterns.

In reality, things are a little bit more complicated. It is considered that all the various pitch accents come from one single old accent, so you can transfer your accent to another to an extent the way I described above. The thing is that word classes have gradually been changing within each dialect, and different dialects may have experienced different changes, e.g., two classes might have merged into one in one dialect but remain distinct in another dialect.

In general, older Japanese have more word classes and more complicated features of pitch. So roughly speaking you can see the differences in pitch accent between dialects as how much simpler they become and in which way. Naturally, you'll have an easier time learning a new pitch accent if you speak a dialect which experienced less simplification.

From this point of view, the Kansai dialect is the hardest because it retains many features of classical Japanese. The dialect spoken in Tokyo has fewer classes and simpler pitch pattern for each class compared to the Kansai dialect. So if you speak the Kansai dialect, learning to speak the dialect spoken in Tokyo is more or less adjusting yourself to a simpler system. But if you're from Tokyo and want to speak like a guy from Osaka, you have to learn new word classes and more complicated use of pitch.

Of course, things are way more complicated in real life, so this is too simplistic a view of variations of pitch accent. But I think this is the most basic of how you transfer your accent to another.

Last edited by magamo (2011 February 20, 1:34 pm)

magamo wrote:

dusmar84 wrote:

私が場所を伝え間違えました。

My question centers around the 伝え間違えました part.  Id like to know what the rule about using a verb to talk about another verb. Up until know I have learned that if you want to use a verb to talk about another verb, you must nominalize the first verb by using either の or こと or って (or something of the like) before using the second verb.

In this case, 違え doesn't get nominalized nor is it a noun by itself either.

I'm not sure what you mean by "talk about another verb" or what 違え not being nominalized has to do with it. If anything, if you see 伝え間違う as a combination of two verbs, isn't 伝える the first verb? Or are you talking about how 間違う is connected to ました?

Technically ます is an auxiliary verb. But as far as I know, most textbooks don't teach this and introduce masu-form instead. If you learned auxiliary verbs and want to learn how to connect a verb to them as in 間違える + ます = 間違えます, probably this is treated in the verb conjugation section of your textbook. If you haven't learned an auxiliary verb, most likely your textbook expects you to see 間違えます as kind of a transformed version of a verb 間違える. In this case, you're supposed to memorize the form instead of general rules. It should be treated in a section which introduces masu-form.

If your question is about two verbs 伝える and 間違う, then 伝える is the first verb so it's the one which should get some sort of modification. If you already learned auxiliary verbs, then you must have learned verb conjugations instead of te-form, masu-form and whatnot. In this case, 伝え間違う is simply understood as just a combination of 伝える and 間違う where 伝える is conjugated to its continuative form (or 連用形 if you're learning grammar in Japanese). Because connecting two verbs is one of the main functions of the continuative form, what's happening is a basic rule applied straightforwardly.

If your textbook uses masu-form to explain grammar, this is a bit tricky. In this case, don't even try to understand anything about this and simply accept that there are a gazillion of verbs which look like "masu-form without masu" + "dictionary form" as in 伝え間違う; 伝えます is the masu-form, and you drop masu so you get 伝え. And you attach another verb 間違う so the end result is 伝え間違う.

This is what Im asking about. I wasnt aware (or perhaps I learned it a while ago and forgot it) about this continuative form.  Ive come across a similar looking construction in the past where it seems like the first verb gets chopped off and then stuck to the second verb but when I researched it a bit more the first verb actually was a noun (as you mentioned).  Sorry if this is getting too convoluted but at my level Im not able to rattle off example sentences off the top of my head so I hope this is making sense. Anyways, from what I gather from your explanation I need to look into this "continuative" form because int the original example I asked you about the 伝え is not a noun.

Thanks

fakewookie wrote:

Magamo, pronunciation aside, what would you say are the worst sounding grammatical/word misuse mistakes that gaijin make when speaking Japanese? I'm trying to make myself sound as native as possible in the way I speak. While there's the typical overuse of 私, misuse of と to mean "and" etc. which are typical mistakes for beginners, what things would you say are most characteristic of even advanced gaijin-produced Japanese  which make a person's speech sound unnatural?

For example, I've heard that we often use から to mean "because" in situations where we should really use ので.

Since different learners with different backgrounds make different kinds of errors, it may not be very helpful to single out a particular grammatical error. But I also agree that there is a kind of error which is very frequent and universal and makes your speech very foreign. And I think there is one trivial reason many foreigners make such errors. So in this post I focus on the culprit instead of concrete examples. I'm not saying there is THE reason or anything because different learners study language differently. So you may not make the kind of error I'm going to explain. Also, many teachers seem to be against my opinion on this. Pretty much every textbook favors the teachers' theory too. So take the following with a larger grain of salt.

Probably you've learned a lot of grammar rules, which, if applied to a natural sentence taken from native material or spoken by your Japanese friend, generate a weird English translation which native English speakers would never say in real life. The translation may be grammatically correct in English, but it usually requires a certain degree of imagination to make sense of it because no one would say such a bizarre sentence in their native language. Often, to understand the meaning, you should be familiar with the kind of English translation generated by applying grammar rules to a natural Japanese sentence in the wild. 99.9999% of the time, the nuance in the original sentence is lost in translation through grammar.

Obviously, if you apply the same rules backwards to a natural English sentence, the resulting Japanese sentence would be as strange as the kind of unnatural English sentence we were talking about in the previous paragraph. In other words, if you want to generate a natural Japanese sentence through grammar rules you have learned, you should start from a very carefully constructed unnatural English sentence native English speakers would never say. This would be the only method the backward application can give a good natural sentence.

In short, bilingual grammar allows you to get the gist of a Japanese sentence. But it's not supposed to give a natural translation or be applied backwards if naturalness is important.

Just like you need to be familiar with the unnatural English sentences to make sense of Japanese through straightforward translation, if you do backward application to speak Japanese, the listener must be used to the strange Japanese to understand you. Look at translation generated from straightforward application of grammar to natural Japanese. It's almost always unnatural English which is beyond "sounding foreign." That's what your Japanese sounds like if you rely on grammar too much.

Advanced learners mimic native speakers more and use less grammar. If the imitation is done correctly, unnaturalness can only come from the grammatically translated part. If you say a sentence taken from native material verbatim, it must work perfectly in the same context and carry the exact same meaning and nuance with absolutely zero nonnativeness. So, in my opinion, increasing the ratio of imitation to creation is key to sound natural. Creativeness can wait until you can mimic native speakers in virtually any situation, though in reality learners often have to express themselves when they don't have native sentences necessary to make themselves understood. In this sense, grammar is a last resort you use knowing full well you sound foreign.

Most learners find it difficult to produce natural sentences. To me, the culprit is obvious and trivial; they're using grammar the wrong way. Textbooks have exercises where you apply a newly learned rule to generate a Japanese sentence. Teachers even recommend those exercises. I can agree that backward application plus some experience is good enough if you only talk to Japanese people who are used to broken Japanese or your goal isn't that high. But I think this is one of the biggest reasons foreigners can't get rid of foreignness from their second languages.

There are many nonnative errors; overuse of 私, mixing up から and ので, and what have you. But if you don't apply grammar backwards to English, you literally can't make such errors for obvious reasons.

The other kind of error is using a native sentence in the wrong context. This type of error can lead to a complicated situation because native speakers think you mean what you said. Your Japanese sounded natural, so people take the nuance, connotation, implication and everything as they are expressed. And you may not even notice you said what you didn't mean.

You may think this is a kind of error by speakers of higher level. But it's not. This is the same kind of error as talking like anime characters with idiosyncratic speech habits. In the right context, such language sounds perfectly natural. You just used it in the wrong context. If using natural sentences in the wrong context is considered errors by more advanced learners, people who only say sentences from anime verbatim would be infinitely better than your average JLPT1 holder in the naturalness department.

This kind of error isn't as noticeable. It may not be considered a source of nonnativeness by many people. But I think this is also typical and frequent errors made only by nonnative speakers.

Last edited by magamo (2011 February 21, 4:45 pm)

Tori-kun wrote:

1) recently - preparing myself for N3 - I came across this: 達する. The Japanese word for "to achieve", right? Could you use this also for "to achieve a goal (etc.)", I mean, for everything achievable ("to achieve *something*") or its usage limited?

There are too many examples that 達する isn't the best translation for "to achieve something". Here are some:

What do you want to achieve in life?
生きてる内に何を成し遂げたい？

What do you want to achieve by the time you're 50?
50歳になるまでに何をしておきたい？

I achieved the goal.
目的を達成しました。(目的を達した and some other expressions can work too. It depends on context and your style.)

The country achieved full independence in 2000.
その国は2000年に完全独立を勝ち取りました。

Buddha achieved enlightenment.
仏陀は悟りを開いた。(悟りの境地に達した might be ok if you want to use 達する.)

達する is definitely one of the closest translations. But there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more examples out there where "achieve" isn't translated as 達する than sentences in which "achieve = 達する" works well. If I were asked to pick one Japanese word for "achieve," 達する is a very good candidate. But translation doesn't work that way. Note that the first and second examples use different Japanese words when the English sentences aren't that different.

If you didn't know, most of the time the best translation of an English word into Japanese doesn't work well in actual translation. It's considered closest because it works more often than others. But there are too many possible translations.

Tori-kun wrote:

2) causative vs. passive, esp. passive forms (i know there is a topic about it already, I know) -- I still do not get the hang of it. Am I mistaken if I say there is a passive in Japanese, e.g. ケーキがされた。 - The cake was made (by whomever)?

Japanese grammar does have a passive form. But it's quite different from the passive form in English. Also, ケーキがされた doesn't make much sense. ケーキが作られた might mean "The cake was made." But in normal context, it sounds like a bad translation from a foreign language done by a non-native Japanese speaker or someone who doesn't care what his translation sounds like in Japanese.

You might want to consider the Japanese passive form something you can't find in English. It might be better to think that "passive" is a misnomer.

Tori-kun wrote:

3) -ておく and -てしまう are used both (?) for stating something that has been finished and remains in this current state unchanged, right? So what's the difference between those two exactly (keep it short XD)
Thanks a lot again

To keep it super simple, I only focus on one pair of examples:

小説の翻訳を読んでおく vs. 小説の翻訳を読んでしまう

In both cases, you read a translated novel. The former implies that you do it on purpose to prepare for something, e.g., you're reading a short Japanese novel to learn Japanese, but it's a little too difficult for you to follow the story. So you first read a translation in your mother tongue. The latter implies that you regret it, e.g., you wanted to experience the original first but couldn't wait until your Japanese becomes good enough to read it.

A very short explanation is that both mean that something you've done or you're going to do will be in a "have been done" state. しておく implies the person who does the action thinks it's good, usually for something that will/might happen after the action. Preparation is a good context. してしまう is negative, and usually the person who does it regrets it or others suffer from it.

Last edited by magamo (2011 February 22, 5:18 pm)

Hi Magamo,

This is a kind of a follow up to one of your recent posts where you say the best way to speak natively is to start reproducing the phrases natives use.  I hope I paraphrased you right.  Anyways, as of late Im starting to transition away from a lot of grammar and kanji study towards more speaking oriented study.  Ive bought a shadowing textbook, Ive signed up for LingQ(although I havent posted anything) and Ive got a Japanese friend I meet up with from time to time.

My question is, how would you recommend improving ones speaking ability? I try to carry on conversations with my friend but often find Im scrambling for stuff to talk about. Same goes for LingQ. I like the idea of writing I just get tired of writing about what I did that day.

Curious to get your feedback on the topic of speaking.

Thx.

Last edited by dusmar84 (2011 February 23, 4:18 pm)

Dear Magamo™,

I think somebody asked this before but how did you learn English?
Did you use Anki or any other kind of flashcard management system?

Thanks.

Magamo™ has not posted since February 22. Do you know where Magamo™ is? The Ask Magamo™ franchise is in shambles.

bodhisamaya wrote:

nestor has an avatar?

His avatar is not as sexy as mine.