I just wanted to share with some of you, particular those that are leaving beginnerhood and advancing into the intimidating realms of intermediate Japanese, a method you can use to help advance your understanding of complex grammar points. Of course it's one of many methods I use to aid my learning and should never be the be all and end all.

I've been re-reading ノルウェイの森 (Norwegian Wood by Murakami) lately and am finding もの used a lot in quoted speech, especially in really informal situations. I've always had trouble wrapping my head around the different uses and nuances of this stubborn little word. Here are a couple of examples:

(context: The girl, Midori, is complaining to the guy how she can never understand complex things like the English subjunctive, sine and cosine etc and how she gets through life without them. To avoid confusion I changed these to x, y, and z in the below)

「xだの、yだの、zだの、そんなもの何の役に立つもんですかとしか考えなかったわ。」

When I first read the above I thought it meant something like, 'I only ever wondered what x, y and z were useful for.' but it didn't really fit the context and something was telling me that little もんですか gave the sentence an important nuance. I looked up the official English translation in Norwegian Wood by Jay Rubin and low and behold:

'I always thought of things like x, y and z as totally useless.'

So how did Rubin get 'totally useless' from 役に立つもんですか, which with the untrained eye seems as if it should mean 'is it a thing which is useful?' Well, after more digging and thanks to jgram.org I learned that もんですか・ものですか・もんか・ものか stresses severe negative. It can't be taken literally at all. So 役に立つもんですか means something like, as Rubin translated, 'totally useless', or maybe 'absolutely not useful at all'. The challenge now for me is to be able to internalise this grammar point and be able to use it naturally.

だの was also new to me, but it was pretty obvious that it is basically the same as や、や、など～

Here's another use of もん on the same page.

「それでまあよく高校を出て大学に入れたもんだよね」と僕はあきれて言った。

This usage of もん is perhaps even harder than the one before. At first glance Rubin's translation doesn't seem to help much:

'That's incredible! How did you pass your exams? How did you get into university?'

But after I learned (thanks again to JGram) that it is yet another type of emphatic marker it began to make sense. Rubin's translation is interesting as he changes it from one declarative sentence to two questions, but when I realised that they're actually rhetorical questions it all came together. A more "accurate" (for lack of better word) translation would be:

Amazed, I said, 'And to think, you left high school and were able to get into university!'

Here, my insertion of "and to think" is the equivalent of もんだよね to give his statement an extra punch.

I recommend this as one of the methods you can use when trying to understand Japanese. i.e. reading a Japanese book, attempting to understand, referring to the official translation when you don't understand, then trying to figure out why the translator made the decision to translate it that way.