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Making Sense Of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You
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| List Price: | CDN$ 20.95 |
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Product Description
Making Sense Of Japanese is a Kodansha International publication.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #74912 in Books
- Published on: 2002-03-26
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: .45" h x 5.16" w x 7.24" l, .43 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 144 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Brief, wittily written essays that gamely attempt to explain some of the most frustrating hurdles [of Japanese]...It can be read and enjoyed by students at any level."
About the Author
Jay Rubin is a Kodansha International author.
Excerpt
[Following is a self-contained section from the book, minus the original macrons.]
Fiddlers Three = Three Fiddlers?
Old King Cole called for "his fiddlers three" mainly because they rhymed with "soul was he." If questions of rhyme and meter hadn't entered into the picture, he could just as well have called for "his three fiddlers," who, we know from the "his," were a unit of some sort. If we wanted to keep them as a unit in Japanese, however, we couldn't be quite so indifferent about word order.
Old King Koroku would have Sannin no baiorin-hiki o yobiyoseta rather than Baiorin-hiki o sannin yobiyoseta. The second version would mean "He called for three fiddlers," three chosen at random rather than the self-contained string band he was used to.
The normal place to put counters is after the noun in question, where it functions as an adverb telling to what extent the verb is to be performed. Enpitsu o sanbon kudasai means "Please give me three pencils"--any three pencils out of a larger supply. Sanbon no enpitsu, with the counter now modifying the noun itself, means "Please give me the three pencils."
Kurosawa's movie about a group of "seven samurai" is called Shichinin no samurai. If someone singlehandedly killed that famous group, he would have Shichinin no samurai o koroshita, but if, in his wanderings, he happened to kill seven guys who were samurai, he would have Samurai o shichinin koroshita.
Ito Sei had far less dramatic doings in mind when he wrote: Watashi-tachi ikko shichinin no Nihon-jin wa, asa hayaku Tashikento o ta[tta] / "Our seven-member Japanese group left Tashkent early in the morning."
