I found two examples from a Japanese game.
Here it is used to describe action of speaker. I wasn’t sure which action, but I found both the action of ignoring and action of doing smth while ignoring someone.
I found two examples from a Japanese game.
Here it is used to describe action of speaker. I wasn’t sure which action, but I found both the action of ignoring and action of doing smth while ignoring someone.
This feedback really got us talking! This seems to be a case where from a stricter perspective you cannot use this phrase to talk about yourself. This point is brought up in quite a lot of resources.
However, in practice this phrase seems to be becoming used a bit more freely than it perhaps was before and could be a good example of the language changing. Also, in general, it is possible to use phrases like this more freely in first-person narratives or personal reminiscences where you are speaking with some distance between your current and past self and can be more objective in tone.
We’ve gone ahead and changed the wording of the original write-up slightly so that it is less absolutist. It now reads:
it will generally not be used to refer to the speaker’s own actions.
So would you say OP’s sentence from the game is unnatural?
There’s also a example of using this grammar about oneself in DoAJG, is that unnatural too? The dictionary makes a point that all sentences are sourced from native speakers, and in general I haven’t noticed unnatural sentences in it before. It’s also published 17 years ago, a whole generation of native speakers, so if you grant that it’s natural, then would you really call it a recent change or an already well established change.
I’ve checked 5 out of 6 resources linked from Bunpro (except Kanzen Master), and none of them mention this restriction, granted they might consider it too obvious to mention. I think it would be helpful to add a link to one of the many resources that do.
And how would one then talk about own actions done with reckless abandon?
These are both natural! It’s a good point and I actually brought up that exact example sentence from the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar with the native speakers on the team so we could discuss it. This feedback genuinely did get us talking. The key here is the fact that there is a narrative like tone.
This was the opinion of one of the native speakers on the team, not mine. But I still went and researched this idea myself as well just in case!
Recent is, of course, a relative term but I searched through some corpus data and on the whole this kind of usage is not only uncommon but also seems to appear more frequently as we get closer to the present day - the first instance I saw when I was searching was from 1998. There presumably are earlier examples but that was the first I noticed in the corpus I was using.
Besides that larger corpus, I also searched through the 朝日新聞 article archive going back around five years and couldn’t spot an example of the usage we’re discussing here when scanning through results, of which there were hundreds.
Here is one!
I might suggest も構わず as a starting point but it would depend on the exact sentence.
As をよそに has quite a strong sense of collocation with specific words and in specific contexts we still think it is best to keep the caution, although it is not an absolute rule as was stated in the original version. One of the reasons some N1 phrases are in N1 is because of their contextual sensitivity and I think this is a good example of that. Hopefully our thinking is clearer now!
The sentences sound natural! Since as James mentioned, this grammar point can be used to refer to the speaker themselves. However, some Japanese language teachers teach that it can’t be used this way (e.g., Chiyo’s blog), or it’s often used to criticize someone (Nihongo Kyoushi Net). So, there might be an original source to mention it.
Even when this isn’t clearly stated, most example sentences tend to refer to someone rather than the speaker. So, we decided to add ‘generally’ to the write-up for clarity!
(Regarding adding the resources or the further edits to the write-ups, we’d like to take a bit more time to find additional sources and consider the best approach .)