たころに is the grammar point
1 Like
I saw it written like 忘れたころに that’s why
2 Likes
Ah, that’ll be 忘れた + 頃（ころ）に, I reckon.
Basically combining the two grammar points: past tense た and ころに, so not a separate one by itself. I’d translate it roughly as “when I forgot”, though it’s hard to give a proper one without the full sentence for context.
9 Likes
I’ve never seen that added to verbs before, you can do that? ʕ º ᴥ ºʔ
2 Likes
I think it’s more you can add ころ to make the prior info in the sentence a description of a time period. Idk if I’m explaining it well, but “anything+ころ(probably occurrences of rendaku as well)”. Rather than thinking about if you can add it to verbs/nouns etc. In my head it can work that way anyway😅
4 Likes
Verbs can be attached to nouns (頃（ころ）is a noun) in front of the noun, so-called ‘pre-nominally’ (literally, ‘in front of the noun’ 
).
When done so, they modify the noun with their meaning, often with the purpose of specifying which particular noun you mean. So, 走る犬 means ‘runs-dog’, or ‘dog-that runs’.
Very often, the verb is in past-tense, so 走った犬 means ‘ran-dog’, or ‘dog-that ran’, or more English-y, ‘the dog that ran’. Like “(I) Follow the dog that ran.” 走った犬を追いかけます。
So, in this case 忘れた頃 means ‘(I)-forgot-time’, or ‘time-that (I)-forgot’, or more English-y ‘the time-when I forgot’, or ‘when I forgot’.
The relevant grammar point is Verb［た・ている］+ Noun (JLPT N5) | Bunpro – Japanese Grammar Explained
3 Likes
That piece of information would’ve helped tremendously!! Please include context next time.
4 Likes
Lmafo def not me never realizing ころ was a noun because it was an earlier genki point that I just “attached” to stuff 
couldn’t be me
During genki (coulple years ago now), I just did it the way it said to for each grammar point not really thinking about it or noticing common patterns. These days (finished tobira path on bunpro and cleaning up my n3) I know enough points to notice those common patterns more naturally and things are soooo much easier.
But I never “learned” ころ as a noun so it didn’t stick that way🤣 Anyway thanks for the detailed recap!
3 Likes
This is called a relative clause (関係節), for those wondering. The term is rarely used in Japanese compared to English as it is simpler in Japanese. In English we use a relative pronoun (関係代名詞) to add information to noun phrases (名詞句) as is being spoken about here. It’s easier to show this by example:
例:りんご食べてるやつ
Example: The guy who is eating the apple.
Where did “who” come from? That’s the relative pronoun.
In Japanese writing relative clauses can get quite long to tag certain things. Here is an example of the name of a book that I saw promoted the other day:
「千葉からほとんど出ない引きこもりの俺が、一度も海外に行ったことがないままルーマニア語の小説家になった話」
This isn’t a difficult sentence or anything but it is not really something we’d say in English and as basically all the information appears before the main thing we’re talking about (話) it is probably hard to parse if you can’t take all the information in at once. I think these sorts of longer relative clauses can give beginners quite a lot of headaches (it certainly happened to me when I started learning) for that reason. In English we are told what we’re talking about first (“The story of how…”) and then all the superfluous information follows.
5 Likes
That’s a long ass name for a title, wow!
1 Like
I don’t know enough about German to know if this is actually true, but I (think I) heard that sometimes German has similar long-phrases-that-after-much-superfluous-context-modify-the-meaning-of-the-final-part-of a-sentence. Or something like that. Again, I dunno. Just something I heard. And maybe it wasn’t German but some other language? Not sure.
1 Like