など - Grammar Discussion

such as, things like

Structure

  • Noun + など

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I keep confusing など with とか in my reviews. How are they used differently?

The resources for など don’t give any distinction.

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I believe the nuance is that とか (single only) implies a list since it’s a list connecting particle. So that is why they put the “among other things” in several examples to give that inflection. とか ~とか is such a flexible particle as you can list nouns/verbs/adj/noun phrases.

I see など used for nouns only. I’ve seen など used as a listing particle as well(not mentioned on BP): や・や・など where listings are for nouns only and giving a “noun, noun, noun, etc.” “or so forth” type of meaning.

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I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say this, but this might have been appeared in the last JLPT N5 grammar section (Dec 1st). So maybe it should be moved to the N5 Session.

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Hey :grinning:

You are allowed :slight_smile: What is more, we are really happy that you have written that! :grinning:

Since the N3 exam has been added, the official word/kanji/grammar lists that are used for exams are not published anymore.
Those are simply approximated using older lists and what has appeared on exams.
Therefore sometimes the ones that are assigned in some books/resources to a higher level, might appear in the lower-level one.

I don’t know if など will be moved to the lower level at the moment, but I think that grammar points that are used more often should be distinguished some way, like a tag, or special color, since those have a higher chance of appearing in lower level exams and users should also study those before the exam. I will put that on our to do list.
(By the way, we kind of did this in N1 grammar points, we have chosen the most common ones for the first lesson)

Cheers! :+1:

Recently came across something that I am not sure if it’s colloquial or if it’s official grammer as Japanese tends to be so fluid anyway, but I went through all my grammar resources and (including bunpro), they all say など gets used with nouns. Nothing forbidding it being used with verbs but nothing about how it is used with verbs.

I know it gets used with verbs as natives have corrected some of my writing and I questioned why など vs とか and the only answer I got is that it sounded more natural. So I went on a hunt for grammar rules around using など with verbs and found nothing definitive. I did finally find in one particle book “All About Particles” by Naoko Chino mentions it can be used with verbs (the last example in the book no 6 of 6 with a meaning of “something to the effect that”.

Asked some other native speakers and it isn’t wrong but it makes me wonder…is bunpro missing this as an optional use or is this one of those things that if it were an English teacher from elementary school would be super angry and yell at you but it’s used in everyday speech…

Just wanted to throw this one out there because it seemed a bit unclear to me… and if it can be used with verbs…then bunpro should maybe add that info or call it out somehow… (of course I could be completely wrong on all of this…but wanted to ask)

There are several cases where it’s used with other things than nouns, for example when quoting something (…などと, also see the とは grammar point for a mention) or in patterns like …などする.

You can find a few of them in 教師と学習者のための日本語文型辞典.

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I don’t have a copy of that book/ref but thank you for posting… the quoting example is exactly how it was done in the ref I mentioned…

specifically though the correction that I received was from とか to など。wasn’t quoting anything
No quoting particles… Have talked to a few Japanese friends and haven’t gotten a straight answer, not a big deal just weird…

in any case…I can kind of see how the meaning might be more natural (even if the quoting particle is omitted)…

will be interesting to see if anyone has any other references/input.

Thanks!

I think the fun fact section could be made a little clearer. It says that the kanji 等 can be used as the pluralising suffix ら, then shows an あいつら example sentence written in hiragana (and not あいつ等).

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This should have been displayed as あいつ等, so we have just fixed it! Thank you for letting us know about this!

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