ということ - Grammar Discussion

Grammar Points
#21

Hi there, and thanks for getting in touch! In this case, ‘they are’ was just used in the gender neutral sense, but I agree it could definitely be a little bit more natural!

I am going to change it to -
You are living together, but not dating? So that means they’re your roommate, right?

I think in this case, prolonging the ‘they are’ and adding ‘a’ made the English come off a little like an accusation. I hope this is a better translations that more closely reflects the Japanese.

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#22

Sorry for unburying this but I really just wanted to go out of the way to say how wonderful of an explanation this is for this particular grammar point.

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#23

I have a lot of difficulty understanding this grammatical point. In this sentence, why use ということ instead of just と?

あの先生の教え方が酷いということを聞いた。
あの先生の教え方が酷いと聞いた。

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#24

Having trouble understanding “ということ”.
I don’t understand what normalization (phrase to noun) has got to do with the point.

  1. Most of the example sentences seem to be just telling me “XXX + ということ” is equal to “mean XXX”.
    If you add a question (? or ですか？), you get “Do you mean XXX?”.

  2. A couple of the sentences seem to be different, but it just seems to be a replacement for a quotation.

Example: あの先生の教え方が酷いということを聞いた。
What is the difference from “あの先生の教え方が酷いと聞いた。”?

Isn’t “ということを” just the same as “と”?
We seem to be only using a different phrase for quotations.

#25

I believe that I’ve found this grammar point in Tae Kim’s Guide.
It is just a small subsection.

https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/define

Section: “Rephrasing and making conclusions with 「という」”

  • We can also simply use 「こと」 to sum up something without rephrasing anything.

Example Dialogue
A：みきちゃんが洋介と別れたんだって。
A: I heard that Miki-chan broke up with Yousuke.

B：ということは、みきちゃんは、今彼氏がいないということ？
B: Does that mean Miki-chan doesn’t have a boyfriend now?

A：そう。そういうこと。
A: That’s right. That’s what it means.

So, I guess the explanation on Bunpro could probably titled as “Summing Up” or “Do you mean …?” to make it clearer on what it is doing.
Not too sure why is it labelled as Normalization when more or less all of the examples are for “Summing Up”.

#26

+1 this could be clearer

I suspect that ということを can be used as a substitute for the と use case where you’re not necessarily making a direct quote from someone but to reference some statement/idea you’ve heard before.

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