After I started immersing seriously a few years ago, I compiled some Japanese that felt so weird to me at the time. Since then, everything makes sense, but to this day, I have not seen any resources that explain these concepts. I say these are hard-earned learnings because the only way I could learn these concepts was by immersing, as explanations were scantly available anywhere on the English-speaking corner of the web.
What I hope to accomplish here is to reduce the amount of brain wrestling you will need to understand the underlying factors at play when you immerse yourself. Essentially, I hope to be the resource I didn’t have.
Instead of starting with the general principles, what I will do is start with specific learnings I had from specific examples. Only after I have done this will I connect it to a more general principle and tie it with other recurring aspects of the language.
Exhibit A) Using ない and ある on their own to refer to floating/unstated norms and expectations.
- 空いた食器を下げるとか あるだろ
(Lit: Lowering empty dishes, exists y’know /
Translation: Y’know, there’s that norm that you should lower empty dishes)
Here, the word “norm” or an equivalent is never used. It just says that such a thing exists. (So it makes me wonder if they just imagine a floating set of norms that you can point to as existing at any time.)
- ちょっと 聞いといて その言い方はないでしょ
(Lit: Listen up, that way of talking, doesn’t exist right? /
Translation: Listen up, you know that’s no way to talk, right?)
It’s weird that they say “言い方がない” to say that this is not an established norm/way of talking that conforms to societal standards that exist.
Exhibit A Learnings: There is always a default context
I can assure you that in the context of the shows in which those sentences showed up, words like “norms” or “expectations” never once showed up. Instead, it seems like one can always simply point to these norms or expectations at any time, because they are part of the default conversational context.
I’m sure you all already know about how in Japanese, as you speak, the conversational context can shift around and expand or shrink. When you need to point to something that isn’t expected to be in the other person’s mind already as part of the context, you use は to introduce it. However, these examples show something different: on top of being able to introduce new conversational contexts, there is always a default context. Conversational contexts don’t start from a blank slate.
That’s why they can lightly refer to norms and expectations without ever once mentioning these words: they are already expected to be part of the default conversational context.
Exhibit B) Tendency to describe things and situations (nouns) rather than actions
As far as sounding natural, one “ah-ha” moment for me was when I realized that English sentences are motivated by verbs – A does B. Japanese is motivated by nouns or passive phrases – Phrase B is A.
Instead of: 日本に行きましたか？ You went to Japan?
It’s normally: 日本に行ったことがありますか？ Does the went to Japan thing exist?
Now for some examples from immersion:
- そのペースじゃ 貴様は 永遠にブタのままだな！
(Translation: At that pace, you’ll remain a pig forever!)
For some reason, in my English brain, if I were to form the same sentence, I would probably say it like this (adding a strikethrough to emphasize that this is not natural sounding):
そのペースじゃ 永遠に豚である状態が続くよ
- 全員に100万渡しても 余る額だぜ
Notice that this is simply stating a described noun, rather than introducing the noun and describing it. Initially, my English brain would have been tempted to say it like this instead:
この額は、全員に１００万渡しても残る
(Everything in my soul is screaming for me to add a noun at the end now, but the above is indeed how I would have phrased things before I got more accustomed to this principle of describing things).
Exhibit B Learnings: Japanese figuratively points at things in the world
In general, the Japanese mentality differs from English in that in Japanese, it seems like the default way of communicating is to thing-isize everything, and simply make declarative statements about them.
Thus, Japanese simply describes the world around them. It has a penchant for pointing at something in the conversational context and elucidate a little more about it.
This is why the explanatory の is so prevalent. For example, if you see me with a cast for the first time, I could pre-emptively say,
家の段階で倒れて怪我したんだ
That んだ=の(だ) is using の to point at something in the shared conversational context. As soon as I see that you see me seeing you, I know that the situation of my having a cast has entered the conversational context, without a word needing to be uttered. Therefore, I can point to that and describe the “cast-having me” thing with の since I know it is in our shared context.
Even more general, the way that these grammar points like の and わけ function is simply to explain something in the conversational context.
You can see this at play in this BunPro example:
熱のわけではないけど、体がだるい。
Now that you understand that わけ is pointing at something in the conversational context, what you can immediately infer is that this sentence would be uttered in a situation where you were clearly disturbed by some ailment, and this is clearly visible to others, and you can see that others are apt to notice it.
In that situation, you don’t even have to introduce the fact that you are feeling unwell, as this is apparent; you simply describe the “ailment-causing thing”, and say that the source of this occurrence is not fever.
Notice that when you think like this, you lose the temptation to rephrase this (incorrectly) in the English-thinking way below (again striking it through to emphasize that this would probably not be as natural sounding):
熱があるわけではないけど、体がだるい。
See, if you were to add the がある to it, now you would be pointing to yourself in the conversational context, whereas in the original, you’re more pointing at the ailment-causing thing itself.
Anyway, more generally, you can see that Japanese is a language focused on describing the things in the world (rather than a language that is focused on interacting with it) by seeing examples that have been before your very eyes from the very start with examples like:
本が好き
Surely by now you know that 好き is an adjective, but did you know that the reason that this is how we say “I like books” in Japanese is not because Japanese lacks the concept of the verb “to like”? In fact, the verb does exist: 好く and it is transitive. So you could actually (rather unnaturally) say, “本を好く” or “本を好む”.
In actuality, this simple example that you have gotten used to is simply an illustration of the general principle that in Japanese, it is preferred to describe the things in the world, rather than talk about how we interact with it. Literally, you are just pointing at the thing (books) and describing them (they are liked).
This bias toward description rather than action can be seen in the fact that, generally, when there are transitive/intransitive verb pairs (such as 付く and 付ける), natural Japanese sentences will prefer using intransitive verbs when possible, because this is more in line with describing the 出来事 (occurrence of things in the world) rather than interacting with them. This is why we use
気が付く instead of 気が付ける - realizations get attached to you; you don’t do the attaching yourself.
I’ll even add one more thing without giving much proof by example: whenever you do see a transitive verb being used, it’s often used to figuratively describe what inanimate things are doing. This is why you will see this pattern a lot in J-J dictionaries: “…という意を表す” (it is literally saying that the word in question that is being defined, expresses a meaning, rather than that the meaning is expressed by the word).
Thus, it seems that even when transitive verbs are used, they’re mostly used to describe the things in the world, rather than to describe the actions taken onto the world.
There’s a lot more to write about, but I don’t have the patience to go through everything, compile it, and explain it. I was going to delete this, but I figured I might as well not be greedy and share what I’ve already written so far.