Hiragana clusters are beating me

Japanese
#1

So, I recently hit that moment where I decided to get into native content, but I noticed I am basically skipping clusters of hiragana when reading and I am missing a lot of the nuance. It feels like the “meat” of the story is in nouns and verbs, and then there is that additional “fluff” that I can not get my head around.

What I mean by clusters of hiragana

I feel like there are a couple of categories:

  • Those little words that speakers begin sentences with (conjuntives? 接続詞?) e.g. 「ところで」、「それで」、「そこで」、「これも」、「まあ」
  • the stuff at the end of the sentence that probably carries some additional nuance (sentence ending particles?) e.g. 「ね」、「なの」、「よ」、「だろう」、「かな」、「じゃん」
  • various expressions e.g. 「そうなの」、「そうです」、「それが」、「どんなね」, 「だって」
Examples in sentences
  • 「なんかしないでよ」 in the sentence「ゴロゴロしてるときに 将来の話なんかしないでよ」
  • 「なんだって」and 「んですよ」in 「なんだって 毛繕いできるんですよ すごくないですか」
  • 「…これもそうなの?」- here it is the entire sentence
  • 「あれ」、「それで」and「の」in 「あれ それでペンコさんのパン屋さんで買ったの」
  • 「よ」and「ちゃったんだよ」in 「 違うよ ダジャレどうしようもなくて倒れちゃったんだよ」

I know that bunpro teaches many of those, but I often miss what the nuance should be, or I am afraid that the nuance is not what I expected and I will miss the entire meaning. For example I learned here that な after the dictionary form is a negative command, then な can also add “emotional emphasis”, then as かな it marks wondering about things, and my favorite, after the continuative form it marks a soft command. So I am constantly wondering if I got the correct meaning. Some more examples of similar things below.

Examples of various な uses
  • 「行くな」 - don’t go
  • 「行きな」 - go (I really love this l anguage)
  • 「暑いな」 - t’s hot (but with ~emotion~)
  • 「行こうかな」 - maybe I’ll go…
Examples of various だって uses
  • 「だって、忙しかった」 - because I was busy
  • 「子どもだってできる」 - even a child can do it
  • 「明日休みなんだって」 - I heard tomorrow is a holiday

Another problem is also that they seem to be written shortened or in various alternative forms quite often.

Though this looks like a rant I really do want to wrap my head around those.
Does anyone feel the same way? And did you find a useful way to deal with that? Does anyone know whether there is an overarching name for those?

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#2

Replying to myself here, but I just came up with a fun dialog :smiley:
母親：「行くな」
父親：「行きな」
私：「難しいな、行こうかな．．．」

Translation (hopefully even a correct one)

Mom: “Don’t go!”
Dad: “Go”
Me: "Difficult… Should I go?

#3

Good to hear I am not the only one struggling with these ^^. If I see ん or なん my brain automatically skips them lol.
My current stance is that I don’t have to 100 % understand and these smaller things will eventually fall into the right place with enough exposure or more study (for instance, there’s a grammar point for だって which really helped me with understanding it and picking it up when reading).

2 Likes
#4

Thanks for the validation、probably it really is about more exposure, but getting that in the heat of trying to understand the content itself is quite hard

#5

I totally relate to this - the nice thing is that, since this is true, it gives you two modes to read in! If you want to do deep reading, these small clusters are huge for understanding small nuances and can be really interesting to study while you’re reading. If you want to do extensive reading, you can blow right past these so long as you’re getting the gist and your brain will start developing an intuition for when these are used and why.

If you’ve got enough vocabulary to get the gist, it’s a great place to be :slight_smile:

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#6

Those kinds of hiragana clusters was really troublesome for me when I was studying N3 as well, but now after learning for N1, I totally do not have any problems with them anymore.

It is just about how frequent you can get in touch with those anyway. It will get better, also many textbook has great and simplified way to understand those as well. Try Shinkanzen Grammar for once.

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#7

Never thought of doing deep and non deep reading separately, that is a good idea, thanks. Maybe it would also help in those days where I normally just can’t be bothered. Though it is sometimes hard to let go of wanting to understand fully…

#8

Thanks for the encouragement that it will get better, I will also look into that textbook