This is a discussion topic for the updated N5 Lesson 1 reading passages. [May 2024]
田中先生 is the goat 
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Even as somebody who’s only a bit less than halfway into N4, I find the fact that absolutely everything ends in either “desu” or “desu ka” strange. Was this to make it make more sense to the absolute beginners?
Hello! For the following sentence, what is the grammar rule for conjugating the verb “to make” that makes it read this way? I recognize the plain form in だ at the end of the sentence, but the topic construction “bento-making” isn’t something I recognize.
お弁当作りは大変だ
Making bentos is hard!
Hello and welcome!
This kind of conjugation is seen a lot in Japanese. You probably expected to see something like お弁当を作ることが大変だ。 or お弁当を作るのは大変だ。 - both would translate to “making bentos is hard.”
However, お弁当作り would loosely translate as “bento-making”, so your sentence translates as “bento-making is hard”, which of course is essentially the same thing, but the nominalised verb becomes a standard noun.
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Hi Matt, thank you very much for the thoughtful reply! To clarify, I was asking if this construct is a formal grammar point which I might encounter in a textbook (or bunpro) later in my learning journey, or if it’s colloquial Japanese which I might very well encounter in the wild but would not be taught.
I understood the meaning but was trying to determine if there was a rule like “how to nominalize a noun+wo+transitive-verb sentence fragment: remove -masu from the verb’s present polite form and ditch the wo particle”.
Sorry for misunderstanding your original question!
お弁当作り isn’t something I ever remember being highlighted in textbooks (although it’s been a while since I looked at a Japanese language textbook!), but it falls under the broader idea of nominalisation, which you’ll obviously see in textbooks. 作り is the stem of the verb 作る, and it functions as a noun meaning “making” or “creation.” You’ll see this kind of verb-stem usage often in phrases like 絵描き for “drawing” or 歌作り for “songwriting.”
It’s a standard pattern in Japanese, so I wouldn’t describe it as colloquial. It’s definitely worth keeping in mind even if it’s not listed as an actual grammar “rule.”
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分かりました!
Thanks for the elaboration, very helpful 
For any other beginners reading this thread, I found this link helpful for further reading: How to Conjugate Japanese Stem Form
In my experience, a lot of intro-beginner N5 lessons really want the learners to fully understand polite speech and basic grammar before introducing more advance compound sentence structures – which compound and more advance grammar would decrease the usage of "です” being overly used.
I’ve seen some examples of usage of あなた on grammar reviews and found it weird, but the last was a phrase of a girl talking to her boyfriend, so I thought maybe that would be a natural usage. However here on the reading there is also an example of the same. I though basically in Japanese things like あなた are never used outside of the context of literal translations from other languages which do use pronouns commonly. Is there any rationale as to why this is used, or even taught as vocabulary so early if it is not a word they really use?
I wouldn’t say it’s never used. あなた is a fallback in case there isn’t a more appropriate way to refer to the person, e.g. name, title (社長), relationship (お客様), or a different pronoun (きみ).
Two situations come to mind: talking with a stranger, and ads addressing the listener.
Second person pronouns in general will be omitted where possible, but can also be necessary for a sentence to make sense.
Coming back to the first example in L1, it feels like an entirely possible thing to ask a complete stranger:
これはあなたの本ですか
You can’t omit it because then it’s not clear what you are even asking, and you might not have another way to refer to the person yet.
N5 is quite a difficult level to give example sentences for, since many bases are not covered yet… And including a safe version of “you” doesn’t sound that bad.
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Oh, I see. Thanks for the explanation.
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I’ve just come up with this example: 私はあなたのことが好きです。as I love you.
I’m worried that these phrases are given out of context on why are they the way they are written… I think but I’m not sure, that あなた here can be used because adding のこと after it makes it softer… but really I have no clue. I think in order to 好き something/someone, this must not be the first time you see this thing/person (as my Japanese teacher explained to me, or you would use かっこい or another adjective) so I would understand in this context the two parties need to know each other. I don’t see why 私 needs to be explicited either… It would be nice to have another level of hints on phrases that explains this type of things, like if the phrase is natural in spoken japanese or if it is written/in what context it makes sense, because if you give me the translation, I’d guess that this sounds like a robot and I would expect something much more reasonable to be 好きだよ or 好きです on a formal context.
I really don’t want to bash the platform or anything, I paid for the lifetime because I believed it can be useful, but I think the time you invest here will be much more costly than the monetary value, and specially for the latter levels I want to make sure this makes sense for me and is going to be helpful rather than detrimental.