This is a discussion topic for the updated N5 Lesson 1 reading passages. [May 2024]
田中先生 is the goat 
16 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.”
2 Likes
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.