In at least one Cure Dolly video, she claims that case-marking particles (格助詞; such as が, を, に, et al) can only be used to attach to nouns, with the reasoning that nouns are the parts of the sentence which are relevant to ‘grammatical case’.
I won’t go into what grammatical case is (I don’t really know, myself), and I haven’t taken the time to find the particular video where I heard this (but it was recent, and I’m pretty sure I’m more-or-less accurately conveying what she said), but I’m hoping someone here might be able to help me understand what seems to be an exception to this ‘only nouns get case-marking particles’ rule.
And that is the case of a verb followed by the particle に. I’ve only encountered this situation from studying grammar here on Bunpro – as I haven’t done much reading on my own yet; I know, I know! – so I’ll see if I can pull up some examples:
Maybe it has something to do with the construction にしては/も? Or that might be just because that’s what I’ve been learning recently? These were taken from a recent review session.
Anyone got any ideas? In particular, I’d like to hear if anyone can explain it in a way that Cure Dolly might have said, “Oh, yes, of course, …” and perhaps she’d be able to put some of her own logical explanation to it. Sadly, Cure Dolly has passed away recently (during Covid era, though it’s not public what the actual cause was). So, unfortunately, I can’t just post a comment to one of her videos.
tl;dr: Be vary of words like only, always, never, they might be simplified explanations that gloss over nuances, exceptions etc. I can’t answer your specific question, but don’t get hung up on this one, since you’ll probably encounter many more.
I haven’t seen many of Cure Dolly’s videos. The few I’ve seen however seem to be aimed at beginner/lower-intermediate learners, and thus might lack some nuance. E.g. she goes to great lengths to avoid using any complicated linguistic terms, using “train engine” instead of “predicate”, “adjectival modifiers” instead of “relative clauses” etc.
It probably makes it easier to learn/understand at that level, but you’ll have to unlearn some things later on (a common teaching technique know as lying to children).
Some of these that I can suddenly think of (not all from Cure Dolly, but from what I’ve seen in various textbooks/beginner explanations):
が always marks the subject (has edge cases like 分かる, 聞こえる etc., and I’ve seen it leading to debates about the meaning of the linguistic term “subject”)
The たい makes the verb into an adjective (it’s technically a 形容詞型助動詞, an auxiliary that conjugates like an い-adj. Why is it important? E.g. 重さ is valid, 食べたさ is not)
な-adjectives are just a subset of nouns (they are noun-like, but there are な-adjectives that are definitely not nouns, like 綺麗)
When you’re just starting to string your first sentences together, these simplistic explanations are fine. You start physics with “velocity = displacement / time”, not with Einstein’s relativistic equations, even though the latter is more correct. But at one point, you’ll have to let go of these “ironclad” simple rules, and realize that language is kind of messy, has exceptions, historical baggage, incorrect usage that became widespread etc.
I’m not a Japanese teacher nor a linguist, so I can’t explain your specific point. But I can give examples that also use に after verbs:
So it’s not a special feature of にしては/にしても. Maybe the rule has exceptions, maybe this に is not case-marking, or it was historically case-marking but not anymore. I’ll let the smarter people answer this one.
I agree with @hali_g in that unfortunately some educators teach grammar without using the already established lingo, which ends up hurting the student later on since no one else uses the “simplified” version, but that specific educator. It’s a disservice to the learner, IMO.
Also, I’m not sure what Cure Dolly’s reasons are for saying what you’ve stated about the に particle, but there are a TON of grammar that use it, including the ones already mentioned. It probably makes sense in her methodology? I don’t know, but I would suggest you unlearn some of her terminology/methodology and learn them the way they are generally utilized.
In my reply below, I’ll be ‘defending’ Cure Dolly a bit, but I don’t want to give the wrong impression when I do so. I’m not of the opinion, nor am I claiming, that she’s infallible or some academic-level expert or anything.
Extra background info for anyone interested
I just get the impression that her ‘style’/quirks/whatever rubs some people the wrong way, and their first impressions can be that she’s overly-authoritative or smug or something, and thus she may be misleading people or whatever. Note: I’m not saying that you necessarily have this impression, but I have come across many people who do.
From my perspective she is/was just a thoughtful and knowledgeable learner of Japanese whose hobby (to the point of it becoming a modest self-publishing ‘business’ thing) it became to also try to teach others how to learn Japanese using some of the principles she picked up along the way. If anything, a lot of her inspiration came from Jay Rubin (who I believe is an academic, for what it’s worth), and she explicitly admits and acknowledges this. Indeed, she even has several points where she differs with Rubin. But this is all just to say that I think of Cure Dolly as someone who was trying to help others to learn Japanese in a better way, and I think it’s mainly her unusual cultural background and perhaps-odd personality traits that tend to rub people the wrong way. I don’t think she’s actually as pretentious as her detractors think. I think of her as a quirky old lady … err, I mean android who did thinks in her quirky way.
Anyway, sorry for the long preamble. That’s just to say that I’m not intending to treat her as some ultimate source, and I accept she may be wrong on some things. And I’m aware of that, and okay with it. (Just seen long threads of people going back and forth about her style/presentation/personality/etc., and trying to nip that in the bud by stating my own perspective up front.)
Also, sorry for this reply being so long! Paraphrasing Fermat, I didn’t have time to make it shorter! Aaaanyway!
This is inevitable, in a 10-20 min video format, and she explicitly acknowledges this in her initial videos.
She has one-off videos on single topics, but she also has at least one video ‘course’, which is a playlist of videos, from introduction to more advanced stuff. In her videos, whenever she says something that’s perhaps ‘not the whole story’, she usually includes a link(s) to other video she’s done which goes more into depth. Basically like page-references if it were a text book, or hyperlinks if it were a website. She also has a couple of books which are likewise ordered so.
She does mention such terms, again, in her early videos in her course(s). E.g. she talks about subject and predicate but quickly reframes it in less-academic language. Often, she’ll use the actual Japanese linguistic terms, again reframing them into her own English-language metaphors, but at least that allows one to look up what the exact term she’s talking about, if one wants to. Which is what I have been doing with her vids.
But unfortunately her work was ongoing, and she’s no longer with us, so this is one of those cases where she didn’t go further into referencing the specific concept/rule, so I don’t have such a term to look up. Hence this forum post.
Ironically, it’s exactly this kind of thing that she was working against. From her perspective – and I’d agree – most sources for Westerners learning Japanese couch things in terms of Western-style (i.e. mainly European, and especially English) terminology that often only half-maps onto real Japanese, or in other cases is a very confusing ‘lying to the children’ misrepresentation of the actual structure of the Japanese language.
Indeed, she does teach that が always marks the subject – and the ‘counter-examples’ that you’ve given there are exactly an example of ‘lying to the children’ (at least that’s her perspective on it).
With those verbs, when you see が , the noun marked by it really is the ‘subject’ of the sentence (and here she will give the specific Japanese term for this, namely the 主語; conversely, the ‘predicate’ is specifically the 述語). Here’s a good video where she addresses this very confusion (as a basic difference between Japanese and – in particular – English, though I’m sure other European languages as well):
Her ‘teaching’ is that ‘な-adjectives’ are misnamed. All words used with な are actually just nouns. But not all nouns can be used with な. [Note added later: I wrote this before reading your last point. So, the rest of this answer may just be another instance of your later example. Anyway…] And it only becomes ‘adjectival’ with the presence of the な, so: [Noun] is just a noun, but [Noun + な] is ‘adjectival’. And な derives this power by being a form of the copula だ.
I could post another nice video where she goes into depth on it, but I don’t want to flood this comment with videos. Besides, it’s not even a point of disagreement.
I’ll grant you this one without contention. She does indeed teach that たい is basically ‘just’ an い-adj.
However, it took me quite a while to find anything about this specific point you raise (thanks to your clue about ‘形容詞型助動詞’). I’d say that in the end it’s a bit of an esoteric point, from the perspective of beginner/intermediate learners, as you correctly identified her target audience.
By the time one gets to the point where this distinction becomes practically important, one will already be well-served in how to use such words like たい in most common situations.
Being charitable to Cure Dolly, we could imagine these kinds of over-generalizations as being something like the mnemonic devices used by say WaniKani. They get you off the ground quickly, but they’re not the end of the story. (And in the case of mnemonics, you’re not even expected to remember them once you’ve got practical working ability with the kanji/vocab under study.)
Okay, I’m going to take your word for it. I guess in that case this would be an example of Cure Dolly ‘lying to the children’. Fair enough.
I think, trying to put myself in her shoes (do androids wear shoes?), that she might reply that such 形容動詞 which are not also 名詞 at least behave structurally like nouns in the grammar/syntax of a sentence. But I don’t know enough about the distinctions to really put forth that argument myself.
Again, this is where I just see Cure Dolly as a fellow learner of Japanese who is trying to share her conceptualization of Japanese as a way to help others learn Japanese in a less-painful way than many/most Western sources. And again, you’re right that her target is beginner to intermediate.
Okay. Basically agree with the rest of your comment. I think you made some good points, and as a late-beginner to early-intermediate learner myself, I think your cautions are valid and I’ll keep them in mind. Thanks for sharing and for the info! Cheers!
If only such resources were available to me! I don’t know enough Japanese to get it straight from the source, and so I must rely for now on stuff written for English speakers.
Like, say, Bunpro! … Which, I’ll just point out as an example, also does not teach the specific distinction about たい being a 形容詞型助動詞, and so not ‘conjugating’ exactly like an い-Adjective; though they do distinguish it as a 助動詞 rather than a 形容詞, but they don’t explain what that means in that lesson.
So, from my perspective, learning Cure Dolly’s take on things does not actually hurt ‘the learner’ (speaking as a member of that population, sample size 1), since I don’t exclusively rely on her stuff. (And she wouldn’t recommend to rely solely on her stuff, either.)
Cure Dolly is explicitly using a model of Japanese grammar that makes it easier for English speakers to understand what is going on. The model she uses is not how Japanese people generally think about grammar (there is obviously overlap - it isn’t all or nothing). She simplifies a lot and heavily focuses on specific areas that English speaking novices struggle with (hence her massive over-emphasis on the subject of sentences). In my opinion her rhetoric is way way too strong considering she is also presenting a set of meta concepts and vocabulary to help English speakers in exactly the same way as a textbook does.
As for her use of Japanese terms, it has been a while since I saw her stuff but it is highly selective. Like her (in)famous claim that " な-adjectives" are “nouns” - why not just introduce the idea of 形容動詞 in general and discuss how Japanese people actually understand and use them if she is claiming to teach “Japanese as it really is”? Why this weird business using English terms which don’t even really fit? Again, it is because she is trying to help English speaking beginners the same as any other textbook.
(Just to be clear - I think Cure Dolly is a good resources for some beginners but I am just trying to point out that maybe her rhetoric misleads some people a bit sometimes.)
But she also explicitly is not using the standard Western-style terminology to do so. That was my main point there.
True, she is not using strictly the Japanese-style terminology either, and she explicitly acknowledges that early on in her videos. For example, she points out, IMO rightly, that native Japanese learners will already have fluency with verbal Japanese (which includes implicit knowledge of the grammar) before they get into these kinds of concepts that we as non-natives are learning without the benefit of such fluency.
She’s presenting a model in terms that she has adopted (for example, from Jay Rubin), and also in some cases has herself created, e.g. as metaphors, to help Westerners shift their perspective more towards how Japanese actually does work in practice. At least that’s her stated goal.
No linguist or traditional educator of Japanese Language (neither Western nor Japanese) is going to use a metaphor of train cars linked together to teach Japanese to anyone.
But as a mental model/metaphor, it is a useful device, and helps highlight the ‘logic’ behind Japanese that is often hidden from view by most non-native learners (particularly those coming from Western/European languages with no prior experience of any other ‘Asian’ languages).
This is the one part where I think you misunderstood me. It isn’t really a beginner topic, so I didn’t really explain it, but here you go. If you’re interested, look up the term “nominative object” (at least, if you can find anything that’s not a scientific paper). Why is it not just a normal subject? Because reflexivity (自分), honorific language etc. works as if it were an object, not a subject. Compare:
私が自分の部屋を掃除している。 - I’m cleaning my own room. Who does 自分 refer to? Me, the subject of the sentence.
姉さんが自分の部屋を掃除している。 - My sister is cleaning her own room. 自分 = Sis, the subject of the sentence.
自分の声が聞こえない。 - I can’t hear my own voice. 自分 refers to me, but the subject is 声. According to the previous rule, 自分 should be the voice, since it’s marked as the subject. But that makes no sense (I heard the voice’s own voice?). So linguists came up with a new term, “nominative object”, that’s kinda like a subject and kinda like an object, and it does not exist in English.
So no, Cure Dolly is also trying to shoehorn the Japanese into the English framework, just in a way that’s a bit more consistent than your standard textbook.
But.
I didn’t say her teaching method is bad. Will “が is sometimes a nominative object” matter to you at all? Is it a problem if you think about it as a subject? Probably not, since it’ll be a long time till you are making your own 尊敬語 sentences, and the 自分 example makes intuitive sense, the weirdness only comes up if you put it under a magnifying glass. Just keep in mind that it’s still “lying to children” territory, i.e. a beginner resource, not an authoritative grammar guide, so if you see an example in the wild that contradicts her, it’s more likely that she was simplifying things for easier understanding (or that she was just simply wrong - it happens to everyone).
I found this pretty interesting, so I decided to look into this. However, after researching and looking through different resources, it seems that “nominative object” is more so just an explanatory tool used by linguists to help English speakers understand this usage of が. I couldn’t find anything that shows native speakers understanding が as being able to mark objects.
Quoting from ON THE SCOPE PROPERTIES OF NOMINATIVE PHRASES IN JAPANESE by Mamoru Saito he writes "The particle -ga is referred to as the nominative Case marker. But it is well known
that its distribution is wider than the English nominative. For example, Japanese allows
multiple subjects and in this case, all the subjects are accompanied by -ga. " which I make from this that が’s sole purpose is to mark subjects in Japanese. However, linguists came up with nominative object as a way to help bridge the gap. If I’m wrong, please correct me, but that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn from this (and not being able to find anything stating otherwise).
Looking at your example sentence: 自分の声が聞こえない we have the reflexive 自分 and the subject 声. However, it’s clear there can be more than one subject in a sentence so we don’t have to rule out 声 being a subject in this case, and instead can bring in the fact that “I” can also be a subject and that’s where 自分 gets its reflexivity from.
If you can provide other examples where が simply doesn’t work as a subject that’d be great. I’ve always understood が to be a subject marker - but if this isn’t the case then I’d like to have my understanding changed.
As someone who has enjoyed watching her videos, I can definitely say I am very interested in hearing where she is wrong, or where there’s more too it. But I think the specific examples and how it ACTUALLY works is much more helpful than describing it in English words that are equally hard to understand. I think a lot of the terms being used here are the exact reason she made her lessons. I would really enjoy seeing all the examples of where you guys think a learner could be led astray by her teachings and provide any resource you think does a better job at it.
自分 refers reflexively to me. Fine. But that doesn’t make 自分 itself the grammatical subject of the sentence. It’s being used with の to modify 部屋, a grammatical object marked with を. The grammatical subject of the sentence is 私, marked with the subject-marker が. Okay, looks good. The core of the sentence is
私が掃除している。I am cleaning.
Again. Same scenario. The subject is 姉さん, marked with が. The core sentence is 姉さんが掃除している。Sister is cleaning. 自分 again refers to the subject, but it is not itself the grammatical subject of the sentence.
This is where Cure Dolly would point out (check out the video I posted, it has a really good explanation about this with several examples and justifications) that 声, marked with が, is indeed the grammatical subject of the sentence. But the translation given, while natural-sounding in English, is not what the sentence more-literally means in Japanese.
She would translate it as: Self’s-voice not-hearable-is.
Look at the core sentence, 声が聞こえない。Voice not-hearable-is, or more English-y, Voice is not hearable. The subject is indeed the voice.
Now, adding 自分 does not change the grammatical subject. It just modifies 声. Which voice? Or, in the sense of possessive-の, whose voice? 自分’s voice, Self’s voice. But why do you expect 自分/Self to always refer to the grammatical subject of the sentence?
Is that some rule somewhere? (Honest question, as I don’t know.) From my mid-level understanding, the 自 is what indicates ‘self’, it doesn’t indicate ‘grammatical subject’.
For example, if you augment the sentence with a ‘zero pronoun’ you could have it as:
∅は 自分の声が聞こえない。
And, based on context, the ∅は would be implicitly interpreted as 私は. So, resulting in:
私は 自分の声が聞こえない。As-for-me, self’s-voice not-hearable-is.
This was Cure Dolly’s point in that video: In English (and other languages), we have a perspective that focuses on some ‘ego’-possessing entity to be the do-er or be-er in most sentences. Whether that be a person or an animal, or whatever, we tend to want a self-driven entity to be the one doing things. Hence, we feel the natural translation is “I can’t hear my own voice.”
But in Japanese, they are very comfortable for ‘inanimate’ objects (without self-awareness or self-driven-ness) to be the do-er or be-er in a sentence. She terms this as a kind of ‘animist’ bias in contrast. So, while it’s less natural for us in English to talk about a ‘voice’ doing or being something, in Japanese, it’s natural.
Unnatural English: As for me, the voice is not hearable.
Natural Japanese: 私は声が聞こえない。As-for-me voice not-hearable-is.
Or, if we remove the negative to eliminate that variable: 私は声が聞こえる。As-for-me voice hearable-does.
Even ‘hearable’ is not a good translation, since that’s an adjective. Perhaps for lack of imagination I’ll go with stimulates-sound-sensations. So:
It’s only when we try to translate it to a natural sentence in English that we switch things around and confuse the do-er of the sentence: I can-hear (a/the) voice.
The Japanese does maintain the voice as the true subject of the sentence. It sounds strange to us, but that’s just the way Japanese works. And when we’re taught that the sentence really means that the subject I am the one doing the can-hearing to the object of (a/the) voice, that’s the real source of confusion.
Instead of learning how Japanese really works, we’re trying to fit it into an English framework, which includes this presumption of a non-Japanese perspective on the naturalness of ‘inanimate’ entities being the grammatical subject.
The video gives a more complete explanation than my attempt here. I recommend to watch that and then argue against what she’s saying, if you’re not convinced, than arguing against what I’m saying. I’m just relaying my own interpretation of what she actually teaches.
According to what rule? What’s the basis for that? That’s what I’m not getting.
Wait, did Japanese linguists come up with the term ‘nominative object’ in order to explain to Japanese speakers why they’re allowed to mark things like voices as the grammatical subject (主語) with the が particle?
Or is ‘nominative object’ a term that non-Japanese linguists came up with in order to explain to non-Japanese speakers why in Japanese (and possibly other languages, I don’t know) things can be marked as a grammatical subject with が, even though they don’t sound natural as a subject when they are translated out of Japanese into some non-Japanese languages?
Don’t agree. In my view, she’s introducing and emphasizing the importance of grammatical particles – in particular が as being central, and as marking the grammatical subject – so that non-Japanese folks who may have an unrecognized bias to thinking that because something doesn’t sound natural in English, that must not be the right interpretation, and so we must jumble around the roles of Japanese particles in order to fit Japanese-shaped pegs into English-shaped holes.
Instead, she wants us to try to experience the Japanese language more closely to how it actually works grammatically. So she uses various metaphors and maybe like ‘cognitive-mnemonics’ to help us shift our perspective.
Once we manage that kind of paradigm shift, and get used to it, we won’t need her cognitive-mnemonics anymore. We’ll just go about using the language intuitively and naturally, using Japanese as Japanese.
I didn’t experience this weirdness you’re referring to. I looked at the が, saw that it marked the 声, saw the 自分の as simply a modifier, and interpreted the 聞こえない in the way explained in the video, as being about the voice being not-hearable-is
Rather than about the Self-grammatical-subject (i.e. 自分 = 声) as being the thing that is doing the can’t-hear verb on the voice. Which I admit is a confused mess. But that’s only because we’re doing mental gymnastics and needed to invent a new linguistic term to patch up our misunderstanding of the simplicity of Japanese as Japanese.
Isn’t every language model just an explanatory tool? (half-serious )
But this is the part where the different definitions of “subject” come in. I’ve seen a reddit thread where two people were arguing about this exact topic for like 10+ comments, and in the end they realized they defined the word “subject” differently. Under one, layperson definition (the subject is the thing doing the action, or described by the predicate), this が is indeed a subject. But using a more technical definition (which I don’t remember, but it was multiple sentences long), it came out as an object. So I’m calling it “nominative object” to know there might be shenanigans going on.
So I don’t think what you found is wrong. But sweeping it under the rug and not even mentioning the issue at all… is a thing for beginners, who at that point don’t care about stuff that comes up once in a blue moon IRL.
If you’re coming from an English(-like) background, and you’re consuming beginner materials instead of research papers, no, it’s not clear. At least, it wasn’t for me. Every material just assumed that I know what a grammatical subject is. The only reason I even know about (non-relative clause) double が constructions is because of random stackexchange questions I encountered.
Thanks, but it’s one of the few videos I’ve actually seen, otherwise I wouldn’t comment on it. I understand what she’s saying. As I said, it’s a better explanation than “が is randomly an object here.”
Yes, that’s what I was saying (or at least, was trying to say).
My intuition about reflexive pronouns. Which, turns out, might not be 100% correct. The only article about 反射代名詞/ 再帰代名詞 that’s not about English learning is friggin Wikipedia, and there it has a 主語など qualifier. So if it refers to the unstated topic instead of the subject, everything would be fine and I’d give you this one.
But @josh made some good points about multiple subjects. Here’s a trick question: 誰が猫が好きなの？ It’s a correct, natural sentence that has two がs. Which one is the subject? Or does it have two?
If only one is the subject, then CD’s explanation is not the full deal.
But if it has two, that would mean the Japanese 主語 means something different than the English word “subject”, so using the word subject could be misleading.
Either way, the CD explanation is incomplete in one way or another.
Sorry for derailing the thread btw, it wasn’t my intention. But I know that as a teacher (programming, not Japanese), I almost always have to simplify, “dumb down” things when teaching beginners, b/c reality is way more complicated.
Yes, although that wasn’t what I was getting at. But I see what you mean.
I’ve done some more thinking on this and I’m realizing more so why it’s viewed this way. While I still prefer the idea of whatever が marks as being a subject, I’m starting to understand the point of the term “nominative object” and what you’re getting at. Thanks for bringing this up, super interesting.
OP’s original question was answered immediately. We’re currently playing armchair linguists about the true nature of が and the concept of “subject” in Japanese. But I think I’ll spin off a new thread dedicated to the topic instead, in case you’re asking if you could rename it.
I’d be interested in reading that thread so please do post. I think the underlying discussion here is about the fitness of different grammatical models for Japanese depending on the intention and user. Probably worth bringing up the cases where either が or を can be used (何々をしたい、何々がしたい) or even the rare but possible case of できる taking を (I have a good example from native media which I might add to your thread if you make it). Equally it is probably worth mentioning that many natives will take the 象は鼻が長い kind of sentence as a double-“subject” sentence etc etc etc
who did thinks in her quirky way.
)