に particle marking direction or Adverbial?

Japanese
#21

I had tried Genki a long time ago and found it extremely confusing, which is why I had enjoyed Cure Dolly’s channel as it allowed me to at least progress. But it seems there is a lot of disagreement with it, with the things you mentioned, plus I believe たい form and how the opposite of what you said about nouns would apply, if たい is making it an adjective like she claims then why can’t you say 食べたさ and stuff, which shows it has to be different than a normal い-adjective right?

It seems like a lot of the time finding the right place to learn can be half the battle. Like I had briefly looked up Jay Rubin as CD mentions him and Tofugu had given his book a 9/10 Making Sense of Japanese - The Tofugu Review And I have used their resources a lot so I figured if they approved then it was considered a high grade resource. But it seems these things are more controversial than they appear.

With the おいしそうに 食べる sentence, I really appreciate you trying to help me, but I seem to be a bit hopeless on the matter as I still don’t get it. Maybe I explained wrong.

I know the person making the judgment is not the eater. But what I am confused about it what the viewer is judging. Are they judging that from the looks of it, that food must be delicious. Or that, from the looks of how that other person is eating THEY must find it delicious.

The way they are eating, THEY seemingly find the food delicious. (About just the person we are watching)
The way they are eating, the FOOD seemingly is delicious. (About the food itself)

I hate to make it into English as I know that doesn’t help get the Japanese but in English you would never say “They are eating deliciously” as that would be super creepy and be referring to the persons motions of chewing their food…I get that in Japanese that isn’t the way its taken, but what I don’t understand is whether this judgement from us with そう about the manner of their eating is indicative of our judgement of the food being delicious, or indicative of the person who is eating simply eating it as if it is delicious to them specifically.

#22

I think of this sort of claim every time I see ads that say something like “きれいは〇〇でつくる”…

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#23

This is personal opinion territory, someone more knowledgeable feel free to chime in. But since おいしそう is modifying the verb, I’d interpret the sentence the 1st way. I could definitely imagine a scenario where someone is eating a food I don’t personally like, but their expression shows that it’s their favorite.

However, if I’ve never tasted the food before, the question is more of a philosophical one rather than a practical one.

Book/show/game titles, ads etc. should not be taken as a definite source of grammar :slight_smile: They take many creative liberties to make them shorter, more snappy etc. I’m not taking the manga titled 「 須波優子と百合な人びと」 as evidence that 百合 is a な-adjective.

But as always, if someone can give me a counterexample, I’d be more than happy to hear it. My go-to dictionary at least only lists 綺麗な/綺麗に examples, and my own experience (so far) backs it up too.

Edit: I just found a book titled 「おいしいはおもしろい」 I guess i-adjectives are also nouns now :slight_smile: (jk)

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#24

Ads are also communication designed to be understandable by a large audience. Otherwise they don’t work.

Anyway the 三省堂国語辞典 does list 綺麗 as a noun (in colloquial language) and gives 綺麗をみがく as an example. So the editors made the same observation, people use this word in this way. And that’s the only thing that counts.

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#25

On the one hand, I stand corrected. 綺麗 was probably not the best example.

On the other hand, it kinda proves my point. People started using it with は and を, so dictionary makers start to classify it as noun. That kind of implies that は/を usage is a difference between nouns and な-adjectives, otherwise, why list it as a noun?

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#26

I think this discussion won’t go much further than this. In my opinion now, I believe identifying which に is being used will not change the meaning of a sentence significantly most of the time, and when they DO change, one of the options will be discarded by context or constraints of other grammar structures (like the topic or subject).

(Supposing as if 驚き was a na-adj)

The topic and the subject is missing. Assuming they default to 私, the only possible interpretation is in surprise because you can’t assume other people will think you are opening your eyes in a surprising manner.

In most of your other adverb examples they are constrained in a similar way as well, it seems.

I’m not too fond of phrases in a vacuum like this…

@hali_g I’m quite fond of Cure Dolly’s model, and it has been very helpful on pretty much everything, so I haven’t searched about her criticisms yet. So I’m thankful to you for shining light in some of her issues, I’ll take her model with more discretion now. :+1:

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#27

Hey, I apologize for adding back to this after so long, but I do have a few questions.

I encountered a sentence saying いい加減起きなさい, how do you interpret this? Is this something to be learned as a set phrase or is this more in line with “do whats right (whats responsible) and get up!” ?

Also, I wanted to ask you if you had any viewpoint on if Imabi Table of Contents 目次 – IMABI 今日 and Kanshudo Dashboard - Kanshudo are good resources in your mind for learning? If you don’t have experience with them specifically that’s okay, I was just looking to incorporate more learning resources, so if you did have an opinion on them I was curious to hear it.

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#28

I’d personally interpret your example as a shorthand for 「いい加減にしなさい、起きなさい！」, but that’s kinda long-winded and the repetition of しなさい sounds weird, so it’s shortened down to いい加減起きなさい. See more examples: 【いい加減目覚めたかよ！】とはどういう意味ですか？ - 日本語に関する質問 | HiNative

I have no strong feelings about Imabi since I use Bunpro instead :slight_smile: I did bookmark the site a while ago to fill in the gaps after I’m done here. Keep in mind that they seem to be using the model/terminology used in Japanese schools (e.g. terms like binding particle/係助詞, terminal form/終止形 don’t often appear in English language explanations).

I’ve never used Kanshudo, so can’t comment.

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