(plural noun) “that I” (verb)

Japanese
#1

Hey y’all, thought of something i wanted to write but realize i had no clue how to.

I wanted to make a playlist of japanese songs that I understand and a different playlist of japanese songs that I don’t understand so I could learn the meaning of a songs lyrics, move it to the “understand” playlist, and then reinforce by listening to the songs again.

i’m assuming the structure is something like

日本語の曲 ___ 分かる

日本語の曲 ___ 分からない

but i’m not sure what would go in there, or if this is even right.

I’m going through the N5 Grammar deck so I might not have gotten to this yet, but if you could help me out that would be great.

other example sentences:

“people that I hate”

“cars that I like”

“places that I walk”

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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#2

Simply mark yourself as the subject of the sentence with は
As CursedKitsune pointed out, this is often omitted

#3

What you’re looking for is called a relative clause. In English we use relative pronouns (that, who, what, etc) to show this relationship. E.g., “songs that I don’t understand” or “songs which I don’t understand”. In Japanese there are no relative pronouns. This is where I think you’ve gotten tripped up.

A relative clause in Japanese is made by putting the explanation/description before the noun/noun phrase that is being explained/described. For example, if we take the English sentence “The person who is eating an apple” we can say this in Japanese as “リンゴを食べている人”. You can see that the order of the clause is flipped and the “eating the apple” part is just plopped in front of the noun (人).

Applying this to “Japanese songs that I don’t understand”, we’d end up with “わからない日本語の曲”. Again the order is flipped and there is no relative pronoun (“that”).

Let me know if anything this doesn’t make sense or you need more examples.

Bonus: As a general rule of thumb, in a regular Japanese sentence anything that comes before something is giving information about what is coming later in the sentence. There are exceptions though.

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#4

わかる is intransive so the grammatical subject, marked with が, would be the thing that is understood. You’re right that the person understanding would be marked with は but it can be easily and naturally ommited here. Hope thay makes sense!

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#5

@CursedKitsune Got it, thank you so much for your response! so just by switching the word order

日本語の曲が分かる: i understand japanese songs

changes to

分かる日本語の曲 “japanese songs that I understand”

?

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#6

you know, that is actually a really good explanation for that rule. I always struggled with this even now. lol. Thanks for that.

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