Should bunpro add a grammar point 大きな/小さな and other pre-noun adjectival words?

Bunpro
#1

So I use some books to learn extra vocabulary and listen to Japanese.
One of them is the はじめての日本語 series.
In reviewing some of the stuff this popped up and I noticed for the first time that instead of ‘大きい音’ ‘大きな音’ was used.
Full exercise
鳴る - ケータイが大きいな音で鳴っています。

I looked up the usage of な and could not find anything related to it.
Than I put it in jisho and found the question I had with an answer as well.
I share the link with jisho. There is a link to stackexchange that explains it.
https://jisho.org/word/大きな

I don’t know if it is correct.

大きな is an n5 word. But when learning about adjectives it didn’t come up. AND according to the reply it is used way more than the おおきい counterpart which most textbooks drill.

Anyway I think this might be an interesting grammar point that I did not encounter here yet. And a quick search didn’t yield any results. So is it here? I would like to add that to my reviews.

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#2

Do you want specifically a grammar point for the word 大きな? Because we already have a な adjective grammar point here: な-Adjectives - Japanese Grammar Explained | Bunpro

I’m pretty sure that 大きい and 大きな, 小さい and 小さな existing together is due to some historical shenanigans or some such. Very few い adjectives have a な counterpart. In fact I cannot come up with more examples than the two above. Also both 大きい and 小さい have more hits in google than their な counterparts, but I don’t know if that is a good measure of how often they are used in daily casual speech. Probably not.

Also a similar thing can be said about 遠く being a noun. Like, why? All い adjectives with く ending are adverbs, why is 遠く an adverb and a noun at the same time? (I know a google search would probably answer this question, this is just an example of a similar niche problem that you probably just have to learn the hard way.)

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#3

Careful, not everything that comes before a noun and ends in な is a な-adjective. You can’t use 大きな for any of the other things な-adjectives can do, e.g. you can’t replace the な with だ to form a predicate or に to form an adverb. Therefore it must be something else.

大きな and 小さな are in a class called 連体詞 (often called pre-noun adjectivals in English), together with words like いろんな、わが、その、きたる、いわゆる、たいした、ある etc. Quite a few of them just look like conjugated forms of some other word, or older forms, but they’re actually frozen expressions in modern Japanese and don’t conjugate anymore. IMHO a grammar point for these could be useful because it can’t hurt to be aware of this word class.

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#4

I would be a prime example of being unaware.

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#5

Just to add an extra bit of context so it doesn’t feel like a random exception.
goo’s entry for 大きな mentions this
《形容動詞「おおきなり」の連体形「おおきなる」の音変化》

So the original form of おおきなる does abide by the usual rules.

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#6

Thank you for all the answers so far.

I think 大きい has more hits because it can be used alone. I don’t think that’s the case for 大きな。 I don’t know which is used more before a noun. To my surprise the stockexchange link claims it is 大きな。

And there might be even a nuance difference. (For example Observing opposed to judging or even something else)
If you enter it in deepl the translation changes slightly.

My first thought when I encountered it was that it was a mistake. That’s the downside of being low level.

Since it is a class of it’s own I am fine that they keep it separated from the adjective drills.
But using some other words in that class they are used frequently. And it’s kind of weird that I have a hard time finding grammar points on it.
The words are not the most difficult.
And the concept doesn’t look to hard.

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#7

From a quick search it seems that the difference is that 大きな is used for abstract things and 大きい is used for concrete things.

そして、最大の特徴は「目に見えないもの」に多く使われるのが「大きな」の方ということ。

According to https://okurukotoba.tokyo/archives/3223#1「大きい」と「大きな」の違いと使い分け！

「大きな」は抽象的な語と一緒に、
「大きい」は具象的な語と共に使う

According to https://www.nihongo-c.jp/blog/blog-entry-100.html

Rather than high or low level, it’s just a lack of access to information. Being N1 won’t guarantee that the learner would have come across this along the way. The N-levels are just a lot of volume.

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#8

Not super relevant to the rest of the thread but I saw おかしな in jojo the other day. That’s the only other one I know of

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