Recently, I asked some people on Twitter if they had any Japanese related questions for me. A few did, so I’m going to try to answer them here. That’s it! That’s the introduction. Let’s get right into it.
Question 1:
Our first question is one that I had absolutely no clue about, so off to Google we go. If you aren’t familiar with nininbaori, it’s a comedy act where two people (二人) put on a haori (羽織) and do a comedy act as one person. One person is the face, and the other is the arms (but can’t see), and through trying to interact as one unit comedy ensues. But why is this performance called ninin whereas most of the time 二人 is read as futari? Well, even Japanese people aren’t often sure.
That said, there are more than a few cases in Japanese where the ninin reading is used… or at least allowed. We have words like niningumi (group of 2) or nininnori (2 people on one vehicle, e.g., a bike) which, while also having their futari equivalents do exist. Note though that nininwankyuu, a kabuki dance, also appears and doesn’t have a futariwankyuu version, so it seems like there’s a bit of ninin use in stage-based performances link here. Either way though, as the definition below notes, the choice of futari or ninin in many cases isn’t set in stone but rather decided through custom.
Where do these customs come from? Well, what seems to have happened is that ninin and futari both existed, and while ninin was dominant for a while eventually futari supplanted ninin. However, a few fossilized uses of ninin exist which never got the update. I don’t have the data to trace these changes minutely, but note this Yahoo! Answers source which states that in a 1948 Toyo Kanji publication focusing on readings, futari was actually listed as dis-preferred, and requiring furigana. In contrast, with in a revised document from 1973, futari and ninin are seen as equals. The same answer notes an NHK change where futarigumi was listed as allowed instead of niningumi in 1966. A survey in 1995 then found 60% of people read 二人組 as futarigumi, so the change is definitely in effect by then. Does this mean that most people used ninin until 1995? No. Remember, these documents were written by a group of socially powerful actors, not based on majority common preferences. But they do show that some people in high places viewed ninin as “correct”, even if the tide of speech moved against them.
It looks like what we are seeing then with nininbaori is a fossilized form. At one point, ninin was considered more “official” than futari, but this changed. And like many forms of language change, the transition wasn’t 100% perfect, so fossils of the past remain.
Question 2:
This one is pretty straightforward. Generally speaking, gairaigo refer to words from non-Chinese languages that are borrowed into Japanese more-or-less as-is. In other words, they refer to the same thing, or close to the same thing, as their origin vocabulary. I say “generally speaking” because it’s not 100%. For example, ラーメン is from Chinese, but might be called gairaigo by some people because it’s in katakana. On the other hand, tenpura is from Portuguese but most people probably think of it as a Japanese word. Is tenpura a gairaigo anyway? Well, it depends on the definition that is used. Does perception matter? Does script matter? Is it all etymology? Debates can be had. My point here is that gairaigo is ultimately more like a vibe than a rule. But words like hanbaagaa or shanpuu or biiru are absolutely gairaigo.
The term wasei eigo, or “Japan-made English”, instead refers to terms that are rooted in English (or European languages more broadly) but used in Japan in ways that you would never hear in their origin contexts. Simple examples are words like kanningu or hocchikisu which arrived in Japan from abroad but don’t really fit their origins or even appear in their origins at all. Like, “cunning” isn’t a verb in English and it doesn’t mean “cheat”, although sure some cheaters are cunning, and we don’t call staplers “hotchkisses” because the brand name never took off as a generic noun. More complex wasei eigo then come from Japanese people slapping “borrowed” words together for their own needs: pearukku (a couple dressed the same), terewaaku (working from home), or even the classic OL and sarariiman are cases in point.
If I’m being honest, I don’t really like the term wasei eigo because these words aren’t really eigo. They are Japanese. They are used by Japanese people speaking Japanese to convey things relevant to the Japanese context. But, I mean, it’s not like I can change the label, so it’s here to stay.
Question 3:
Hey, did you know I made a bunch of beginner and intermediate grammar guides? And also offer a free beginner textbook? And they include answers to both of these questions? Check em’ out.
Anyway, to answer these here too:
Causative: This form is used to indicate that someone is forced or allowed to do so something. In most cases, the topic/subject (は・が) is the forcer/allower, the person forced/allowed is marked by に or を, and then the verb is the forced action. The use of を for the person forced/allowed mostly occurs when the verb doesn’t normally take direct objects (e.g., “sleep” or “go”).
私はマイクさんにりんごを食べさせた。 (I forced/allowed Mike to eat apples.)
私はマイクさんを日本に行かせない。 (I won’t let/allow Mike to go to Japan.)
You can use “giving verbs” to make it clear that you mean “allowed”, and you can add terms like むりやり or 強制的に to make it clear you mean “forced”. When using あげる・くれる, the grammar order of FORCERはFORCEDPERSONに stays. But with もらう it flips.
先生が私に読ませてくれた。(The teacher let me read it.)
私は先生に読ませてあげた。(I let the teacher read it.)
私は先生に読ませていただきました。(I was allowed to read it by the teacher.)
先生が私にむりやり読ませた。(The teacher forced me to read it against my will.)
Passive: In this form, the topic is affected by the verb, and the thing that does the verb is instead marked by に.
私はサメを食べた。(I ate (the/a) shark.)
私はサメに食べられた。(I was eaten by a shark.)
サメは私に食べられた。(The shark was eaten by me.)
Causative-Passive: Finally, here the thing which is forced to do something is the topic (so the opposite of the causative), and the forcer is marked by に.
私は先生に本を読ませた。(I forced the teacher to read a book.)
私は先生に本を読ませられた。(I was forced to read the book by the teacher).
Let’s check out some similar sentences using the various forms.
私は本を読んだ。(I read a book.)
私は本を読ませた。(I forced/allowed someone who isn’t stated here to read the book.)
私は田中さんに本を読ませた。(I forced/allowed Tanaka to read the book.)
私は田中さんに本を読ませてもらった。(I was allowed to read the book by Tanaka.)
本は私に読まれた。(The book was read by me.)
私は田中さんに本を読ませられた。(I was forced to read the book by Tanaka.)
The differences between は and が: At the beginner level, you don’t really have to worry about the whole emphasis thing. But yes, は and が can replace each other for emphasis. If you use は when you normally use が that creates emphasis, and vice-versa. But really, at the starter level, you just need to remember these keys uses:
- In a “There is/are _______” sentence, the thing that exists is marked by が
猫がいます。(There are cats.) - In a “Someone owns something” sentence, が marks the owned thing.
私は猫がいます。(I have a cat.) - More broadly, whenever the topic and the subject of a sentence are distinct, you need to mark the subject with が. This is especially common in the XはYが_________ structure that is seen in Japanese to talk about things like preferences and body parts.
私は猫が好きです。(I like cats = As for me (topic) cats (subject) are suki.)
猫は耳がかわいいです。(The cat’s ears are cute = As for the cat (topic) ears (subject) are cute.)
Remember: whatever comes after が modifies the subject, not the topic. - In a relative clause, the doer of the verb is always marked as a subject. Topics don’t usually appear within clauses.
猫が食べた魚は小さかったです。(The fish that was eaten by the cat was small.) - Question words can’t be topics. You can mark them with が but never は.
だれが来きますか。(Who will come?)
だれは来ますか。(This sentence is wrong, don’t use it.) - If you are unsure, subjects are generally used instead of topics when you aren’t sure about the existence of the item. In many cases は kind of works like “the”, although this is an imperfect comparison.
子供はいますか。(Are your children, who I know exist, here?)
子供がいますか。(Do you have kids?)
Early on, stick to the basic rules, and you’ll be fine. Yes, you can say 猫は好きです！ to mean “I like cats” instead of the “base” meaning of “Cats like something that I have not stated explicitly in this sentence!”, and 私が行きます！ can mean “I, who am the subject now for emphasis, will go!”, but these changes are exceptions you’ll get the hang of once you’ve mastered the base patterns. They also require context! If you go up to someone and say “HEY! 猫は好きです!” that’s odd: “HEY! CATS LIKE SOMETHING THAT IS IMPLIED THROUGH CONTEXT!”. But if someone goes up to you and says “HEY, あなたは猫が嫌いですね。” and you’re like “WTF NO” you can hit them with the “いいえ、猫は好きですよ！” for that emphasis feel.
Question 4:
Improving your listening if you don’t live in Japan or have Japanese speaking friends is really hard. It’s quite easy to get thrown by one unknown vocabulary or grammar point and lose track of everything. But listening is obviously important.
So what do you do? Well, I don’t recommend much anime and the like. People in real life don’t speak like they do in anime, so what you are really developing is the ability to listen to anime. Which you may want! But it’s a different skill. I can listen to hour long academic lectures in Japanese and catch 90%+. I can’t watch Attack on Titan without subtitles. It’s different skills. And especially with fantasy/sci-fi kind of stuff, what you’re really developing is the vocabulary of the fandom, not the vocabulary of day-to-day Japanese speech.
A better thing to watch is something that is aimed to reflect “real” speech. Workplace dramas, films about “normal” people, etc. And then turn it into an active experience. If you don’t understand a sentence, pause the show, turn the subtitles on, write the sentence down, and flag all the words you don’t know. Memorize them, check the grammar, and then move on when you’re done. Keep your notes, and review these vocab over time.
But ultimately, the best way to improve your listening is to chat with Japanese people. Or even other Japanese students. It’s something that comes with time, so don’t be worried if it’s, well, taking time. For most learners it probably develops the slowest of the big four skills. Despite quite good grades in Japanese during my undergrad, when I left university my listening was by far my weakest skill, and that was okay. It got better through just talking with Japanese people over time. Don’t neglect listening! But don’t panic if studying in your home in a non-Japanese context isn’t providing you with native level listening abilities.
Question 5:
This answer is going to be pretty straightforward, so I hope it’s not too simple: you can end a sentence with が to introduce a topic. Not a grammatical topic, but like, just the topic of a conversation.
えっと、明日のパーティーの話ですが。。。
(Um, so about tomorrow’s party…)
That’s it really. It’s not a “but”, but more of a way of saying “hey, I’m going to talk about this new thing”. You can tell it apart from the “but” が most times just from context, especially what follows, but often times even the first half gives it away. For the above example, for instance, no one would say “Uhh, it’s tomorrow’s party’s talk but…”. The word “but” just doesn’t really make sense there.
Question 6:
The ~という construction is, indeed, often redundant. These two sentence fragments are basically the same thing:
アメリカという国では
アメリカでは
But redundancy exists in all languages. Sometimes, you just got to deal with it. People say the same thing in different words. You have to accept this at times. Even though the information is already there, it appears again. You have to adapt to this.
In other cases though, という does allow for better relative clauses, or helps you to “sneak” in information or contextualizing cues. For instance, let’s compare…
猫は
猫という動物は
In the first example, I’m just talking about cats. In the second, the という construction allows me to flag that I’m talking about cats as an animal, which might signal some useful context. Like you would never say “The animal called cats are cute”, but “The animal called cats are known to drastically reduce local bird populations” might work, and the という part helps flag that the “animal” element is kind of relevant to the conversation.
The という can also be used as kind of a soft definition. Oddly enough, I came across a great answer from my child’s books last night while reading them to sleep:
トロールという怪物がでました (A monster called a troll appeared)
Here, the という helps define what a トロール is. A child, especially a Japanese child, might not know, so という let’s just sneak the definition into the sentence itself.
All in all, the answer to “why is this here” though is ultimately “because the language user wanted it there, deal with it”. But the reason someone wants という there is often because the thing after という, even if it’s just もの・こと, helps signal something about the conversation. It can also sound a bit fancy! Like…
勉強は
勉強ということは
…the second one is more “ooh, this person is speaking from a pedagogical position of expertise oooh” vibes. Rather than just “studying”, they are talking about “the whole thing known as studying”. Clearly an expert.
Finally, the という construction also allows you to jam in extra information or modifiers that would be difficult to do elsewhere, or without adding a lot of extra sentences. Japanese writing seems to like to do that.
猫という人間に何百年間も愛されてきた動物は… (Cats, an animal loved by humans for many hundreds of years, ….)
Question 7:
The particle へ is basically a limited に. Don’t use it for time. Don’t use it for location of existence. Just use it for destination.
東京へ行く。<YES, GOOD!
三時へ起きる。<NO!
東京へいる。<NO!
If you find it confusing, remember: you never have to actually use it. You can stick with に. You just have know what へ means because people around you will bust it out sometimes.
Question 8:
Once you get to a certain level of your Japanese, you’ll start to encounter synonyms that use the same kanji like 捕まえる and 捕える. In some cases, the words will actually be pronounced the same, but just have different kanji, as in the 捕える・捉える example above. So what do you do?
There is not, as far as I know, a great English guide to these differences. So when I was first encountering these terms, I developed a few techniques for unpacking them that worked for me. You do need to have Japanese proficiency to some extent to access them, but if you are starting to encounter these synonyms you probably do so that’s fine.
The first method is to use the kanji conversion program on your computer as a help guide. When you attempt to switch scripts, you’ll sometimes see a little “book” icon. If you wait, it will show you some definitions with key examples sentences. That’s right! Japanese people get confused by this too, and need the same help you do, so they programmed that help right into your word processer.
As you can see above, for とらえる this lists 捉える as “to grasp or to comprehend”, and provides example sentences like “grasp the characteristics/truth” or “the radar grasped (located) the airplane’s signs”. In contrast, 捕える is used to “take and dominate”, as in “bag game” or “catch a criminal/smuggling ship”. Improving your kanji study assist too, as knowing that 捕える’s kanji is used in words like 捕獲 or 逮捕 helps figure out what 捕える means.
Let’s look at another example: here’s the list for きる (as in cut):
So we have 切る as “normal”, which you can always use, with examples like “cut hair” or “turn off the phone”. Then 斬る is “by a blade” and “cutting a person”, as in “behead”. The word 伐る is then for chopping trees. So while you can say 首を切る or 木を切る, avoid 髪の毛を斬る.
The second useful technique is to just plug the various versions of the word into a “example sentence dictionary”/例文辞書 kind of thing. My favorite is alc.co.jp. So here, 捉え (I leave off the る to allow conjugations like 捉えない to appear in the results) gives use these kind of “grasping” examples…
…whereas 捕え gives us these kinds of examples:
…oh uh… hmm. Wait, maybe they want 捕らえ?
Are there some overlapping examples between the two? Sure! But we see things like “throw someone in chains” or “hunt down and kill” which clearly separate the two. But what about cases like 捕まえる where it’s a whole different word, not something that just has different kanji? Well in some cases, it’s just a synonym. But things like alc.co.jp which provide example sentences can also be quite useful to see if there are some contexts where one doesn’t pop up. You can also compare definitions in dictionaries. From what I can tell, there’s a lot of contexts where 捕える… uh, I mean… 捕らえる and 捕まえる end up basically meaning the same thing. Sometimes two or more words can be pretty interchangeable. And that’s okay! It’s fine. It’s not a problem. It’s okey-dokey. It’s well and good. It’s a nonissue.
Question 9:
Simply put, when someone does the ～くはない form, they are generally damning something with faint praise a bit. Or of the word itself is negative, they are hedging their commitment to the phrase/attempting to lower its impact.
So, like, まずくない is just straight up “not gross”, but まずくはない has an implication of “It’s not gross but…”. On the other hand おいしくない is flat negative “not tasty”, but おいしくはない is like “it’s not tasty but… well, you know, it has its redeeming qualities too”. There’s a really good breakdown here. Note how all the examples have a “but” at the end. You don’t have to say that “but”, but it’s kind of implied. Think of the は here as the italics in “It’s not bad…”. So something like 仕事は悪くない。 is just a straight up positive. Your job? Not bad. But 仕事は悪くはない is more like, “yeah, the job’s not bad, but… it’s not good either”.
You can use this form with negative forms too (~なくはない), in which case you can use verbs conjugated into their plain negative forms. So 行けなくはない (not-can’t-go) is different then 行ける (can go) in that you are saying “Yeah, look, I can go but……” whereas 行ける is just a “yeah, I can go”. The “but…” doesn’t have to be a “but don’t you dare actually send me”, but there’s just a bit of a “hmmm yeah I guess” feel in most cases. You just aren’t volunteering with your hand held high. Indeed, stuff like できなくはない to mean “I can do it” often appears, and isn’t like a grumbling about the work, but might just imply that the information is a bit new, the person is considering the possibility for the first time, or just that it’s a bit tricky. In any case though ~はない indicates some kind of “not straightforwardness”.
Question 10:
While on this note, let’s address Illustry’s question here too because it’s quite similar. There are a lot of things that look like “double negatives” (or are, I suppose) in Japanese that it’s not best to actually think of as double negatives.
Perhaps the most common one is ～あまり・ぜんぜん. Beginners often forget that these formally (ignore 全然大丈夫 etc. for now, yes they exist) have to be used with negative endings. In English, these therefore look like double negatives sometimes. You might see, for instance, あまりよくないです (Not very good) translated literally as “not-very-not-good” and then told you have to “un-double-negative” this in English. That’s one way of thinking about it, but I don’t really like it. I like considering it more “very not good” (“extremely not” for ぜんぜん～ない”, with a あまり just being a “very” that has to be used negatively. You can see this “dual” meaning in あまり’s many definitions. I’m not saying it’s not a double negative, but just that this persepctive has helped me not mix up あまり and よく for over a decade now.
The なければならない・なければいけない・なくてはならない・なくてはいけない forms, which all mean “must”, are double negatives I suppose, but you won’t see that in an English translation.
私は食べなければなりません (I must eat.)
Literally though, these do mean “if [someone] doesn’t [verb], it will not become/go”, which is kind of fun. If you don’t eat, it will not become! What is “it”? What won’t it become/where won’t it go? Oh, you don’t want to find that out! So you better eat.
The last part of Illustry’s question is a double negative in the way we normally think of them. The ないでもない construction works like the なくはない form earlier in being kind of an implied “but….”, but provides a sort of “soft” decision or acknowledgement of possibility. Let’s compare:
行ける。 (I can go!)
行けない。(I can’t go.)
行けないでもない。(I mean… I suppose it’s not like I can’t go.)
Here, #1 and #3 are both positive, but the third is much less uh… gung ho about the whole thing. Phrases like わからないでもない are then used to show that you have some understanding, but there’s often an implied “but” as well. Look, I don’t not understand what they feel but… like… I’m not full on board either.
The end! And let’s stop there for now. To me, 10 is a good round number for a blog post. Sorry to those who answered my tweet and didn’t get covered this time, I have screenshots of your questions and I’ll be sure to get to you next round. If you’d like me to answer a question you have though, feel free to hit me up on Twitter or below! If people like these I’ll keep at them.
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Scripting Japan 
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