Making Sense of Japanese : What the Textbooks Don't Tell You - Softcover

Jay Rubin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 4770023103 ISBN 13: 9784770023100

Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Presents answers to the nagging questions of basic Japanese handled with a light touch and humour. Formerly published as "Gone Fishin'", this text includes a new chapter on upside-down sentences. The Power Japanese series presents a selection of guides to difficult or confusing aspects of the Japanese language. The student can find a quick reference to particles, a guide to the myriad levels of politeness, books of idioms, vocabulary builders, emotive expressions and turns of speech - all with natural examples.

About this title

About the Author

Jay Rubin is a professor of Japanese literature at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has written on prewar literary censorship, No drama, and the authors Natsume Soseki and Murakami Haruki. His translation of Soseki's Sanshiro was included in Kodansha's English Library. His other books include Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984; The Miner, by Natsume Soseki. Translation and study of Kofu. Stanford University Press, 1988; The Elephant Vanishes. Translation of 8 of 17 stories by Murakami Haruki. New York: Knopf, 1993; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Translation of Murakami Haruki's Nejimakidori kuronikuru. New York: Knopf, 1997; Norwegian Wood. Translation of Murakami Haruki's Noruwei no mori. New York: Vintage, 2000; and Modern Japanese Writers. Edited volume. New York: Scribner's, 2001.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

[Following is a self-contained section from the book, minus the original macrons.]

Fiddlers Three = Three Fiddlers?

Old King Cole called for "his fiddlers three" mainly because they rhymed with "soul was he." If questions of rhyme and meter hadn't entered into the picture, he could just as well have called for "his three fiddlers," who, we know from the "his," were a unit of some sort. If we wanted to keep them as a unit in Japanese, however, we couldn't be quite so indifferent about word order.

Old King Koroku would have Sannin no baiorin-hiki o yobiyoseta rather than Baiorin-hiki o sannin yobiyoseta. The second version would mean "He called for three fiddlers," three chosen at random rather than the self-contained string band he was used to.

The normal place to put counters is after the noun in question, where it functions as an adverb telling to what extent the verb is to be performed. Enpitsu o sanbon kudasai means "Please give me three pencils"--any three pencils out of a larger supply. Sanbon no enpitsu, with the counter now modifying the noun itself, means "Please give me the three pencils."

Kurosawa's movie about a group of "seven samurai" is called Shichinin no samurai. If someone singlehandedly killed that famous group, he would have Shichinin no samurai o koroshita, but if, in his wanderings, he happened to kill seven guys who were samurai, he would have Samurai o shichinin koroshita.

Ito Sei had far less dramatic doings in mind when he wrote: Watashi-tachi ikko shichinin no Nihon-jin wa, asa hayaku Tashikento o ta[tta] / "Our seven-member Japanese group left Tashkent early in the morning."

Edition details

• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 4770023103
• ISBN 13: 9784770023100
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 144