Log: ryanheise tries to solve Japanese grammar

[vonPeterhof]

まあ可愛らしいこと (How cute/adorable!)

I assume it's the ballet instructor saying this line? At least in fiction this sort of phrasing is strongly associated with well-bred ladies, as well as women who serve them, like maids or governesses. It often has implications of haughtiness/condescension, like in the examples from a popular ongoing anime below (in a couple of lines she even uses こと right after です, which is also characteristic of this style of speech). Not sure if anyone even talks like this in real life nowadays. I don't think I've ever heard it outside of fiction..

[ryanheise]

まあ可愛らしいこと (How cute/adorable!)

I assume it's the ballet instructor saying this line? [...] Not sure if anyone even talks like this in real life nowadays.

I've edited out the part that I'm trying very hard not to peek at (although I did take a quick peek to see what you were talking about!), since the premise of this journal is to see if I can make these observations on my own purely by observing examples. If I read other people's observations, then there is no way to know later whether I noticed this on my own or I remembered someone else saying it. However, I thank you for bringing it up still, because while it may not be the precise content of your observation that I want to assimilate directly, I do certainly want to take note of the "category" of the observation.

When I started learning Japanese, I had a set of things I was already looking out for, such as the way vowels and consonants sounded, how certain words were used, how grammar worked, etc. After interacting with Japanese people, I realised that there were new categories of things I should pay attention to, such as intonation, pitch accent, and differences between male and female speech. You have pointed out another category which is paying attention to differences between reality and fiction. To some extent, I was aware of things like this in anime where I caught onto the fact that certain expressions did sound very "anime"-like, but I went into Peppa Pig thinking that as a dub of an English cartoon, depicting more everyday situations, it might be a bit closer to reality. Although even there, it appears to be something I should still be weary of.

So what new did I notice this week? Only something very minor. I was watching some Korean dramas and I noticed something in Korean that reminded me of the ちゃ in Japanese that noticed last week. In Korean, people often use the 지 ending when talking to themselves. Actually, this is a short form of 죠 but the shorter form 지 is just more casual. Incidentally, when you're talking to yourself, there is no reason to be formal, hence why you'd say 지. While ちゃ doesn't exactly have the same meaning as 지, I feel that using the shortened form has the same effect. So the shortened form would be more casual, and incidentally when talking to yourself it seems appropriate to use casual language.

It's more like... if you're doing a call-and-response with yourself.

좋아했네. (Wow, I think I liked that, lmao pfft)
좋아했지. (LOL, ye, I think I really did )

Not just speaking aloud to yourself with the action alone, like a simple "hello," or similar. That would be
좋아했었네. (It seems I liked that, right? I think yeah.)
좋아했었지. (Mm hmm, that's correct, I definitely thought that thing.)
and it's pretty unnatural.

It's like if you had italics in a Western, English-language fiction book. Italics usually signify thoughts.

Does that make any sense? I'm here to answer questions!

Now that I can see your profile image, I see that you "might" either be Korean or come from a Korean family (did I guess right?), in which case I now feel slightly embarrassed to have rejected your Korean help, too! (Once again, I slightly regret putting myself into an unfortunate corner where, by my self-imposed game rules at the top of the thread, I am unable to peek at the feedback people are giving me if it contains the very observations I am trying to make. I guess it can't be helped, since I have goals here. Anyway, thanks everyone for trying to help, even if it's sometimes of a nature I prevent myself from peeking at. I still appreciate that you are following along.)

Anyway, for this week, I am going to try to step up my efforts a bit, and write a journal entry once a day over the course of the week, and try to get through every grammatical detail of this Peppa Pig episode. So far I've found this is quite a fun way of noticing patterns, and I think by going through a story sentence by sentence rather than going by observations I just make at random, it helps me to take in and notice more.

I'll do my first daily update later today.

[vonPeterhof]

I've edited out the part that I'm trying very hard not to peek at (although I did take a quick peek to see what you were talking about!), since the premise of this journal is to see if I can make these observations on my own purely by observing examples. If I read other people's observations, then there is no way to know later whether I noticed this on my own or I remembered someone else saying it. However, I thank you for bringing it up still, because while it may not be the precise content of your observation that I want to assimilate directly, I do certainly want to take note of the "category" of the observation.

When I started learning Japanese, I had a set of things I was already looking out for, such as the way vowels and consonants sounded, how certain words were used, how grammar worked, etc. After interacting with Japanese people, I realised that there were new categories of things I should pay attention to, such as intonation, pitch accent, and differences between male and female speech. You have pointed out another category which is paying attention to differences between reality and fiction. To some extent, I was aware of things like this in anime where I caught onto the fact that certain expressions did sound very "anime"-like, but I went into Peppa Pig thinking that as a dub of an English cartoon, depicting more everyday situations, it might be a bit closer to reality. Although even there, it appears to be something I should still be weary of.

I'm sorry if I said too much. I tried my best not to comment on the grammar itself and focus on the stylistic/sociolinguistic aspects, but if that's also something you'd rather figure out for yourself I'll keep that in mind. And yeah, unfortunately even dubs of foreign media aren't free from the "characterization through unrealistic and/or outdated speech patterns" approach of Japanese entertainment, especially not children's media.

[ryanheise]

Week 15

I've been listening to the バレエのレッスン episode of Peppa Pig on repeat each morning through the shower speakers, and in parallel doing this sentence by sentence study, and they seem to be complementary activities. As a way to "kick start" my attempt to increase my daily Japanese learning, I'm going to try to finish analysing all of the grammar in バレエのレッスン this week with daily posts to help hold myself accountable. If I can keep that up for a week, I'll then try to return to a weekly posting schedule, but compiling my daily progress for the week into one post.

For each interesting sentence, I'll once again pull out the grammatical bits and write down my current theories for the record.

1. 今日が初めてのバレエのレッスンね (Today is your first ballet lesson, isn't it!)

は vs が: I feel that either could have been used here, but based on my current intuitions, maybe it would be like the difference between saying "Regarding today, ....." vs "Today is ...".

ね: I think of it as "Isn't it", sort of expecting agreement or mutual understanding from the other person.

2. みんなと一緒に楽しみましょう (Let's have fun fun with everybody)

と: Has many uses, but I instead prefer to take it situation by situation. In this situation, when you do something "with" somebody, you can use と, just like "with". (It's more useful for memory to work from a specific situation to と rather than from と to all of its uses. e.g. You can't rattle off all the uses of the preposition "for", but given a specific situation, you'll know whether "for" is applicable.)

ましょう: conjugation ending meaning "Let's" (analysed previously).

3. あとで迎えに来るわね ("I'll come back later", said by Mama Pig)

で: Used in various situations, but here it is just used to mark the time word. So it's kind of like "at" in English in this instance.

迎えに: used before 来る (come) or 行く (go) to mean to come and pick up, or go and pick up.

わ: I don't have a well-developed intuition for this one yet. It'll turn up again I'm sure, and at that point I'll be able to find some patterns.

4. 楽しんでねー (I'm guessing it means "Have fun!" because Mama Pig said it to her before leaving her)

I don't know how to break this down, and maybe its not useful for me to at this stage. Sometimes the whole can have a different meaning from its parts. If it had said 楽しんだね, I feel like it would have had a slightly different meaning, like "It's fun, isn't it!" but since it's で instead of だ, I feel like that's different, and also given the context, it seems that Mama Pig is saying to actually go and have fun. This can be confirmed once I see more examples. (If I had to break it down, I would think ん is a contraction of の, that で is either a て- form or a contraction of です, and ね is as analysed previously.)

5. 皆さん、今日から新しい仲間が増えますよ (Everyone, from today you'll have a new friend)

から: various uses, but in this instance it means "from" today.
が: marks the noun "new friend", and it has a direct relationship with the verb 増えます.
よ: the only thing I can say about it is that without adding it, the utterance sounds less exciting.

6. さあペッパ。皆のところへ行って (OK, Peppa. Go over to the others.

へ: used here to mark the direction to head in.
て: last week I summarised the uses of て that I knew about, but this seems to be a different one. Having listened to this episode multiple times, I've noticed this て in several other places, and in each case I noticed that the teacher is asking Peppa or the other students to do something. So I take て to be a way to suggest someone to do something, but not necessarily in a strict way.

I'm really happy to have noticed this last one as it's an intuition that has only crystalised in the past week. Before then, I would have broken it down in terms of its more primitive meaning. So with て I always imagine something coming after it. So with AてB, I think of it as "Do A and B" (for some meanings of "and"). But here, there is nothing after A, and that can be interpreted as a way of implicitly suggesting that the person who's listening should fill in the blanks and make something happen after or make something continue. But rather than try to construct such a primitive interpretation like that, I think it'll be much more useful and functional to just remember that て at the end of the sentence can be used to ask someone to do something.

[ryanheise]

I'm sorry if I said too much. I tried my best not to comment on the grammar itself and focus on the stylistic/sociolinguistic aspects, but if that's also something you'd rather figure out for yourself I'll keep that in mind. And yeah, unfortunately even dubs of foreign media aren't free from the "characterization through unrealistic and/or outdated speech patterns" approach of Japanese entertainment, especially not children's media.

Now that I re-read my first post, I see I can probably do a better job of clarifying that. I am using grammar rather loosely when I instead mean rules. That encompasses grammar, but also things like colocations, and the differences between male and female speech, and the correct application of certain words in context. For all of these rules, I determine them by noticing patterns weighted by frequencies.

What you say about the Japanese approach to entertainment, and entertainment for children, is really interesting and makes me wonder whether Japanese children pick up these non-standard expressions and use them, at least for a while. My brother has a daughter who loves to watch Peppa Pig in English, and when I recently visited for the first time in a while, I noticed that she had a British accent (which is unusual since she's Australian). When I asked why that is, my brother explained, "She watches a lot of Peppa Pig." Apparently Peppa Pig in Australia is not dubbed and uses the original British voices, and it goes to show how much language she picked up just from watching this one show.

This observation is also part of why I decided to run my recent over-learning experiment over on my other log, and I plan to use Japanese Peppa Pig as the learning vehicle. I guess that even though Japanese children's entertainment doesn't always use realistic language, Japanese children still turn out OK as they encounter new life experiences and their language adapts, so all in all I should probably not worry about it too much.

[ryanheise]

Week 15 (Day 2)

1. では最初はルミプリエからね (Alright, let's start from the "ルミプリエ" (some ballet term I don't know))

では: "Then"
から: "from", in the same sense as English

2. 次はちょっと飛びます (Next, we're going to do a little bit of flying/leaping)

ます: here is like the future tense "will"

3. 優雅に美しく飛ぶのよ (Jump elegantly and beautifully)
(Not sure if I transcribed that correctly)

に: Here, treats the previous word into an adverb. Kind of like "in an elegant way".
く: Here, it turns the previous adjective into an adverb. 美しい would be the adjective, so we remove the final い and add the く. (This will need to go into my conjugation table for adjectives)

In English, "elegant" is an adjective. So maybe this is one of those adjectives that end with な.

4. バレエのレッスンはとっても楽しいようです (The ballet lesson seems very fun)

よう: Used after a descriptive word to say that something seems that.

Conjugation table for adjectives

And here's my attempt to start the conjugation table for adjectives starting with the ones that end with い. So far, we've seen these い adjectives:

美味しい (delicious) / 美しい (beautiful) / 楽しい (fun) / 可愛い (cute)

They can be turned into adverbs by removing the い and adding く, as observed above. So:

美味しく / 美しく / 楽しく / 可愛く

But there is another way I've seen it where you just remove the い and don't add anything:

美味し / 美し / 楽し / 可愛

In Week 14, I observed that that you omit the い in a compound, but I didn't specify what kind of compound. There are couple of familiar examples that come to mind where it is appropriate to omit the い:

美味しそう (It seems delicious)
可愛らしい (cute-ish)

But in today's selection of sentences, the teacher also said this:

楽しいようです (It seems fun)

Here, the narrator of the story pronounced it with a long い. I haven't yet analysed why this is different, so I'll be interested to see in the future if it's always the case before よう, or whether I've just transcribed it wrong. We'll see.

[ryanheise]

Week 15 - Day 3

Almost at the halfway point of this Peppa week sprint.

1. 皆さん。白鳥でどんな音を出すと思う？ (Everyone, what sound do you think a swan makes?)

で: This is an interesting choice of particle, here presumably functioning to mark the swan as a vehicle for sound production. If I translated the English thought into Japanese, this is certainly not how I would construct the sentence, so it's interesting just to observe how Japanese thoughts are expressed.
と: I think of this as functioning as "that", in expressions like "I thought THAT" and "I said THAT".

(I'm skipping a lot of simple sentences, but what happens next is that since all the children in the class are in fact different types of animals, they all fail to produce a swan sound and instead make dog, cat and sheep noises.)

2. ペッパは踊るのが大好き (Peppa loves dancing)

の: Functions here to turn the preceding word into a noun so that we can put a subject marker が after it.
大好き: In Japanese, the way to say that you like something is to say that something (subject) is likeable. So 大好き doesn't translate as like, it translates as likeable.

3. 白鳥になって踊ったんだよ (I danced like a swan))

になって: This is a nice example of where I'm sure my internal model of grammar does not match the text books. I recognise that に is a particle, but I still think of this as one word because they always go together. It's in the て form as a way of joining it with the next verb like "and" (for some meanings of "and").
踊ったんだよ: The た makes it past tense, and then んだ is sort of redundant but it feels like it's just turning it into a fact or situation that you're talking about rather than saying the thing directly. And よ I guess she says because she's excited (she looks excited as she told this to her mum as she came out of class).

4. 私優雅に美しく踊ったの (I danced elegantly and beautifully)

の: I am starting to think that this is similar in function to よ.

Conjugation table for adjectives

好きな is an adjective that was used above, appearing as 好き (well, 大好き). I'll wait until I collect more examples of な adjectives before making a table out of them.

[vonPeterhof]

1. 皆さん。白鳥でどんな音を出すと思う？ (Everyone, what sound do you think a swan makes?)

で: This is an interesting choice of particle, here presumably functioning to mark the swan as a vehicle for sound production. If I translated the English thought into Japanese, this is certainly not how I would construct the sentence, so it's interesting just to observe how Japanese thoughts are expressed.

This looked extremely wrong to me so I went to check the video, and what I hear is って and not で.

[ryanheise]

1. 皆さん。白鳥でどんな音を出すと思う？ (Everyone, what sound do you think a swan makes?)

で: This is an interesting choice of particle, here presumably functioning to mark the swan as a vehicle for sound production. If I translated the English thought into Japanese, this is certainly not how I would construct the sentence, so it's interesting just to observe how Japanese thoughts are expressed.

This looked extremely wrong to me so I went to check the video, and what I hear is って and not で.

Thank you so much for that! When I listen to it again, I hear って. Although I will say I still haven't figured out what it means yet Based on other examples I've heard up to this point, my current feeling is that って may be derived from 言って. In another story I was listening to from JLPT Stories, I heard "「トリアン」ってよく考えたら" which at least seems to fit that theory.

There are also various other places where I've heard っ immediately after a noun, although they seem to be for different purposes. One of them, っぽい, surely means -like. Another of them appears later in this story when Peppa says "ラディピッグったら", but I don't yet have enough examples of it to have any clear thoughts about it.

Hopefully I can get many more things wrong (i.e. so I'll have a record of how my thought process went).

[ryanheise]

Week 15 - Day 4

Today I attempt to figure out 6 more sentences.

1. どんな風に踊ったか見せてあげる (I'll show you how I danced)

に: Kind of like "in" what manner. For now, I'm taking 風に as a colocation.
か: Not really sure if I transcribed it right. But if I did, usually か indicates uncertainty when alternatives are possible, so if that's what she said, my feeling is that the uncertainty is from the Mother's perspective, as she doesn't know how Peppa dances yet.

2. お家に帰ってからね (After we get home)

から: Here, it takes the meaning of "from" or "after".

3. マミだけじゃなくてラダディーピッグとジョージにも見せてあげて (Don't just show me, show Daddy Pig and George as well.

だけじゃなくて: Grammatically this is だけ(just) じゃなく(not) て(linking). So it means "not just". You could remove the だけ and it would be "not". I have also heard this without the linking part, e.g. ではなく.
と: and
に: to (a person)
も: also
て: the final て is what I mentioned discovering a couple of days ago, and it is used when asking someone to do something.

4. ペッパとマミーが帰ってきました (Peppa and Mummy came back)

き: I think this is really just a conjugation of the verb 来る (to come), but it is often combined with other verbs using て where there is a sense of "coming" to it.

5. ダディージョージ。私がみんなにバレーを教えてあげる (Daddy, George, I'm going to teach you all ballet.

て-あげる: I mentioned before that くれる was used after another verb linked with て to indicate that you are receiving the fruits of that verb. あげる is similar except here Peppa is giving, not receiving.

6. 難しいんだろ (That sounds difficult)

んだろ: I would take ん once again as equivalent to の in that it makes the previous word function grammatically as a noun, and then だろ is a conjugation of です which sort of means "probably".