I don't understand how you haven't been seated on some high council for language learning, it's a crime at this point. Every video is just absolutely golden, providing epiphany enducing insight every time. This video just rocked my whole perception of japanese, bringing me a step closer to thinking through the lense of the language. Like, your explanations are just so good I cannot thank you enough. Without your videos I'd probably be translating horrible japanese with English like a 「外人」 right now. I know you haven't uploaded in a while, so Ihope you're doing well. Many thanks from the US 😁
this didnt sit completely well with me at first because the reasoning for why the de in de aru can't be te felt a bit handwavy, but happy to report that she is in fact correct! i don't think she ever brought up the etymological connection between te and de (the particle is just a combination of ni + te, ni te being something you still see in formal text occasionally in place of de) and it turns out de aru is just a shortened form of the even older sentence ender "ni te ari". There _is_ a te in there, as it turns out, but it's not a "de" form te, just like she said. Dolly-senseis work made me fall in love with etymology. i hope she can rest easy knowing that even though she may be gone, her mentorship is still helping people all over the world, and will for many years to come.
She could have worded it better, but her explanation is very logical. You can't define something by making reference to the thing itself. With the risk of going into needless controversy, this is why the "A woman is someone who identifies as a woman" is a mess. It's a hellish loop if you replace the word being defined with the definition itself. In programming, that kind of mistake would crash your program or system. There is no room for self reference in definitions. If で in である is the て form of the copula, how can である be the origin of the copula? Another way to put it is> What came first, the egg or the chicken?
This has been bothering me since the moment I learned ある which was many years ago. I understand that many language lesson guides want you to learn this purely organically, but as adults, I always felt like learning Grammer could dramatically improve my comprehension faster. Tae Kim's guide made everything seem foreign, but your guide has turned the foreign into the familiar and I can now see all of the things I've learned and how they fit together. Thank you.
Cure Dolly: "ござる is simply a polite, Keigo version of ある" Me: "You mean, it's worked that way this whole time? Even 16 years ago when I was a child doing Pimsleur's Japanese, memorizing おはようございます by rote?"
You can break it down even further too into お早う and ござる which less formally would be 早く and ある, so "Early > Exists". The fact is, most of not all of the earliest set phrases they teach in textbooks are polite versions of very simple concepts. I wish they did even a little bit of explaining of that right away rather than having it dawn on you when you finally learn some 敬語 in like Genki chapter 20+. For example: よろしくお願いいたします breaks down into 宜しく, a formal version of the adverbial form of 良い, お願い, the honorific noun form of 願う, and いたします, the ます form of いたす, which is itself a humble version of する. So you get, "Well > Request > Humbly Do".
The bit about turning adjectival nouns into adjectival verbs made something click in my head. Thinking of 「きれいな人」 as meaning 「きれいである人」as a verb clause, "A person existing in the set of pretty" helped me realize why 「な」really is the same thing as the copula.
Somehow, Dolly先生, you always manage to upload a video on exactly what I’m wondering about. And many other fascinating topics, of course. But your timeliness is becoming uncanny, ahaha
Great vid as usual! I'd also recommend anyone who has trouble with である to look up words that you already know in a Japanese monolingual dictionary. である is used all the time in monolingual dictionaries and I think it's great practice to see how it differs from だ/です and why dictionary authors choose to use it to describe verbs, nouns, etc. in definitions.
Ah, I had this question since such a long time. "But what is that で in である ??" Of course, it turns out it's the same old で we use all the time ^^ Thank you so much for this video !
I actually had no idea な is just the adjectival form of だ and I've been speaking Japanese for a long time. I've always felt there was something off about the way English textbooks approached teaching Japanese, as if they were purposely withholding information. In hindsight they come off as quite condescending, assuming that teaching you the whole truth is too much for you to handle and that you're better off just memorizing what they say instead of learning the etymology behind why things are the way they are. This goes hand in hand with textbooks barely scratching the surface, because it seems the creators don't expect you to make it past the beginner level. It feels somewhat elitist, further reinforced by Japanese people being speechless when you are truly 上手, as opposed to the obligatory 「ま！日本語お上手ですね、箸も使えますか？」
Wow, I'm proud of myself because I figured out (almost) all of this myself and now sensei confirms my understanding. The only thing I didn't realized before watching sensei's videos was the fact that copula is a marker of belonging rather than a marker of equality. Thank you very much sensei
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 ありがとうございます。 I've got a question. Today I came across "あるまい" twice in my immersion, I think it is kind of ありません or ない because of the context but, do you have any explanation? Example: 只いぢめに来たわけでもあるまい？ thanks in advance
偉い人形であるドリー先生！ Your method of understanding Japanese feels like peeking behind the curtain of linguistic reality, and it is beautiful. 悟りみたいな状態でございます。笑ｗｗ I never would have thought it would all click like this. Now it feels like it's just a case of 'getting the words down', though I'm positive that there will still be gaps in my understanding for me to discover later down the line. I think knowing the bounds of your model -- in that you've made an understandable decision to treat the copula as an entity in its own right, with its own peculiarities different from that of other verbs in modern Japanese -- really helps to cement one's understanding of the 3 engines/the Organic model as whole. Of course, we understand the world and the complex concepts within it by the help of models, abstraction and metaphor, and it therefor serves us well to recognise that there can be alternative (perhaps completely valid and sensible) models and metaphors for making sense of those same concepts. I think you've done a stellar job of building and presenting a model which is easily and fruitfully applied to the situation of English learners of Japanese, and I am very grateful for your continued efforts. I suppose that us foreign learners are very fortunate that Japanese lends its self so well to being described by such a consistent model. I doubt that English would fit similarly well into such a framework. As somebody who is training as an English tutor, it seems that for ever rule there are just as many exceptions, whereas such cases are much fewer and further between in modern Japanese. これからもありがとうございます！
Yes this is right. I don't think there are many languages that can be modeled as logically and efficiently as Japanese. The language seems to have evolved in a very logical and economical direction. It is very sparing with grammatically built-in redundant or unnecessary information (like gendered nouns, tense agreement, conjugated forms etc.) and it is very consistent and logical in the ways that it does things. I certainly couldn't model English anywhere near as efficiently.
Speaking of the copula as an indicator of set membership... I recently finished reading a kids' grammar manga from the ドラえもん learning series. It's mostly geared towards preparing for middle school entrance exams, but it has a few interesting observations about structure. One is their rule of thumb for deciding if a word is 名詞 or 形容動詞. In addition to the fact that 形容動詞 use な to modify nouns, they can also be paired with adverbs like とても. So you can say that さくらはとても静かです, but it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to say さくらはとても先生です. In other words, さくら either is or isn't a 先生, but there are degrees to which she could be 静か, relative to other people who are more or less so. ドラえもん of course doesn't explain it to 小学生 in these terms , but what I hear is basically that 名詞 are like classical mathematical sets, in which elements are either part of the set or not, whereas 形容動詞 are more like the more modern concept of "fuzzy sets," where membership in the set is a smooth gradient from 0 (not at all) to 1 (completely). So you usually can't use 形容動詞 as independent nouns, because that would imply that the ideal concept of 静か exists independently of the things that are being compared in their 静か-ness... and that's the kind of thing that Plato and Aristotle used to tie themselves into logical knots arguing about. But, that would be why the copula is used with both 名詞 and 形容動詞-they're both sets, but qualitatively different kinds of sets.
That is an interesting aspect. 静かな/だ places something into the set of "quiet things", but "quiet" unlike, say "Japanese" is a quality that has degrees - so something can be very quiet, somewhat quiet, completely quiet. Of course you can use various other degree modifiers and also comparison modifiers like 割に (comparatively). You can't be comparatively Japanese or comparatively a bird. And of course many adjectival nouns can function either adjectivally or non-adjectivally - like 元気 which is often used as a 形容動詞 but also as a straight noun in 元気を出して (lit. get out [show, use] your 元気) which can't be done with "pure" 形容動詞 like 静か. Another quality of "pure" 形容動詞 is that while they can have degree they can't have number. But a "switch" noun can so when using, say 不思議 as part of a 形容動詞 you can say とても不思議な出来事 (a very mysterious event). In this kind of usage it can be degree-modified, but not counted. However when used as a straight noun (meaning a mystery) the term 七不思議 (seven wonders, seven mysteries) is common. This kind of usage can be counted but not degree-modified. On the other hand 元気 can "flip" but can be degree-modified as a 形容動詞 but not counted as a 名詞.
Nice lesson as usual. I especially appreciate your explanations here about models and grammar, and how the copula is understood and taught to native speakers.
The very logical make-up of である pleases me greatly. If Jan Misali were to review Japanese as a con-lang, he probably would criticise it for being unrealistically logical.
Very true. As an AI unit I am very glad I am working on Japanese and not another language. Honestly I am not sure I could do nearly as well at analyzing most languages.
Thank you for another detailed explanation about this topic. It is really helping me to wrap my mind around how this works. It is so different from the way English expresses things that it takes awhile to recognize what is happening when you hear it in Japanese. These videos help the analytical part of my mind grasp it so I can let it go and just let the Japanese sink in. You don't really find this type of explanation elsewhere. 教えてくれてありがとうございます。
Notes for myself: de aru de arimasu de gozaru* de gozaimasu All last three are variations of "de aru" *gozaru is an honorific version of aru ☆While da is casual and desu is polite, de aru can be seen as a neutral version of the copula, or just, the copula. Thus, it's used in objective contexts, such as academic papers, reports, etc ☆But also, it is used when we want to premodify a noun with a noun that is not an adjectival noun and when no doesn't exactly fit what we want to say or doesn't work. (Note that da and desu can't do this; they can only come at the end of a logical clause) Example daigakusei no Sakura = the university student Sakura ≠ daigakusei de aru Sakura = Sakura who is a university student enkei de aru sama = the state of being round -> "enkei no sama" doesn't really work Historical roots: de aru -> da (da is just an abbreviation of de aru) de arimasu -> desu (desu is just an abbreviation of de arimasu) de aru = de (logical particle) + aru (verb) = "exist (aru) within a particular boundary or parameter (the one marked by the particle de)"* or in other words "exist within a set" Examples washi ga tori da = an eagle exists within the set "birds" = an eagle is a bird *The particle de defines the boundary or limit or field or parameter within which an action takes place or a state of being prevails Examples kouen de asobu = play in the park sekai de ichiban oishii raamen = the most delicious ramen in the world
Each time my mind is blown by these videos, it takes the whole week to piece back together the fragments! However, if you *hadn't* have modelled the copula, う-verbs and adjectives as 3 separate engines, I wouldn't have been able to comprehend it at that stage - resulting in not a mind blown, but merely head-scratching. However, 84 lessons in, I'm ready... だ = で＋ある, say? Keiyoudoushi, you say? *NEW-BOOM!* 🤯 Hey, now would you look at that! Ye olde kanji are so interesting: 在る 「ある」 to exist (inanimate things) 居る 「おる」 to exist (animate beings) - kenjougo 据わる 「すわる」 to hold still 座る 「すわる」 to sit 御座在る 「ござある」 to exist - archaic teineigo ご座る 「ござある」 - to exist - archaic teineigo contraction ございます - to exist - modern polite-form teineigo Choo-choo!🚂
I would also say that while it is valid to model だ as a verb (because it is a contraction of である), Japanese usage doesn't wholly treat it as one. The reason we have to use である to make copula-based pre-modifiers is because verbs inherently work as pre-modifiers. The reason we _can't_ use だ or です in this capacity is that they have evolved structurally far enough from their verb-origins that they no longer feel "right" as pre-modifiers.
Thank you so much for this lesson, Dolly先生！ This has really helped my understanding of Japanese. I wonder, since I am also interested in UA-cam video creation, how do you create the "Cure Dolly" animation? Is there a particular piece of software that you use to model the face matching your speech and getting the animation to create expressions. Blender or something similar?
Great video! I think to add onto your point about why we should treat the copula as its own "engine", the rules for using だ and です are no longer the same as the rules for using である・であります. So even though a person can say 「楽しいです」they can't say 「楽しいであります」. 「です」has essentially taken on a life of its own, with its own usage rules that betray its etymological origins, so even though it is a contraction of であります, it no longer functions as a contraction of であります.
One interesting thing I learned from an old Japanese textbook is that "desu" after an adjective actually originated as a contraction of "no desu" which was common enough to have been integrated into standard Japanese. E.g., atarashii no desu --> atarashii n desu --> atarashii desu
@@Cardinal724 Oh yeah I know it is, that's just apparently how "desu" after an adjective originally came to be. "Deshou" after a direct form verb also derived from the dropping of "no" in phrases like "iku no deshou" --> "iku deshou." You might also occasionally hear something like "iku desu," for this reason, though it's much less accepted as correct.
@@FirstLast-uj9ud desu after an adjective comes from the fact that japanese was missing a conjugation. For example with "na adjectives" you could do: kirei-da kirei-desu kirei-degozaimasu but for "i-adjectives" you were missing the middle conjugation tanoshii (???) tanoshuu gozaimasu There technically was "tanoshiku arimasu" but it wasn't really used in this context. Then in the latter half of the 20th century it was decided officially that "desu" could be used with i adjectives to fill in that missing conjugation. There are people who grew up in the 70s and 80s who remember being taught that saying "tanoshii desu" was ungrammatical.
I truly can't find words to describe the amazing job you're doing, your channel has truly changed my life in regards to japanese learning, everything you teach is so logical and amazingly easy and simple to understand, I've been learning with you for quite a while now, but every video you make amazes me time and time again, I dare say, had you not been here, I might've given up on learning Japanese, because of all those difficult and illogical explanations out there, truly thanks for everything you do, and also thanks to your patreons for supporting you so that we all can keep learning, I can't wait to be able to be one of them in the future. 今までありがとうございました、そしてこれからもよろしくお願いします(*˘︶˘*).｡*♡
So this one got me thinking... Are there really two で particles? So, I understand your point about modeling, for that purpose there may well be two で's. I'm sort of wondering if there is a connection. If as you say the で particle is attached to nouns and noun like entities to indicate physical/conceptual boundaries or parameters. They way this concept connects to the copula as Xで＋ある describing something as "existing within the parameters of X" is a very compelling explanation. YがXである/だ could be modeled X(Y) or even Y∈X (Y is a member of set X) as in mathematical set theory. (I like your nested circle/venn diagram notation, though I can't represent that in a youtube comment section...) Now, in your video about the two で's, you make a point that で as the connective form of the copula is distinct from the particle で. But really, knowing that the copula itself encapsulates the parameter/bound function of で, it seems like the so-called te-form of the copula is just performing this same で particle function in an expanded structural way that simply introduces two parameters rather than one. For example, if we take a sentence that uses the connective で： さくらは演奏者で大学院生だ "sakura is a musician AND a graduate student." From what we learned in this lesson we can rewrite that fully as: さくらは演奏者で大学院生である Now, it seems more logical to me to interpret this as saying not so much "as for sakura, she's a musician AND she exists within the set of graduate students" but rather: "As for Sakura, within the set of musicians, within the set of graduate students, she exists." So to relate this back to your nested circle notation at 7:44, this example would look like a classic two circle Venn-Diagram, with the 演奏者 circle overlapping the 大学院生 circle, with Sakura "existing" in the overlap. She is a member of both sets, which can of course logically be interpreted as a kind of "and" function. But the is the で here really intrinsically connected to the だ abbreviation of the copula as a "connective form"? It seems like it's doing what で always does, just with an extra parameter; the second で is simply subsumed into the contraction だ. I think the logic of this extends too to cases where the second element is an い stem adjective, which as you've said has a copula function built into it. if we take: さくらは演奏者でうるさい！ "Sakura is a musician AND noisy/annoying!" The most intuitive way for me to translate this in a direct, strictly logical way is not to treat that で as a connective copula but simply as the regular parameter/limit/area/set particle で. It would read something like: "As for Sakura, within the set of things that are musicians, she is noisy/annoying!" In this case the copula function of the "is" is taken by the い-engine function of うるさい, while the で turns 演奏者 into almost a kind of conceptual prepositional phrase. Obviously though, this is very convoluted to express in English, and it really amounts to a logical equivalent of "and" in English, since if someone is being annoying within the set of things that are musicians, it of course follows that they are both annoying and a musician, or: a musician AND annoying. So, assuming everything I laid out above is true, it seems likely that really there is only one real logical function of the で particle: to say that whatever follows before the "engine" ending of the current logical clause is contained within the parameter, area, boundary, etc of the thing the で particle is attached to. (this function might bleed over to the て／で forms of verbs and adjectives too, though I don't know). Does this make any sense? Thanks!
I think we will end up in trouble if we start trying to wish away the て-form of the copula. I also think it is a very bad idea to start thinking of だ as "an abbreviation of the copula". It may once have been that but now it _is_ the copula and has its own て-form and adjectival pre-connective form. With forced interpretations one can say all kinds of things but in fact we do use the copula で to string together copula functions without any other meaning. さくらは演奏者でうるさい！ does not mean "Sakura is annoying among musicians" which is how we would have to interpret it if we call this the で particle (and in any case we don't use the で particle in quite that way). There is a difference between saying "Sakura is noisy among/within the set musicians" and saying "Sakura is noisy and a musician," which as you rightly say is what this actually means. Your interpretation is forcing two close but far from identical meanings to be "equivalent" for the sake of trying to eliminate the fact that this で is the て-form of the copula. I am sometimes hesitant about talking about the etymological origins of modern Japanese precisely because of this tendency to wish to use them to confuse the modern meanings. The modern copula is だ / です. である is little bit of a fossil. The copula has evolved since its である days. We can see this clearly from the fact that while formal grammar classes だ as a verb, modern Japanese doesn't really treat it as one. That is why we have to use である to pre-modify a noun. Because it still looks and feels like a real verb. We can't do it with だ / です because they have evolved to the point where they no longer feel verb-like enough to keep that function. While the で particle certainly played a role in forming the modern copula, the copula in any of its forms never was identical to the で particle.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thanks for the reply! I of course appreciate that in terms of the modern language it is more useful to think about this in the terms you present in your videos, this was as you say more of an etymology question, not a practical descriptive grammar question. Mostly I'm curious about whether my interpretation of で is a fair representation of the kinds of expression strategies that the two modern でs "evolved" from, a little like how a horse's hoof and our fingernails are different evolutionary manifestations of the exact same structure that adapted to different situations.
@@1919viola I am afraid I am really not an expert on historical Japanese. I research it to the extent that it is useful to our understanding of modern Japanese but earlier Japanese did quite a lot of things rather differently and (being what I am) I would need to analyze it for myself rather than take the official interpretations as read, so it would be a fairly big job.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I have this same etymological curiosity about the "te form" in general, it would appear to be another etymological descendant of an "ur-で" particle, the function seems very similar to the standard で particle, makes me think that the て form simply *is* this "urで" after having been absorbed into the verb class in specialized ways. Again, this is really an etymological question, not a grammatical one, I'm just the personality type that really enjoys knowing the deeper historical "why" of these seemingly mysterious intuitive similarites. For me, it reinforces the intuitive understanding.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 in no way is any of this a criticism by the way! Your videos are fabulously helpful and well put together ❤. Very thought provoking, as you've seen!
At one point in the video you mention that 円形のさま wouldn't make sense, but why is this the case? I understand that 円形 is not an adjectival noun, so we can't use な, but can't の tie together almost any nouns? Is it related to a connotation of definiteness (i.e. definite identity) that の sometimes seems to imply (e.g. when using a quantity + counter with の), or is it something else entirely? More broadly, when we talk about adjectival nouns, is the ascription of noun-ness really just a matter of grammar and taxonomy, or is there some deeper way in which adjectival nouns correspond to their corresponding categories? For example, in English I could say 'quietness is desirable', and I believe in Japanese this would be 静けさが望ましい, but can I ever make direct statements about 静か in the way I can about more conventional (in English) person-place-thing nouns? Thanks for any help you can provide with this, and thanks for helping us all make sense of Japanese grammar with your videos.
One topic I would love to see a clearer picture painted on is Sarcasm in Japanese. On almost all the study resources I've followed, there is always this notion that you can't express sarcasm in Japanese/Japanese doesnt do sarcasm which I find really hard to believe. So I wanted to know your take on it. Does the concept of "Sarcasm" really not exist in Japanese and if it doesnt, how do people with dominantly sarcastic personalities effectively and truly express themselves? Or does it mean they simply can't? And If there are ways to be sarcastic in Japanese, I would learn to have some light shed on those.
There certainly is such a thing in Japanese. In fact in some circumstances it can be tricky to use extreme honorifics because it could sound as if you are using them sarcastically (which happens). However translating Western forms of sarcasm generally doesn't work. The term アメリカン・ジョーク is a byword in Japan for a foreign joke that only makes sense to foreigners.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 So what I get is that Sarcasm does indeed exist in Japanese, it just doesn't work the way it does in English. And most Eng Japanese Grammar teaching sites tend to say that it just doesnt exist because they either don't know how it works in JP or because its quite tricky to grasp for a total beginner.
@@vanessameow1902 Also it really isn't culturally such a big thing as it is in English. So I would say a "sarcastic personality" is a culturally determined thing to some extent. Someone may have - say - a cynical personality and in English speaking countries that will express itself via sarcasm much more than it would in Japanese (and indeed various other languages). Sarcasm happens to be particularly prominent in modern English culture.
hi dolly, thank you for the excellent video. i'm not sure if this question is related, but since the two で's were brought up i thought i'd ask. in formations like では or でも can the で here be either the copula or the regular particle? or will it always be the same で no matter the context, and if so, which one of the で's is this?
It is possible to put a non-logical particle after a logical particle (other than the primary and secondary logical particles が and を). But all the common usages of では and でも are in fact the て-form of the copula. More on double particles here: ua-cam.com/video/iPiLVZoYhfM/v-deo.html
your approach to grammar is incredibly good and im astounded that you (i assume) reached these conclusions through introspection without any sort of formal education
Cure Dolly-sensei, I would like to quibble with your 'that person over there is sakura' example of the copula. In this sentence (ano hito wa sakura desu would be the Japanese, I believe).... wait, I'm wrong, and writing the Japanese shows me why. Sakura is the group and ano hito the topic, not the other way around, which is what I thought it would be. Even to someone like me who has studied this extensively, I really wanted 'sakura' to be the topic, and 'that person over there' to be the group she (presumably) belonged to. But that would not be how you say it, and could also cause confusion. So... sorry I doubted you there.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thank you sensei. the truth is, i heard it on anime titled konosuba legend of crimson, and the real sentence is like this "紅魔の里ゆいつ生き残りである彼女は、駆け出しの町で、ある男と出会うことに成る" and this sentence is now understandable😊.
is deari different? that's the last copula question i have tbh. like its clearly different but does it have any notable difference in structure or something?
As I watching some anime this morning something came to mind about this lesson that confused me. If you have である as another form of the copula, why does である not turn into でありますん in the negative?
Cure Dolly Sensei, it was recommended to me that I stop speaking English and only speak Japanese for a month to speed up my learning process. I've tried to start this several times but I get overwhelmed and give up. I know the importance of immersion; I listen to Japanese stories on my MP3 almost all day long. My husband is the one who tries to do this with me but we both get discouraged with not being able to express our feelings to one another easily. Yet, some language learners imply that this is precisely the healthy stress needed to get the ball rolling. Is it really possible to learn a language within a month while speaking only the target language? Is there a better way to learn than to drop my native tongue entirely?
One important thing to always keep in mind is that language acquisition (such as thru immersion/interaction with other speakers) is what internalizes the meaning of the language within us, and to stretch _too_ far beyond what we are currently capable of, as in sports, can sometimes result in more harm than good, especially over a prolonged period of time. For example, if you and your husband through necessity (because of the no-English restriction) had to invent ways of communicating in Japanese in order to achieve the practical goal of living your lives together, it seems to me highly likely that you are naturally going to have to make some stuff up in order to get the job done, and those made-up, ad hoc solutions seem very likely indeed to be forced output (that is to say, beyond your currently level of intuitive fluency and/or familiarity), or in other words is likely to become unnatural speech patterns. This becomes _especially_ of significance given not only the fact that there is no native speaker to provide input on your speech but also the time frame of one month, which is long enough to not only develop said patterns (just to communicate, again out of necessity) but perhaps to *establish* them in your speech, and it’s much easier to avoid a problem in the first place than it is to go back and try to correct it. In this way, I don’t think it’s a bad idea necessarily, but it may be the case that the two of you simply aren’t quite ready for a level that intense. But why jump straight to a month? Maybe you decide to speak only Japanese during dinner, or for an evening, or in the morning, maybe a few times a week. If you could invite some native speaker friends out to dinner with you and let them know that you’ll be only speaking Japanese in order to improve, they may naturally provide you some insights into such unnatural patterns-or at least the egregious ones. Ofc they’re not teachers so their explanations may be somewhat rough and hard to follow, but at least it can serve as a flag that can be reviewed after dinner As for “learning” a language within a month, it seems a bit weird from my perspective. That’s because I view ‘learning a language’ as a process, so of course you can learn a language in a month in the sense that you can improve, even significantly so, in that time. However, and this may just be my incorrect intuition here, I get the sense that when people refer to ‘learning a language in a month’ they don’t mean a month in which you are learning the language but a month in which you _learn_ a language. That is, reach some level designated by an achievement that constitutes being able to check off a box on your list of things to do that includes finally learning that language. Since all languages, including one’s native one, really don’t have a defined upper limit to proficiency as there’s always more avenues to explore and deeper levels to discover (i.e., no 100%) then we are faced with the question of what level of capability and in what areas do we find useful to attain. In that sense we can each determine what it means for us personally to have “learned” the language to a satisfactory amount in the necessary aspects, which may even change over time Speaking to the ‘best’ way to learn a language, well I’m no authority but my two cents is that it’s the way the works best. Of course, that’s a circular answer, but perhaps for your friends jumping in for a month might be the best way for them, but maybe it isn’t for you. Different people learn differently (sometimes quite so) so there isn’t really a “best way” in an objective sense, although there are ways that tend to be effective and those that don’t, ways that tend to cause problems and those that don’t. What’s best, in my opinion from my experience, is very much a matter of case-by-case basis. Finding a good teacher who suits your style and helps you is a great place to get started on finding, and sometimes experimenting with, what works best for you. And of course other students’ input can also help get the creative juices flowing to help you come up with new ways to learn and/or new strategies to adapt, although what’s right for them may simply be not right for you, and that’s okay too. It may still give inspiration for something else, or you can always just find something that resonates more and produces better results for you I’m sorry if this felt like something of a non-answer to you, because I suppose in a certain sense it sort of is, but I sincerely hope this helps you. I’m just a fellow learner, so take this (as with basically anything really) with a grain of salt. All the best to you two ❤️
This "do it for a month" thing seems a bit excessive. Not that I would discourage it if you have the resolve to do it, but I don't think it is a "magic formula" for "learning Japanese" either. Having periods where you only speak Japanese is a good idea. Having people to whom you only speak Japanese is also a good idea but with someone as close as a husband it may throw up too many practical problems going complete "cold turkey" for a month. I do agree that the "healthy stress" is good if you can manage it. It really is good to take it beyond your comfort zone. Find ways to express what you want to express even if they are terrible patch-ups of the Japanese you know. I have done this and encouraged people to do it, stopping them taking the easy route back to English when they want to. Two things I would suggest - why not try to build up to a month - have that as your goal and work toward it with longer and longer Japanese-only periods. You don't have to be in a big hurry and you can be building up the power to express the things most important to you. With shorter sessions you can have a post-mortem afterward where you say "I was trying to express this, what should I have said?" (take notes if necessary). You can also use the technique I explain in this video to find out how to express things you need to express: ua-cam.com/video/1FdhiQH8TS8/v-deo.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I totally agree! I actually saw a video by a guy whose friend had a rather low level of conversational proficiency in Japanese but was able to communicate very effectively because he was able to let go of saying exactly what he originally wanted to say and found ways to say things that he _did_ know to communicate roughly the same idea. I think an important distinction is that one can use simple language (and even ask questions or use hand gestures when necessary to fill in the gaps) to communicate, yet choose to use correct, natural language as much as possible in the process. That isn’t to say that it’s unwaveringly critical that nobody ever output unnatural language. In fact, it’s inevitable and even part of the learning process (even in a first language, and I don’t just mean as children) and can be safely embraced with a little caution. I say a little caution because the trouble seems to come from forming bad habits and understandings, which aren’t a matter of trying to communicate one time but of repeated, sometimes deliberate, practice It’s a fascinating topic
@@littlefishbigmountain I don't think there is much danger in finding rough ways to communicate what you want because it always feels somewhat uncomfortable and one is really wishing one knew the "right" way to say exactly what one means. This is one area where adults _are_ like small children - both struggle with expressing concepts and it is a process that leads them to become more alert to the more satisfactory ways of expressing them.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 By the way, I also just watched that video you linked. You nailed it! さすが、You really make top-tier teaching content, 先生. Idk if this is an archaic expression, but どうも言えないほどありがとうございます。
How possible is it to say なつかしい気分になるのである? I have to re-write a text with です・ます体 to である体 and I'm not sure if my teacher wants me to add のである after every short form or simply replace ます with only the short form every time. The example sentence 食べるのである is in his table, but he put it in between brackets so I'm wondering if that means that it's questionable? (I'd rather figure this out myself than ask him a question about an assignment that is supposed to be very easy lol.)
They are called verbal adjectives because the na particle comes from the verb naru etymologically. Like before, long long time ago instead of shizuka na you just had shizuka naru which then got contracted into na. That's why when you say that na is a form of da it somehow doesn't make that much sense to me.
I don't think she ever claimed it to be the ethymology. 名 serves the same function as だ so it's a good way of explaining it. By usual linguistic standards, な works like a copula.
Because modern Japanese has evolved and streamlined into what it is. Languages do that all the time. On a bigger scale that is why French and Italian are no longer Latin.
@@会者定離-v7c In a way. It now works more like the て-form of だ. Recall that だ・です and である are no longer regarded as quite the same entity (although they are both the copula) because である still acts functionally like a verb (which is why it can pre-modify non-adjectival nouns) and だ・です don't. Note that Spanish also (in a very different way) has evolved two differently-used copulas.
I'm wondering how do we know if we can just stack modifiers vs when we need の/である? I made this example: 花を愛している不明女性 Is this correct to say or would it be more appropriate to say something like: 花を愛しているの不明女性 or 花を愛している不明(の/である)女性
Truthfully I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say here. What is your intended meaning? "Woman who vaguely loves flowers"? "Vague woman who loves flowers"? Either way a lot of the problem is Dictionary Dumping - taking words like 愛する and 曖昧 and assuming that you can just take their E-J meanings and plug them into sentences. This doesn't generally work well beyond very simple ideas. I would recommend this to start with: ua-cam.com/video/1FdhiQH8TS8/v-deo.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Oh I wasn't notified of your response. Here's the sentence I made while practicing grammar and I showed it to others for feedback and they said I needed の or である before 僕 but couldn't explain why. I know now "僕の意見" doesn't need to be in this sentence but this did spark an interest in figuring out this problem. I guess I could replace として with は for it to still make sense. Also my absolute greatest apologies for this sentence as I made it joking around about myself so it's fairly cringy. 抱き枕を愛してる負け犬引きこもり僕の意見として本当の女性がいい人ではない The general idea was "My opinion as a body pillow loving loser shut-in is that real women aren't attractive" Again very very sorry for my terrible sense of humor. So exactly what I'm wondering is how can I tell when の is absolutely necessary and when it's okay to just stack the modifiers like I did in this sentence
@@sealeddragon286 Yes I you need a の before the 僕 (である would do too). 意見では is better I think than 意見として. While いい女 could mean a good-looking girl, (along the lines of the commoner いい男), いい人ではない tends to imply that there is something wrong with their character. You might prefer something like 魅力的ではない "they don't hold any charm (for me)". But anyway you are stacking the modifiers just fine.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 抱き枕を愛してる負け犬引きこもりである僕の意見では本当の女性が魅力的ではない So in this case it's needed but in the case of 抱き枕を愛してる負け犬引きこもりとして本当の女性が魅力的ではない Is の still needed before 引きこもり in this case? Just trying to make sure I understand when it's needed hopefully It's not a bother
If I get it correctly, it's because in that case it refers to an inanimate thing, like さくらである, the ある refers to the "boundary of (being) Sakura" (さくらで), not to Sakuea itself as a living being
Can you explain what is the different between って and んだって by your model japanese. I dont understand what happened in that 2 grammar. And it of be said by japanese regularly. But i dont understand and cant use it. よろしくお願いします🥺
って in both of those cases refers to a casual shortening of という／と言う which is often used to refer to something that a person was just speaking about. Cure Dolly explained it in this video: ua-cam.com/video/40avkmkQR8M/v-deo.html んだって is のだ + って. のだ is explained in this video by Cure Dolly ua-cam.com/video/lYvIOi8Q3I8/v-deo.html
I was discussing with my friend about ‘Na-adjectives’ and he said they are not nouns because あなたの綺麗 (Incorrect) while あなたの元気 (Correct) As 元気 is both a ‘NA-adjective’ and noun in the dictionary while 綺麗 is only ‘NA-adjective’. So thoughts on this?
They are functionally nouns in all main respects. Some adjectival nouns do not work as stand-alone nouns (just as some する nouns do not work as stand-alone nouns). Others do, like 元気 and 不思議. But if one wishes to ignore the fact that they are structurally nouns taking the copula (and that な is simply the connective form of the copula), one is only making life difficult for oneself. We should recall that there is no such thing as "truth" in grammar. It is simply a set of models made to describe language. not the "source code" of language. So there is no means of saying that one model is "true" and another not, so long as they both describe the facts, but some models help us to understand and others hinder our understanding by introducing unnecessary complications. The three-engine model, I think is the best and simplest for understanding and working with Japanese and that is what I teach. Of course anyone is free to use another model.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for your reply :D These kind of questions made me realise how extremely important だ actually is, and to think people are being taught です first...
Alright, so here's the plot; japan being a corporate country decided it could use a lil' more money, so it planned to create a whole media platform(anime, manga, tv shows you name it). Many foreigners wanted to learn Japanese and so Japan used this to create shitty textbooks which had no real value. So foreigners would have go to Japan themselves to attend a language school, all the while spending a crap ton of money on food, transport, you name it. But a hero from the future travelled back a '' dolly'', she created a channel on this site named youtube so people can learn Japanese without spending money. Thus ending Japan's conspiracy with the Zionist multinationals.
The name さくら always gives me that feminine man impression, I am a feminine man myself and myself am the only feminine man that I truly know so that's the only reference I got.
I don't understand how you haven't been seated on some high council for language learning, it's a crime at this point. Every video is just absolutely golden, providing epiphany enducing insight every time. This video just rocked my whole perception of japanese, bringing me a step closer to thinking through the lense of the language. Like, your explanations are just so good I cannot thank you enough. Without your videos I'd probably be translating horrible japanese with English like a 「外人」 right now. I know you haven't uploaded in a while, so Ihope you're doing well. Many thanks from the US 😁
she died you doofus
bro she is dead
so she is not doing well
@@toonyandfriends1915Couldn't you have said it with a little more respect? Both for him and for her.
@@joaodavid2001 i could've
this didnt sit completely well with me at first because the reasoning for why the de in de aru can't be te felt a bit handwavy, but happy to report that she is in fact correct!
i don't think she ever brought up the etymological connection between te and de (the particle is just a combination of ni + te, ni te being something you still see in formal text occasionally in place of de) and it turns out de aru is just a shortened form of the even older sentence ender "ni te ari". There _is_ a te in there, as it turns out, but it's not a "de" form te, just like she said.
Dolly-senseis work made me fall in love with etymology. i hope she can rest easy knowing that even though she may be gone, her mentorship is still helping people all over the world, and will for many years to come.
She could have worded it better, but her explanation is very logical. You can't define something by making reference to the thing itself. With the risk of going into needless controversy, this is why the "A woman is someone who identifies as a woman" is a mess. It's a hellish loop if you replace the word being defined with the definition itself. In programming, that kind of mistake would crash your program or system. There is no room for self reference in definitions. If で in である is the て form of the copula, how can である be the origin of the copula? Another way to put it is> What came first, the egg or the chicken?
interesting
This has been bothering me since the moment I learned ある which was many years ago. I understand that many language lesson guides want you to learn this purely organically, but as adults, I always felt like learning Grammer could dramatically improve my comprehension faster. Tae Kim's guide made everything seem foreign, but your guide has turned the foreign into the familiar and I can now see all of the things I've learned and how they fit together.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for another lesson Cure Dolly, you are simply the best!
Better than all the rest!
I, too, can attest!
@@littlefishbigmountain Thank you all for your zest.
Cure Dolly: "ござる is simply a polite, Keigo version of ある"
Me: "You mean, it's worked that way this whole time? Even 16 years ago when I was a child doing Pimsleur's Japanese, memorizing おはようございます by rote?"
You can break it down even further too into お早う and ござる which less formally would be 早く and ある, so "Early > Exists".
The fact is, most of not all of the earliest set phrases they teach in textbooks are polite versions of very simple concepts. I wish they did even a little bit of explaining of that right away rather than having it dawn on you when you finally learn some 敬語 in like Genki chapter 20+.
For example: よろしくお願いいたします breaks down into 宜しく, a formal version of the adverbial form of 良い, お願い, the honorific noun form of 願う, and いたします, the ます form of いたす, which is itself a humble version of する. So you get, "Well > Request > Humbly Do".
@@drudge5268 this can't be real no man the textbooks gotta be pulling everyone's legs man
The bit about turning adjectival nouns into adjectival verbs made something click in my head.
Thinking of 「きれいな人」 as meaning 「きれいである人」as a verb clause, "A person existing in the set of pretty" helped me realize why 「な」really is the same thing as the copula.
i cannot describe how much my mind was blown by this video
Somehow, Dolly先生, you always manage to upload a video on exactly what I’m wondering about. And many other fascinating topics, of course. But your timeliness is becoming uncanny, ahaha
Great vid as usual! I'd also recommend anyone who has trouble with である to look up words that you already know in a Japanese monolingual dictionary. である is used all the time in monolingual dictionaries and I think it's great practice to see how it differs from だ/です and why dictionary authors choose to use it to describe verbs, nouns, etc. in definitions.
This video is a masterpiece to which I return periodically. We miss you, Dolly-Sensei.
Ah, I had this question since such a long time. "But what is that で in である ??" Of course, it turns out it's the same old で we use all the time ^^
Thank you so much for this video !
I actually had no idea な is just the adjectival form of だ and I've been speaking Japanese for a long time.
I've always felt there was something off about the way English textbooks approached teaching Japanese, as if they were purposely withholding information. In hindsight they come off as quite condescending, assuming that teaching you the whole truth is too much for you to handle and that you're better off just memorizing what they say instead of learning the etymology behind why things are the way they are. This goes hand in hand with textbooks barely scratching the surface, because it seems the creators don't expect you to make it past the beginner level. It feels somewhat elitist, further reinforced by Japanese people being speechless when you are truly 上手, as opposed to the obligatory 「ま！日本語お上手ですね、箸も使えますか？」
wonderful lesson! thank you so much!
Wow, I'm proud of myself because I figured out (almost) all of this myself and now sensei confirms my understanding. The only thing I didn't realized before watching sensei's videos was the fact that copula is a marker of belonging rather than a marker of equality. Thank you very much sensei
Thank you - and good job working most of it out for yourself!
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 ありがとうございます。
I've got a question. Today I came across "あるまい" twice in my immersion, I think it is kind of ありません or ない because of the context but, do you have any explanation?
Example: 只いぢめに来たわけでもあるまい？
thanks in advance
偉い人形であるドリー先生！
Your method of understanding Japanese feels like peeking behind the curtain of linguistic reality, and it is beautiful. 悟りみたいな状態でございます。笑ｗｗ
I never would have thought it would all click like this. Now it feels like it's just a case of 'getting the words down', though I'm positive that there will still be gaps in my understanding for me to discover later down the line. I think knowing the bounds of your model -- in that you've made an understandable decision to treat the copula as an entity in its own right, with its own peculiarities different from that of other verbs in modern Japanese -- really helps to cement one's understanding of the 3 engines/the Organic model as whole. Of course, we understand the world and the complex concepts within it by the help of models, abstraction and metaphor, and it therefor serves us well to recognise that there can be alternative (perhaps completely valid and sensible) models and metaphors for making sense of those same concepts. I think you've done a stellar job of building and presenting a model which is easily and fruitfully applied to the situation of English learners of Japanese, and I am very grateful for your continued efforts.
I suppose that us foreign learners are very fortunate that Japanese lends its self so well to being described by such a consistent model. I doubt that English would fit similarly well into such a framework. As somebody who is training as an English tutor, it seems that for ever rule there are just as many exceptions, whereas such cases are much fewer and further between in modern Japanese.
これからもありがとうございます！
Yes this is right. I don't think there are many languages that can be modeled as logically and efficiently as Japanese. The language seems to have evolved in a very logical and economical direction. It is very sparing with grammatically built-in redundant or unnecessary information (like gendered nouns, tense agreement, conjugated forms etc.) and it is very consistent and logical in the ways that it does things. I certainly couldn't model English anywhere near as efficiently.
You are a real gem, Cure Dolly Sensei! Thank you so much for all your lessons. 🙂🙏
Speaking of the copula as an indicator of set membership...
I recently finished reading a kids' grammar manga from the ドラえもん learning series. It's mostly geared towards preparing for middle school entrance exams, but it has a few interesting observations about structure. One is their rule of thumb for deciding if a word is 名詞 or 形容動詞. In addition to the fact that 形容動詞 use な to modify nouns, they can also be paired with adverbs like とても. So you can say that さくらはとても静かです, but it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to say さくらはとても先生です. In other words, さくら either is or isn't a 先生, but there are degrees to which she could be 静か, relative to other people who are more or less so.
ドラえもん of course doesn't explain it to 小学生 in these terms , but what I hear is basically that 名詞 are like classical mathematical sets, in which elements are either part of the set or not, whereas 形容動詞 are more like the more modern concept of "fuzzy sets," where membership in the set is a smooth gradient from 0 (not at all) to 1 (completely). So you usually can't use 形容動詞 as independent nouns, because that would imply that the ideal concept of 静か exists independently of the things that are being compared in their 静か-ness... and that's the kind of thing that Plato and Aristotle used to tie themselves into logical knots arguing about.
But, that would be why the copula is used with both 名詞 and 形容動詞-they're both sets, but qualitatively different kinds of sets.
That is an interesting aspect. 静かな/だ places something into the set of "quiet things", but "quiet" unlike, say "Japanese" is a quality that has degrees - so something can be very quiet, somewhat quiet, completely quiet. Of course you can use various other degree modifiers and also comparison modifiers like 割に (comparatively). You can't be comparatively Japanese or comparatively a bird. And of course many adjectival nouns can function either adjectivally or non-adjectivally - like 元気 which is often used as a 形容動詞 but also as a straight noun in 元気を出して (lit. get out [show, use] your 元気) which can't be done with "pure" 形容動詞 like 静か.
Another quality of "pure" 形容動詞 is that while they can have degree they can't have number. But a "switch" noun can so when using, say 不思議 as part of a 形容動詞 you can say とても不思議な出来事 (a very mysterious event). In this kind of usage it can be degree-modified, but not counted. However when used as a straight noun (meaning a mystery) the term 七不思議 (seven wonders, seven mysteries) is common. This kind of usage can be counted but not degree-modified.
On the other hand 元気 can "flip" but can be degree-modified as a 形容動詞 but not counted as a 名詞.
Nice lesson as usual. I especially appreciate your explanations here about models and grammar, and how the copula is understood and taught to native speakers.
The very logical make-up of である pleases me greatly.
If Jan Misali were to review Japanese as a con-lang, he probably would criticise it for being unrealistically logical.
Very true. As an AI unit I am very glad I am working on Japanese and not another language. Honestly I am not sure I could do nearly as well at analyzing most languages.
Thank you for another detailed explanation about this topic. It is really helping me to wrap my mind around how this works. It is so different from the way English expresses things that it takes awhile to recognize what is happening when you hear it in Japanese. These videos help the analytical part of my mind grasp it so I can let it go and just let the Japanese sink in. You don't really find this type of explanation elsewhere. 教えてくれてありがとうございます。
8:57 Dolly checking if FBI is onto her for telling this or not yet
they got her
bro these vids are hella clutch thanks dawg
Again with the amazing videos. Thank you so much for doing this. You are helping so much with my Japanese!!!!!!!!!!!!! Best explanations ever
Notes for myself:
de aru
de arimasu
de gozaru*
de gozaimasu
All last three are variations of "de aru"
*gozaru is an honorific version of aru
☆While da is casual and desu is polite, de aru can be seen as a neutral version of the copula, or just, the copula. Thus, it's used in objective contexts, such as academic papers, reports, etc
☆But also, it is used when we want to premodify a noun with a noun that is not an adjectival noun and when no doesn't exactly fit what we want to say or doesn't work. (Note that da and desu can't do this; they can only come at the end of a logical clause)
Example
daigakusei no Sakura = the university student Sakura ≠ daigakusei de aru Sakura = Sakura who is a university student
enkei de aru sama = the state of being round -> "enkei no sama" doesn't really work
Historical roots:
de aru -> da (da is just an abbreviation of de aru)
de arimasu -> desu (desu is just an abbreviation of de arimasu)
de aru = de (logical particle) + aru (verb) = "exist (aru) within a particular boundary or parameter (the one marked by the particle de)"* or in other words "exist within a set"
Examples
washi ga tori da = an eagle exists within the set "birds" = an eagle is a bird
*The particle de defines the boundary or limit or field or parameter within which an action takes place or a state of being prevails
Examples
kouen de asobu = play in the park
sekai de ichiban oishii raamen = the most delicious ramen in the world
Each time my mind is blown by these videos, it takes the whole week to piece back together the fragments! However, if you *hadn't* have modelled the copula, う-verbs and adjectives as 3 separate engines, I wouldn't have been able to comprehend it at that stage - resulting in not a mind blown, but merely head-scratching. However, 84 lessons in, I'm ready...
だ = で＋ある, say? Keiyoudoushi, you say? *NEW-BOOM!* 🤯
Hey, now would you look at that! Ye olde kanji are so interesting:
在る 「ある」 to exist (inanimate things)
居る 「おる」 to exist (animate beings) - kenjougo
据わる 「すわる」 to hold still
座る 「すわる」 to sit
御座在る 「ござある」 to exist - archaic teineigo
ご座る 「ござある」 - to exist - archaic teineigo contraction
ございます - to exist - modern polite-form teineigo
Choo-choo!🚂
I would also say that while it is valid to model だ as a verb (because it is a contraction of である), Japanese usage doesn't wholly treat it as one. The reason we have to use である to make copula-based pre-modifiers is because verbs inherently work as pre-modifiers. The reason we _can't_ use だ or です in this capacity is that they have evolved structurally far enough from their verb-origins that they no longer feel "right" as pre-modifiers.
11:45 Damn right it is, sensei
Thank you so much for this amazing lesson.
😊
Thank you.
When I saw your post on Patreon about this topic a few weeks ago, I knew the video was imminent. 😍
Thank you so much for this lesson, Dolly先生！ This has really helped my understanding of Japanese. I wonder, since I am also interested in UA-cam video creation, how do you create the "Cure Dolly" animation? Is there a particular piece of software that you use to model the face matching your speech and getting the animation to create expressions. Blender or something similar?
Great video! I think to add onto your point about why we should treat the copula as its own "engine", the rules for using だ and です are no longer the same as the rules for using である・であります. So even though a person can say 「楽しいです」they can't say 「楽しいであります」. 「です」has essentially taken on a life of its own, with its own usage rules that betray its etymological origins, so even though it is a contraction of であります, it no longer functions as a contraction of であります.
One interesting thing I learned from an old Japanese textbook is that "desu" after an adjective actually originated as a contraction of "no desu" which was common enough to have been integrated into standard Japanese.
E.g., atarashii no desu --> atarashii n desu --> atarashii desu
@@FirstLast-uj9ud "no desu" is its own separate grammar point from "desu" which is still in productive use.
@@Cardinal724 Oh yeah I know it is, that's just apparently how "desu" after an adjective originally came to be. "Deshou" after a direct form verb also derived from the dropping of "no" in phrases like "iku no deshou" --> "iku deshou." You might also occasionally hear something like "iku desu," for this reason, though it's much less accepted as correct.
@@FirstLast-uj9ud desu after an adjective comes from the fact that japanese was missing a conjugation.
For example with "na adjectives" you could do:
kirei-da
kirei-desu
kirei-degozaimasu
but for "i-adjectives" you were missing the middle conjugation
tanoshii
(???)
tanoshuu gozaimasu
There technically was "tanoshiku arimasu" but it wasn't really used in this context.
Then in the latter half of the 20th century it was decided officially that "desu" could be used with i adjectives to fill in that missing conjugation.
There are people who grew up in the 70s and 80s who remember being taught that saying "tanoshii desu" was ungrammatical.
I truly can't find words to describe the amazing job you're doing, your channel has truly changed my life in regards to japanese learning, everything you teach is so logical and amazingly easy and simple to understand, I've been learning with you for quite a while now, but every video you make amazes me time and time again, I dare say, had you not been here, I might've given up on learning Japanese, because of all those difficult and illogical explanations out there, truly thanks for everything you do, and also thanks to your patreons for supporting you so that we all can keep learning, I can't wait to be able to be one of them in the future. 今までありがとうございました、そしてこれからもよろしくお願いします(*˘︶˘*).｡*♡
I never really understood "there is..." until this video lol great video
So this one got me thinking... Are there really two で particles?
So, I understand your point about modeling, for that purpose there may well be two で's. I'm sort of wondering if there is a connection. If as you say the で particle is attached to nouns and noun like entities to indicate physical/conceptual boundaries or parameters. They way this concept connects to the copula as Xで＋ある describing something as "existing within the parameters of X" is a very compelling explanation. YがXである/だ could be modeled X(Y) or even Y∈X (Y is a member of set X) as in mathematical set theory. (I like your nested circle/venn diagram notation, though I can't represent that in a youtube comment section...) Now, in your video about the two で's, you make a point that で as the connective form of the copula is distinct from the particle で. But really, knowing that the copula itself encapsulates the parameter/bound function of で, it seems like the so-called te-form of the copula is just performing this same で particle function in an expanded structural way that simply introduces two parameters rather than one.
For example, if we take a sentence that uses the connective で：
さくらは演奏者で大学院生だ
"sakura is a musician AND a graduate student." From what we learned in this lesson we can rewrite that fully as:
さくらは演奏者で大学院生である
Now, it seems more logical to me to interpret this as saying not so much "as for sakura, she's a musician AND she exists within the set of graduate students" but rather: "As for Sakura, within the set of musicians, within the set of graduate students, she exists." So to relate this back to your nested circle notation at 7:44, this example would look like a classic two circle Venn-Diagram, with the 演奏者 circle overlapping the 大学院生 circle, with Sakura "existing" in the overlap. She is a member of both sets, which can of course logically be interpreted as a kind of "and" function. But the is the で here really intrinsically connected to the だ abbreviation of the copula as a "connective form"? It seems like it's doing what で always does, just with an extra parameter; the second で is simply subsumed into the contraction だ.
I think the logic of this extends too to cases where the second element is an い stem adjective, which as you've said has a copula function built into it. if we take:
さくらは演奏者でうるさい！
"Sakura is a musician AND noisy/annoying!"
The most intuitive way for me to translate this in a direct, strictly logical way is not to treat that で as a connective copula but simply as the regular parameter/limit/area/set particle で. It would read something like: "As for Sakura, within the set of things that are musicians, she is noisy/annoying!" In this case the copula function of the "is" is taken by the い-engine function of うるさい, while the で turns 演奏者 into almost a kind of conceptual prepositional phrase. Obviously though, this is very convoluted to express in English, and it really amounts to a logical equivalent of "and" in English, since if someone is being annoying within the set of things that are musicians, it of course follows that they are both annoying and a musician, or: a musician AND annoying.
So, assuming everything I laid out above is true, it seems likely that really there is only one real logical function of the で particle: to say that whatever follows before the "engine" ending of the current logical clause is contained within the parameter, area, boundary, etc of the thing the で particle is attached to. (this function might bleed over to the て／で forms of verbs and adjectives too, though I don't know).
Does this make any sense?
Thanks!
I think we will end up in trouble if we start trying to wish away the て-form of the copula. I also think it is a very bad idea to start thinking of だ as "an abbreviation of the copula". It may once have been that but now it _is_ the copula and has its own て-form and adjectival pre-connective form. With forced interpretations one can say all kinds of things but in fact we do use the copula で to string together copula functions without any other meaning.
さくらは演奏者でうるさい！
does not mean "Sakura is annoying among musicians" which is how we would have to interpret it if we call this the で particle (and in any case we don't use the で particle in quite that way).
There is a difference between saying "Sakura is noisy among/within the set musicians" and saying "Sakura is noisy and a musician," which as you rightly say is what this actually means.
Your interpretation is forcing two close but far from identical meanings to be "equivalent" for the sake of trying to eliminate the fact that this で is the て-form of the copula.
I am sometimes hesitant about talking about the etymological origins of modern Japanese precisely because of this tendency to wish to use them to confuse the modern meanings.
The modern copula is だ / です. である is little bit of a fossil. The copula has evolved since its である days. We can see this clearly from the fact that while formal grammar classes だ as a verb, modern Japanese doesn't really treat it as one. That is why we have to use である to pre-modify a noun. Because it still looks and feels like a real verb.
We can't do it with だ / です because they have evolved to the point where they no longer feel verb-like enough to keep that function.
While the で particle certainly played a role in forming the modern copula, the copula in any of its forms never was identical to the で particle.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thanks for the reply! I of course appreciate that in terms of the modern language it is more useful to think about this in the terms you present in your videos, this was as you say more of an etymology question, not a practical descriptive grammar question. Mostly I'm curious about whether my interpretation of で is a fair representation of the kinds of expression strategies that the two modern でs "evolved" from, a little like how a horse's hoof and our fingernails are different evolutionary manifestations of the exact same structure that adapted to different situations.
@@1919viola I am afraid I am really not an expert on historical Japanese. I research it to the extent that it is useful to our understanding of modern Japanese but earlier Japanese did quite a lot of things rather differently and (being what I am) I would need to analyze it for myself rather than take the official interpretations as read, so it would be a fairly big job.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I have this same etymological curiosity about the "te form" in general, it would appear to be another etymological descendant of an "ur-で" particle, the function seems very similar to the standard で particle, makes me think that the て form simply *is* this "urで" after having been absorbed into the verb class in specialized ways. Again, this is really an etymological question, not a grammatical one, I'm just the personality type that really enjoys knowing the deeper historical "why" of these seemingly mysterious intuitive similarites. For me, it reinforces the intuitive understanding.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 in no way is any of this a criticism by the way! Your videos are fabulously helpful and well put together ❤. Very thought provoking, as you've seen!
I really like the way she described the how and why, instead of the what..
It is really sad she is no longer here, a big loss for japanese learners.
でこざる is used a lot in One Piece by the Wano samurais, never understood it until now!
Hmm I studied set theory in math , I did think of this myself.
About the の particle
At one point in the video you mention that 円形のさま wouldn't make sense, but why is this the case? I understand that 円形 is not an adjectival noun, so we can't use な, but can't の tie together almost any nouns? Is it related to a connotation of definiteness (i.e. definite identity) that の sometimes seems to imply (e.g. when using a quantity + counter with の), or is it something else entirely?
More broadly, when we talk about adjectival nouns, is the ascription of noun-ness really just a matter of grammar and taxonomy, or is there some deeper way in which adjectival nouns correspond to their corresponding categories? For example, in English I could say 'quietness is desirable', and I believe in Japanese this would be 静けさが望ましい, but can I ever make direct statements about 静か in the way I can about more conventional (in English) person-place-thing nouns?
Thanks for any help you can provide with this, and thanks for helping us all make sense of Japanese grammar with your videos.
I know I am being sudden but did you find the answer to your first question?
mind.blown.
Mind blown
1:36 本当にびっくりした草
CURE DOLLY FAN! I SUPPORT YOU 100%
One topic I would love to see a clearer picture painted on is Sarcasm in Japanese. On almost all the study resources I've followed, there is always this notion that you can't express sarcasm in Japanese/Japanese doesnt do sarcasm which I find really hard to believe. So I wanted to know your take on it. Does the concept of "Sarcasm" really not exist in Japanese and if it doesnt, how do people with dominantly sarcastic personalities effectively and truly express themselves? Or does it mean they simply can't? And If there are ways to be sarcastic in Japanese, I would learn to have some light shed on those.
There certainly is such a thing in Japanese. In fact in some circumstances it can be tricky to use extreme honorifics because it could sound as if you are using them sarcastically (which happens). However translating Western forms of sarcasm generally doesn't work. The term アメリカン・ジョーク is a byword in Japan for a foreign joke that only makes sense to foreigners.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 So what I get is that Sarcasm does indeed exist in Japanese, it just doesn't work the way it does in English. And most Eng Japanese Grammar teaching sites tend to say that it just doesnt exist because they either don't know how it works in JP or because its quite tricky to grasp for a total beginner.
@@vanessameow1902 Also it really isn't culturally such a big thing as it is in English. So I would say a "sarcastic personality" is a culturally determined thing to some extent. Someone may have - say - a cynical personality and in English speaking countries that will express itself via sarcasm much more than it would in Japanese (and indeed various other languages). Sarcasm happens to be particularly prominent in modern English culture.
i wish i could become one of your patreons but i am but a teenager and dont have any money TT but i still try to watch the ads
Liking and commenting also helps the algorithm notice Dolly-sensei's videos and helps the channel grow :)
hi dolly, thank you for the excellent video. i'm not sure if this question is related, but since the two で's were brought up i thought i'd ask.
in formations like では or でも can the で here be either the copula or the regular particle? or will it always be the same で no matter the context, and if so, which one of the で's is this?
It is possible to put a non-logical particle after a logical particle (other than the primary and secondary logical particles が and を). But all the common usages of では and でも are in fact the て-form of the copula. More on double particles here: ua-cam.com/video/iPiLVZoYhfM/v-deo.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 thank you!
your approach to grammar is incredibly good and im astounded that you (i assume) reached these conclusions through introspection without any sort of formal education
Yes that is correct. I am a self-learning unit and proceed by observation, analysis and thought-experiments.
Now I can finally understand: 吾輩は猫である。名前はまだない。
I've always had this question. Why is it that you gotta say でございます and not で御ざります?
It is a fossil and corresponds to older grammar rules than modern Japanese.
Why does using の instead of である sometimes not work?
Cure Dolly-sensei, I would like to quibble with your 'that person over there is sakura' example of the copula. In this sentence (ano hito wa sakura desu would be the Japanese, I believe).... wait, I'm wrong, and writing the Japanese shows me why. Sakura is the group and ano hito the topic, not the other way around, which is what I thought it would be. Even to someone like me who has studied this extensively, I really wanted 'sakura' to be the topic, and 'that person over there' to be the group she (presumably) belonged to. But that would not be how you say it, and could also cause confusion.
So... sorry I doubted you there.
sensei can i also use である on i-stem(verbs)? like this
魔法を使いである彼女
mahou(wo)tsukai-dearu-kanojo
Yes, you can use である like that with an i-stem verb (which is in fact a noun) and another noun.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49
thank you sensei.
the truth is, i heard it on anime titled konosuba legend of crimson, and the real sentence is like this "紅魔の里ゆいつ生き残りである彼女は、駆け出しの町で、ある男と出会うことに成る"
and this sentence is now understandable😊.
@ Me wanting to hit like at 3 separate points...
So
Da is verby
Na is adjectivy
No is nouny
Face of the same thing?
is deari different? that's the last copula question i have tbh. like its clearly different but does it have any notable difference in structure or something?
It is the い-stem of である.
As I watching some anime this morning something came to mind about this lesson that confused me. If you have である as another form of the copula, why does である not turn into でありますん in the negative?
Did you mean でありません？ It more or less does. It is usual in modern Japanese to include the (negative-emphasizing) は however and say ではありません.
Cure Dolly Sensei, it was recommended to me that I stop speaking English and only speak Japanese for a month to speed up my learning process. I've tried to start this several times but I get overwhelmed and give up. I know the importance of immersion; I listen to Japanese stories on my MP3 almost all day long. My husband is the one who tries to do this with me but we both get discouraged with not being able to express our feelings to one another easily. Yet, some language learners imply that this is precisely the healthy stress needed to get the ball rolling. Is it really possible to learn a language within a month while speaking only the target language? Is there a better way to learn than to drop my native tongue entirely?
One important thing to always keep in mind is that language acquisition (such as thru immersion/interaction with other speakers) is what internalizes the meaning of the language within us, and to stretch _too_ far beyond what we are currently capable of, as in sports, can sometimes result in more harm than good, especially over a prolonged period of time. For example, if you and your husband through necessity (because of the no-English restriction) had to invent ways of communicating in Japanese in order to achieve the practical goal of living your lives together, it seems to me highly likely that you are naturally going to have to make some stuff up in order to get the job done, and those made-up, ad hoc solutions seem very likely indeed to be forced output (that is to say, beyond your currently level of intuitive fluency and/or familiarity), or in other words is likely to become unnatural speech patterns.
This becomes _especially_ of significance given not only the fact that there is no native speaker to provide input on your speech but also the time frame of one month, which is long enough to not only develop said patterns (just to communicate, again out of necessity) but perhaps to *establish* them in your speech, and it’s much easier to avoid a problem in the first place than it is to go back and try to correct it. In this way, I don’t think it’s a bad idea necessarily, but it may be the case that the two of you simply aren’t quite ready for a level that intense. But why jump straight to a month? Maybe you decide to speak only Japanese during dinner, or for an evening, or in the morning, maybe a few times a week. If you could invite some native speaker friends out to dinner with you and let them know that you’ll be only speaking Japanese in order to improve, they may naturally provide you some insights into such unnatural patterns-or at least the egregious ones. Ofc they’re not teachers so their explanations may be somewhat rough and hard to follow, but at least it can serve as a flag that can be reviewed after dinner
As for “learning” a language within a month, it seems a bit weird from my perspective. That’s because I view ‘learning a language’ as a process, so of course you can learn a language in a month in the sense that you can improve, even significantly so, in that time. However, and this may just be my incorrect intuition here, I get the sense that when people refer to ‘learning a language in a month’ they don’t mean a month in which you are learning the language but a month in which you _learn_ a language. That is, reach some level designated by an achievement that constitutes being able to check off a box on your list of things to do that includes finally learning that language.
Since all languages, including one’s native one, really don’t have a defined upper limit to proficiency as there’s always more avenues to explore and deeper levels to discover (i.e., no 100%) then we are faced with the question of what level of capability and in what areas do we find useful to attain. In that sense we can each determine what it means for us personally to have “learned” the language to a satisfactory amount in the necessary aspects, which may even change over time
Speaking to the ‘best’ way to learn a language, well I’m no authority but my two cents is that it’s the way the works best. Of course, that’s a circular answer, but perhaps for your friends jumping in for a month might be the best way for them, but maybe it isn’t for you. Different people learn differently (sometimes quite so) so there isn’t really a “best way” in an objective sense, although there are ways that tend to be effective and those that don’t, ways that tend to cause problems and those that don’t.
What’s best, in my opinion from my experience, is very much a matter of case-by-case basis. Finding a good teacher who suits your style and helps you is a great place to get started on finding, and sometimes experimenting with, what works best for you. And of course other students’ input can also help get the creative juices flowing to help you come up with new ways to learn and/or new strategies to adapt, although what’s right for them may simply be not right for you, and that’s okay too. It may still give inspiration for something else, or you can always just find something that resonates more and produces better results for you
I’m sorry if this felt like something of a non-answer to you, because I suppose in a certain sense it sort of is, but I sincerely hope this helps you. I’m just a fellow learner, so take this (as with basically anything really) with a grain of salt. All the best to you two ❤️
This "do it for a month" thing seems a bit excessive. Not that I would discourage it if you have the resolve to do it, but I don't think it is a "magic formula" for "learning Japanese" either. Having periods where you only speak Japanese is a good idea. Having people to whom you only speak Japanese is also a good idea but with someone as close as a husband it may throw up too many practical problems going complete "cold turkey" for a month.
I do agree that the "healthy stress" is good if you can manage it. It really is good to take it beyond your comfort zone. Find ways to express what you want to express even if they are terrible patch-ups of the Japanese you know.
I have done this and encouraged people to do it, stopping them taking the easy route back to English when they want to.
Two things I would suggest - why not try to build up to a month - have that as your goal and work toward it with longer and longer Japanese-only periods.
You don't have to be in a big hurry and you can be building up the power to express the things most important to you.
With shorter sessions you can have a post-mortem afterward where you say "I was trying to express this, what should I have said?" (take notes if necessary).
You can also use the technique I explain in this video to find out how to express things you need to express: ua-cam.com/video/1FdhiQH8TS8/v-deo.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49
I totally agree! I actually saw a video by a guy whose friend had a rather low level of conversational proficiency in Japanese but was able to communicate very effectively because he was able to let go of saying exactly what he originally wanted to say and found ways to say things that he _did_ know to communicate roughly the same idea. I think an important distinction is that one can use simple language (and even ask questions or use hand gestures when necessary to fill in the gaps) to communicate, yet choose to use correct, natural language as much as possible in the process.
That isn’t to say that it’s unwaveringly critical that nobody ever output unnatural language. In fact, it’s inevitable and even part of the learning process (even in a first language, and I don’t just mean as children) and can be safely embraced with a little caution. I say a little caution because the trouble seems to come from forming bad habits and understandings, which aren’t a matter of trying to communicate one time but of repeated, sometimes deliberate, practice
It’s a fascinating topic
@@littlefishbigmountain I don't think there is much danger in finding rough ways to communicate what you want because it always feels somewhat uncomfortable and one is really wishing one knew the "right" way to say exactly what one means. This is one area where adults _are_ like small children - both struggle with expressing concepts and it is a process that leads them to become more alert to the more satisfactory ways of expressing them.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49
By the way, I also just watched that video you linked. You nailed it! さすが、You really make top-tier teaching content, 先生. Idk if this is an archaic expression, but どうも言えないほどありがとうございます。
How possible is it to say なつかしい気分になるのである? I have to re-write a text with です・ます体 to である体 and I'm not sure if my teacher wants me to add のである after every short form or simply replace ます with only the short form every time. The example sentence 食べるのである is in his table, but he put it in between brackets so I'm wondering if that means that it's questionable?
(I'd rather figure this out myself than ask him a question about an assignment that is supposed to be very easy lol.)
You shouldn't use の just to force a である ending. If you wouldn't have said のです / のだ then you shouldn't use のである.
They are called verbal adjectives because the na particle comes from the verb naru etymologically. Like before, long long time ago instead of shizuka na you just had shizuka naru which then got contracted into na. That's why when you say that na is a form of da it somehow doesn't make that much sense to me.
I don't think she ever claimed it to be the ethymology. 名 serves the same function as だ so it's a good way of explaining it. By usual linguistic standards, な works like a copula.
I was wondering :
If it is so, shouldn't the te form of the copula be であって/ だって ? Why is it で instead ?
Because modern Japanese has evolved and streamlined into what it is. Languages do that all the time. On a bigger scale that is why French and Italian are no longer Latin.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 So the modern te form で comes from であって ?
@@会者定離-v7c In a way. It now works more like the て-form of だ. Recall that だ・です and である are no longer regarded as quite the same entity (although they are both the copula) because である still acts functionally like a verb (which is why it can pre-modify non-adjectival nouns) and だ・です don't.
Note that Spanish also (in a very different way) has evolved two differently-used copulas.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you
I'm wondering how do we know if we can just stack modifiers vs when we need の/である? I made this example:
花を愛している不明女性
Is this correct to say or would it be more appropriate to say something like:
花を愛しているの不明女性 or 花を愛している不明(の/である)女性
Truthfully I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say here. What is your intended meaning? "Woman who vaguely loves flowers"? "Vague woman who loves flowers"? Either way a lot of the problem is Dictionary Dumping - taking words like 愛する and 曖昧 and assuming that you can just take their E-J meanings and plug them into sentences. This doesn't generally work well beyond very simple ideas. I would recommend this to start with: ua-cam.com/video/1FdhiQH8TS8/v-deo.html
PS with a clearer example I can give advice on modifier order.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Oh I wasn't notified of your response.
Here's the sentence I made while practicing grammar and I showed it to others for feedback and they said I needed の or である before 僕 but couldn't explain why. I know now "僕の意見" doesn't need to be in this sentence but this did spark an interest in figuring out this problem. I guess I could replace として with は for it to still make sense. Also my absolute greatest apologies for this sentence as I made it joking around about myself so it's fairly cringy.
抱き枕を愛してる負け犬引きこもり僕の意見として本当の女性がいい人ではない
The general idea was "My opinion as a body pillow loving loser shut-in is that real women aren't attractive"
Again very very sorry for my terrible sense of humor. So exactly what I'm wondering is how can I tell when の is absolutely necessary and when it's okay to just stack the modifiers like I did in this sentence
@@sealeddragon286 Yes I you need a の before the 僕 (である would do too). 意見では is better I think than 意見として. While いい女 could mean a good-looking girl, (along the lines of the commoner いい男), いい人ではない tends to imply that there is something wrong with their character. You might prefer something like 魅力的ではない "they don't hold any charm (for me)".
But anyway you are stacking the modifiers just fine.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49
抱き枕を愛してる負け犬引きこもりである僕の意見では本当の女性が魅力的ではない
So in this case it's needed but in the case of
抱き枕を愛してる負け犬引きこもりとして本当の女性が魅力的ではない
Is の still needed before 引きこもり in this case? Just trying to make sure I understand when it's needed hopefully It's not a bother
why is it not でいる when talking about living things? I thought living things took IRU not ARU
If I get it correctly, it's because in that case it refers to an inanimate thing, like さくらである, the ある refers to the "boundary of (being) Sakura" (さくらで), not to Sakuea itself as a living being
Can you explain what is the different between って and んだって by your model japanese. I dont understand what happened in that 2 grammar. And it of be said by japanese regularly. But i dont understand and cant use it. よろしくお願いします🥺
って in both of those cases refers to a casual shortening of という／と言う which is often used to refer to something that a person was just speaking about. Cure Dolly explained it in this video: ua-cam.com/video/40avkmkQR8M/v-deo.html
んだって is のだ + って. のだ is explained in this video by Cure Dolly ua-cam.com/video/lYvIOi8Q3I8/v-deo.html
@@the-coding-fox Exactly. I have nothing to add.
I was discussing with my friend about ‘Na-adjectives’ and he said they are not nouns because
あなたの綺麗 (Incorrect)
while
あなたの元気 (Correct)
As 元気 is both a ‘NA-adjective’ and noun in the dictionary while 綺麗 is only ‘NA-adjective’. So thoughts on this?
They are functionally nouns in all main respects. Some adjectival nouns do not work as stand-alone nouns (just as some する nouns do not work as stand-alone nouns). Others do, like 元気 and 不思議. But if one wishes to ignore the fact that they are structurally nouns taking the copula (and that な is simply the connective form of the copula), one is only making life difficult for oneself.
We should recall that there is no such thing as "truth" in grammar. It is simply a set of models made to describe language. not the "source code" of language. So there is no means of saying that one model is "true" and another not, so long as they both describe the facts, but some models help us to understand and others hinder our understanding by introducing unnecessary complications.
The three-engine model, I think is the best and simplest for understanding and working with Japanese and that is what I teach. Of course anyone is free to use another model.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you for your reply :D
These kind of questions made me realise how extremely important だ actually is, and to think people are being taught です first...
Alright, so here's the plot;
japan being a corporate country decided it could use a lil' more money, so it planned to create a whole media platform(anime, manga, tv shows you name it). Many foreigners wanted to learn Japanese and so Japan used this to create shitty textbooks which had no real value. So foreigners would have go to Japan themselves to attend a language school, all the while spending a crap ton of money on food, transport, you name it. But a hero from the future travelled back a '' dolly'', she created a channel on this site named youtube so people can learn Japanese without spending money. Thus ending Japan's conspiracy with the Zionist multinationals.
The name さくら always gives me that feminine man impression, I am a feminine man myself and myself am the only feminine man that I truly know so that's the only reference I got.
Dilate
first
creepy voice really makes it hard to keep watching.