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努力し / 作ろう / 十四年間の日本語 / と / のに

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eeky

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Hi,

1. ...我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと努あ ﾍし、二年間でこの教科書を書き上げた。

My attempted translation: "over two years, and with much effort, we wrote this textbook for use at the level of our second-year students".

a) In 努力し, is し the stem of する used as an alternative to して？

b) Is 作ろう the probable/volitional form of 作る? Does it refer to the writers producing the book? Why is it in this form?


2. また、この十四年間の日本語、日本文化の変化にはめざ ましいものがあった。

I assume this is talking about the remarkable changes that have occurred in Japanese culture and language over the fourteen years in question, but I don't really understand the grammar. How does the clause この十四年間の日本語 grammatically relate to the next part? There don't seem to be any of the linking words that I am used to seeing.

3. Is the following construction OK in Japanese?

adjective noun1 と noun2

meaning

adjective noun1 and adjective noun2

e.g. 新しい帽子とコート to mean "new hat and new coat".

Does it work roughly like in English where deciding if the adjective also applies to noun2 is a matter of common sense and context?


4. これは小さくて、持って歩くのに便利な辞書です。

Translation given: "This is a small dictionary, handy to carry around with one."

I'm always having problems with のに. What does it mean here? I understand the rest of the sentence OK.
 
1. a) Yes. That's why it's called the 連用形.
b) Yes. Vol. + とする means to try to do something (or that something is about to happen, but obviously that's not what it means here).

2. この十四年間の日本語、日本文化の変化 is all one unit. 日本語 is lumped with 日本文化 here.

3. Yeah, that all looks right.

4. Think of it as the phrase 持って歩く + の + に. の here is a nominalizer, like こと.
 
Thanks Glenn. In my original post, in question 1, do you see a difference in the rendering of 努・ ﾍし in the full sentence and 努力し in my question (a)?

For me, the rendering in the full sentence has become corrupted, though I am virtually certain that I typed it correctly. I have noticed something similar before at this forum, but I have not noticed it in any other place where I have typed Japanese. Do you have any clue what the problem might be? I am using the standard IME that comes with Windows XP.

Glenn said:
4. Think of it as the phrase 持って歩く + の + に. の here is a nominalizer, like こと.
Click to expand...
OK, I get の then, but could you explain why に is required here?
 
Last edited:
It's the forum that's the problem, and it's insistence on inserting a half-width space every 25 characters. Japanese text is full-width, so if a half width space will end up getting inserted in the middle of a full-width character, resulting in 文字化け. There's a link about it in my sig.

It's the same as 健康にいい or 通勤に便利. I'm pretty sure no other particle makes sense there.
 
You can also think it as 日本語・日本文化の、この十四年間の（/における/の間の）変化.

Glenn said:
That's why it's called the 連用形.
Click to expand...
This is a widely-spread misinterpretation.;-) 連用形 is not from the word 連用する or "to use continuously", but from 用言に連なる形 as the opposite to 連体形 or 体言に連なる形.

連用形 - Wikipedia

So "the continuative/conjunctive form" is not accurate as the translation of 連用形 at least from the point of view of etymology. "The adverbial form" would be more appropriate, I suppose.
 
I did read that once before, actually, but, I'm sorry, I don't fully understand it how it relates to my problem. Do you mean mean that I inadvertently inserted a half-width character somewhere in my sentence? Can you tell which character it is? And this seems to be different from saying that the forum automatically inserts a half-width space character that messes things up. If the forum does this, then will anything more than 25 characters always be messed up? If so, how is that tolerable?
 
文字化け is occurred when you mix half-size fonts and full-size fonts（kana, kanji） in a paragraph.

the source of your trouble
"1. ..." + "我々の二年生のレベルで…."

You can avoid it adding a half-size space " " after the half-size font.
 
Oh, so do you mean the half-width characters are the "1. ..." at the start of the line? I was looking for something embedded in the Japanese script.

As it happens, though, there are an even number of characters in "1. ...", which seems to satisfy the requirement Glenn documented that "If you really want to use half-width characters then make sure you use an even amount, otherwise you'll get mojibake."
 
Even at the start of the sentence, it's in a paragraph.


original
1. ...我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと努あ ﾍし、

separate into two paragraphs
1. ...
我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと努力し 、

put " " after "..."
1. ... 我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと努力し 、

Here you can see, 文字化け doesn't occur in the last two examples.
 
Thanks, I get the general idea now. There still seems to be something funny going on though, because the following all have six half-width characters at the start, yet the first two are OK and the last is corrupted:

111111我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと 努力し、
......我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと 努力し、
11 111我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと努あ ﾍし、
 
One of the reasons, I suppose, is the space automatically put after と in the first two examples. This shows that each six half-size letters in the sentences is recognized as "three full-size letters" by the site. (3 + "我々の二年生のレベルで使える教科書を作ろうと" 22 = 25) However, there's no space there in the last one. This difference causes something.
 
Yeah, I've seen it too where it depended on where I stuck the space as to whether it screwed things up, and I'm not completely sure what's going on with that. It would be pretty awesome if it didn't insert anything that wasn't in the text already. It would also be pretty awesome if we didn't lose line breaks upon previewing or editing...


I was actually thinking 用言に連なる形 when I wrote that, and was thinking that it was opposed to 体言に連なる形 (連体形). That's actually how I learned to keep them straight. But, I was wondering just what 用言 it was attached to. I guess it's the one at the end of the sentence, or it's the group of all of them together (although your quote says it just appears in front of another 用言). To be honest, I never learned the translation of it.

I feel a bit confused, though, because like I said, I learned it by opposing it to 連体形, so it feels like it should be modifying something, and that something would be the following phrase, or just the predicate of it. But I guess that's not quite right. Bleh, it's been a long day, and I'm tired.
 
Toritoribe said:
However, there's no space there in the last one. This difference causes something.
Click to expand...
The way I understand it, though I am happy to be corrected, is that the space is always being inserted. If it gets inserted "in the middle" of a Japanese character then it messes up that character, but if it gets inserted at a character boundary then it doesn't, it just appears as a space. For some reason the character counts are being treated differently in my examples, even though the number of characters appears to be the same. This causes the space to be inserted at a different point.

The whole thing seems totally wacky to me. Why on earth would the site be randomly inserting spaces into one's text? Who would ever want that to happen? It doesn't seem to make any sense.
 
I doubt it makes sense to any of us. I also doubt anyone would ever want it to happen. It just started happening a few years ago, and never got fixed. We've just learned to deal with it as best we can.

Incidentally, there seems to be a more fatal problem with blog titles. I've seen 文字化け in blog titles that were only 10 characters long, and right in the middle of them. I have no idea why that would happen. There was also once a problem with characters becoming completely different characters in thread titles. I once had a question mark turn into a vertical line. It may be time for a completely new board program, like IP.Board 3 or something. That one seems to work fine.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure the whole reason I have that donor status is because I wanted to help get rid of these sorts of technical issues. That was five or six years ago.

One last thing: it looks like the space gets treated differently than other characters, for some reason, just judging from your attempts above. I don't know. At any rate, you should mostly have the tools to prevent 文字化け from occurring in your posts from now on.
 
It occurred to me later that this probably has nothing to do with "paragraphs", but everything to do with what the software considers unbroken "words". For example, in the following it has inserted a space after 50 characters (equivalent to 25 double-width Japanese characters) in the two 60-character "words" (consisting of all digits) and left the rest alone.

aaaaaaaaaaaa 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 bbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccc ddddddddddddddd 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890

When it hits a bunch of Japanese with no spaces, the software probably thinks that it's all one "word" and that it needs to insert a space, probably as a kludge to allow line-wrapping to happen because the software doesn't properly handle long unbroken character strings.
 
Oh, sorry for misunderstanding.
've often seen here and there in the internet that 連用形 is named from its conjunctive usage, probably because of the misinterpretation of 連用.

連（なる） is more likely just "connecting" than "modifying" in this case. 連用形 simply means the form to connect 用言.

Interesting. So the space is automatically inserted even in Roman letters.
 
Toritoribe said:
Interesting. So the space is automatically inserted even in Roman letters.
Click to expand...
It seems so. My guess is that the messed-up Japanese text is simply an unanticipated side-effect of a horrible programming hack designed to fix problems with the display of long unbroken strings of single-width characters.
 
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