Help with this sentence

3)
～そうだ can't be attached to nouns, except the stem of na-adjectives(some of them can be considered as a noun) or a kind of set phrase like いい人そう. You need to use other expressions such like ～のようだ, みたいだ or らしい for nouns.

4)
違う means "to be wrong/not correct" there.
よ shows that the speaker gives an information the listener doesn't know. It doesn't have a nuance of "of course".
"I heard" or "the police man said" is more appropriate there.

The police man said I was wrong, who drove the car. (= The police man said I, the driver was wrong.)

5-1)
に indicates that 子ども is the target of 見せない (子どもに見せない), not the subject. You need to get who the unmentioned subject of the sentence is from the context (probably the parents). 見せない performs like negative causative there. This seems to be the key of your confusion.

5-2)
It's the contrastive maker. ２時間以上はテレビを見せない connotes ２時間以内なら見せる as a contrast.

Thanks
5.1 and 5.2:
=> "I have acquired the habit of not letting the children watch TV for more than two hours on one day."
a) The contrastive "は" expresses this semantics of contrastive comparing here right? Like: "I let them watch for 2 hours, but not more"
Similar to: "ビールはのまない" => I don't drink beer (but I might drink other alcohol).
b) Is there any more elegant way than saying "I have acquired the habit of..." in this sentence? I could imagine just writing "I dont let the children watch more than two hours a day." but it kind of loses the semantics conferred by the japanese original ^^ It sounds really odd though, especially in this context of allowing someone else to do something xD
c) Including what you wrote me about it already, I used this guide here for the contrastive は.
Japanese Particles : The Contrastive wa
I hope it's at least not too wrong

a)
That's right.

b)
I would use "to make it a rule to do" for ～することにしている.

Thanks

1) 田中さんは家庭の事情で中国旅行には参加しないことになりました。
=> Again, は is a contrastive marker here, right?
"It so happened that tanaka doesn't participate in the trip to china due to circumstances in his family." ...he might participate in other trips though.

2) 今年の秋(に?)、結婚することになりました。
=> It happens very often that the に particle is left out in time data. I just wonder if this follows any rule?^^

3)
祖母は今９０歳です。祖母にはいつまでも元気で長生きしてほしいです。
=> "My grandma is now 90 years old.
I want for my grandma to be healthy and live a long life forever/indefinitely."

I'm having trouble because で works as a connector here.
So I guess 元気 doesnt modify "長生きする" but instead constitutes its own verbal complex/own verbal expression as I translated above?
I feel uncertain because 長生き is listed as a suru-verb: nagaiki - Jisho.org
genki isn't, although I think I encountered na-adjective plus suru already, especially with genki. ^^ But I'm not sure and I have nothing to look it up directly here ^^

4)
自然を守るために、これ以上森のきを切らないでほしい。
=> To protect nature, I want that we don't cut the trees of more than this forest/I want that we don't cut more trees than this forest.


In my first version, I tried to show my problem through this very literal translation. I hope I understood the basic sense of the sentence correctly, but the use of いじょう on もり which represents the forest from which the trees (the object) is very confusing for me. Thats why I wanted to know wether my second, less literal translation is still correct, because it feels very complicated and strange to me to express it in english as it is expressed in japanese.

1)
Right.

2)
Generally, に is attached to absolute temporal words, and isn't to comparative/relative time. I believe almost all textbooks must mention this difference.
cf.
12時にご飯を食べる
２月にアメリカに行く
夏頃（に）完成する
先月アメリカに行った
明日荷物が届く

3)
It's [元気だ] + [長生きする], not [元気 + 長生き]する.
cf.
掃除して、買い物する
掃除と買い物（を）する

Another interpretation is that で is a particle to indicate "state", i.e., "live a long life in good health."

4)
これ以上 is an adverb. It modifies 切らないでほしい (don't want to cut anymore). の is needed when used as a predicative, and even for これ以上の森の木, これ以上の modifies 森の木, not just 森.

It seems to me that the subject of 切らない is "you", i.e., "I want you don't cut.../I don't want you to cut..."

Thanks!
About 4)
a) I still have trouble determining how this should be interpreted.
So, when これ以上 modifies the verb, I still don't know wether
これ以上森のきを切らないでほしい means...
...I don't want you to cut trees of a forest and up anymore.
or
...I don't want you to cut the trees of the forest and up anymore.
or
...anything in between with the definite article only on trees or only on forest.

The meaning of the sentence can slightly shift in those variations, since the second version confers a more comprehensive meaning, clearly demanding to stop cutting trees completely and in general.
In the first version, it sounds like the person wants us to stop cutting trees in a forest, or at least to stop cutting all the trees of a forest, or to stop cutting so many trees that they could make up a forest.

b) Overall I'm still a bit clueless on how to actually interprete and integrate これいじょう in this sentence. I'm even struggling to explain what exactly my problem is with it. I usually try to construct a relatively literal translation which succeeds in conferring the correct meaning, and then I think of a more elegant solution. But this time, at least with what これ以上 - Jisho.org
gives me for translation, I just fail to do this.
Since I understand that he wants to protect nature, I can kind of guess what he wants to say me with this sentence, but otherwise I wouldn't even know wether he doesn't want to cut more trees or if he doesn't want to cut less trees.
Thats the kind of confusion I'm facing right now xD
It is this interaction between "not less than; ... and more; ... and upwards" and the negation in the verb which I can't figure out.
I get the concept of it, but with the vocabulary the dictionary gives me, I fail to construct a literal translation which confers this meaning ^^

c)
"I don't want you to cut any more trees of the forest" or
"I don't want you to cut any more trees than those of a forest"
is how I would express it if I wanted to make it sound good. However, even the first version already settles for a meaning which for example isn't contained in the first version of my literal translation.
But especially the second version here adds so many pronominal and functional elements for which I can't find explicitely expressed corresponding elements in the japanese original, that I wouldn't feel well about this translation. It's meaning is closer to the first version of my literal translation.
However, as I already said, when constructing the literal translations to have a reference in terms of the basic meaning of the sentence, I couldn't decide which one is right, or if one of them is right at all...

これ is "this" and ...以上 is "more than ...", so これ以上 is "more than this". By extension, a literal translation of the sentence would be: "I want [that company/the city/the people of the world] to not cut trees of forests more than this", where "this" refers to the current state.

"I want them to not cut down more forest trees than they already have"
"I want them to not cut down any more forest trees"
"I want them to stop cutting down forest trees"

Whether the speaker is talking about all of the world's forests or one forest in particular would be clear from the context.

Thanks, this helped a lot!

サントスさんは気持ちよさそうにねています。

I just learned the (masu-stem, i-adjective minus i, na-adjective) + (そうな+noun; そうに+verb) constructions.
The above sentence is from an example in the textbook.
I encountered よさ several times already and while I could always make sense of it, I dont understand this form and its function xD
I know that i-adjectives can lose their -i and have a -sa attached to become a noun. Maybe thats the case here, from the old form "よい" which usually is "いい" nowadays?
But even if so, then it still doesnt make sense here because my textbook didnt introduce a noun+そうに construction (yet).

I would translate the sentence like that:
a) Santos-san is sleeping well
b) Santos-san looks like he is sleeping well

I don't know which one is better, my textbook actually has only shown me translated examples for そうに+verb constructions where the special semantics of そうだ, incorporated into そうに/そうだ here if I understood the explanations correctly, wasn't explicitely expressed.

Toritoribe said:

これ以上 is an adverb. It modifies 切らないでほしい (don't want to cut anymore).

Click to expand...

"Don't want to cut anymore" in my post above couldn't be an answer to your previous question? Don't you think this means "don't want to cut any trees anymore"?
The same goes to your newest question.

Toritoribe said:

Also, negative forms and ない are also treated as i-adjectives, but なさ, not just な, is used for そう as an exception, e.g. 書いていなさそう or 寒くなさそう)

Click to expand...

Toritoribe said:

～そうだ can't be attached to nouns

Click to expand...

いい is another exception of ～さそう. なさそう can be a hint to interpret よさそう, no? Indeed, よさ and なさ can work as a noun since "the stem of adjective + さ" is a noun form of adjectives, as you wrote, but "noun + そうだ" is ungrammatical, as I already pointed out, therefore you would have never seen structures such like 高さそう, 寒さそう or 静かさそう.
I already gave you lots of explanations even just in this thread, and I believe those explanations can be a hint also for other examples if you read them more carefully, just like the "'copula + そう' is hearsay" case.

Toritoribe said:

"Don't want to cut anymore" in my post above couldn't be an answer to your previous question? Don't you think this means "don't want to cut any trees anymore"?

Click to expand...

It's just that "anymore" focusses less on the physical quantity of the tree cutting (at least in my opinion), and more on the timely expansion/limitation of it.
That's why I found lanthas translation and explanation helpful, because I was looking for a way to express this aspect of physical quantity as much as possible in a literal translation.
If this understanding of the sentence is incorrect though, I'll happily reiterate it ^^

Narktor said:

そうだ, incorporated into そうに/そうだ

Click to expand...

This is a typo btw.. I actually wanted to type "そうな".

Toritoribe said:

いい is another exception of ～さそう. なさそう can be a hint to interpret よさそう, no?

Click to expand...

Yes it is helpful, but without someone telling me about this exception I wouldn't have found out by myself ^^ Especially since the case of なさhasn't appeared in any of my exercises yet since then. Without practice, theoretical knowledge alone is prone to stay "inactive" and therefore such useful analogies most of the time are impossible for me to draw all by myself. Even browsing the thread for the hints you've quoted wouldn't really help me, because I can't make the necessary connections between なさ and よさ. I lack the inventory of reference material (=individual cases of textencounters which contain the respective grammatical phenomena) in my head which skilled language users usually have. For the case of なさ I actually don't have any further reference material at all. Besides that, we are talking about an exception here and even if I had drawn an analogy to the
なさ case, the least thing I would have had to do is asking for confirmation. However, if I had that kind of language awareness already, I probably wouldn't have asked any of the questions I already asked^^
The theory you explain to me is helpful, but I need to have both productive and receptive encounters with it in practice before I'm near the ablity to autonomously transfer this knowledge into unknown contexts (what I mean is this: Transfer of learning - Wikipedia
In other words: What you explain to me is always very helpful to understand the cases right before us, but the more future textencounters differ from the lingual patterns I already know, the less likely it is that I will be able recognize the functional elements of the sentence and put them into meaningful relations by myself.

意見がいろいろ出ているので、 ミーティングはまだおわりそうもありません。
=> "Because many different opinions came out, the meeting seems not to be finished yet."
1)
意見がいろいろ
some uncertainty about that one. Why isn't it: いろいろな意見が...?
I might be wrong, but I interpreted this one like I usually interprete は as topicmarker: "Concerning opinions..."

2) I kind of lack both creativity and courage to come up with a better translation for deru here. Any suggestions?^^

電車が来ましたよ。
...うわ、込んでいるね。座れそうもないな。

=> The train has arrived.
...Wow, its crowded, isn't it? It seems we won't be able to sit down.

3) What is the な doing there?

待っていても雨がやみそうもないので、 タクシーで帰りましょう。
=> a) Since it seems that we have to wait and that the rain won't stop, let's return by taxi.
b) Even if we wait, since it seems that the rain won't stop, let's return by taxi

3) a) seems more likely to me. b) isn't possible to my understanding, since according to my textbook, a sentence where -te form bears an adversative meaning must be followed by a main theorem. This isn't the case here, at least to my understanding, since in the languages I've learnt so far, causative clauses were always subclauses. I don't know wether this is true for japanese as well though ^^

Well, then it must be totally meaningless to point out the similarity between ＡとＢは同じだ/ＡはＢと同じだ and ＡとＢを比べる/ＡをＢと比べる or between なさそう and よさそう since what I explained couldn't be a hint to your interpretation such like the cases that you translated 僕がわるいんだそうです as "it seems I was the bad one" regardless of my saying "'copula + そう' is hearsay" when explaining about 意味なんだそうだ, or you thought about the possibility of "a noun+そうに construction" regardless of my replying "～そうだ can't be attached to nouns" when asked "what happens if 'soudesu' shall be attached to a noun in this function". My explanations in fact seem to be useless for you, and useless replies are nothing but wasted effort.

Toritoribe said:

Well, then it must be totally meaningless to point out the similarity between ＡとＢは同じだ/ＡはＢと同じだ and ＡとＢを比べる/ＡをＢと比べる or between なさそう and よさそう since what I explained couldn't be a hint to your interpretation such like the cases that you translated 僕がわるいんだそうです as "it seems I was the bad one" regardless of my saying "'copula + そう' is hearsay" when explaining about 意味なんだそうだ, or you thought about the possibility of "a noun+そうに construction" regardless of my replying "～そうだ can't be attached to nouns" when asked "what happens if 'soudesu' shall be attached to a noun in this function". My explanations in fact seem to be useless for you, and useless replies are nothing but wasted effort.

Click to expand...

If thats what youre thinking then I cant help it. I tried to explain where my limits are because it also takes me quite some time and effort to justify why I keep asking whenever Im blamed for not reading careful enough.
I always did my best to follow through with it and I think that I did improve my understanding oftentimes. But there are limits to what someone still learning a language can be expected to do, and this time I'm not willing to take the blame for not being able to figure out a grammatical regularity in highly irregular morphological circumstances...

Well, my previous explanation "～そうだ can't be attached to nouns" can't be a help to surmount the high irregularity of よさ? Also, it's useless to point out that これ以上森の木を切らないでほしい, not これ以上の森の木, also can be a hint of 意見がいろいろ出ている, not いろいろな意見?

Toritoribe said:

...Also, it's useless to point out that これ以上森の木を切らないでほしい, not これ以上の森の木, also can be a hint of 意見がいろいろ出ている, not いろいろな意見?

Click to expand...

1) If I'm asking, then it obviously wasn't enough of a hint for me.
Even now that you're pointing it out directly, I don't see much of a relation except for the fact that 以上 and いろいろ are both without an element of flection like -い or -な. But while いろいろ iroiro - Jisho.org is categorized as na-adjective, いじょう isn't ijou - Jisho.org
Anyway, if you say that いじょう shall be a hint to いろいろ, then they must be both in adverbial use.
However, I learned that いろいろ is a -な adjective, I did not learn that it is an adverb at the same time. That's why I'm expecting it to bear -に
if it is used as an adverb.
I just left the beginner level and entered intermediate, I find it quite annoying as well that my textbook constantly confronts me with constructions which introduce either known or sometimes unknown elements in functions which never were explained before. Neither am I provided with translations which could help me doublecheck my own interpretations, which would help me "reverse engineering" the functions in the sentence.

Toritoribe said:

Well, my previous explanation "～そうだ can't be attached to nouns" can't be a help to surmount the high irregularity of よさ?

Click to expand...

2) No it can't because there wasn't just the problem that I had to recognize noun + そうだ would be impossible.
First, it wasn't そうだ but "adjective + そうに + masustem-verb".
My book had told me that そうだ changes to そうに in these circumstances, but it hadn't told me that all the rules that account for そうだ are in effect in そうに as well. It didn't tell me before that noun + そうだ isn't possible either, leading to confusion in sentences which weren't transparent to me. That's why I came asking about these sentences .
Then comes the real challenge though, and that's that よさ is a morphological exception just like なさ. I didn't use なさ any time before, you explained it to me but that was it, I had no opportunity to observe it's function in context of any of my exercises since it hadn't even been introduced yet.

3) I'm repeating myself, but you're simply asking too much of me.
If you want to avoid repeating your explanations, that's fine, you can always link me to past explanations.
Sometimes they might help, sometimes they might not.
In the latter case I'll ask again of course, and you can either chose to respond to it or leave it be.

But I won't waste any more time on justifying why I can't magically deduce every exception and every analogy all by myself. You even criticized me for taking advice from lanthas, asking me to explain myself why your "hints" weren't enough. And I didn't even say that, I just thanked lanthas and said that it helped. I responded to you because I thought you might have an interest in understanding what your explanation was missing. Since I'm a teacher myself, I thought so because that's how one can improve in teaching others.
Meanwhile though, I'm getting the impression that this has started to revolve around less professional matters, and that I'm obligated to make sure that I'm the one to blame whenever I'm not living up to _your_ expectations...

Alright, a word 不毛 has come to my mind. (言い訳 also comes to mind at the same time, though...)


3)
It shows that the speaker said it to himself like a monologue, not said to the listener. Of course it's actually said to the listener, so this な works to soften the nuance as a result (something like "I'm not saying directly to you".)

4) (not "3)", right?)
It's not [待っていても]、[雨がやみそうもない]ので, but [待っていても雨がやみそうもない]ので, thus, "it seems that the rain won't stop even if we wait" is the cause/reason of the main clause.

1)
結構な量の問題を解いた。(attributive)
この問題は結構難しい。(adverb)

随分な額のお金を払った。(attributive)
言い方が随分失礼だ。(adverb)

相当な成果を収めた。(attributive)
相当面倒くさい。(adverb)
There are many examples.


It can't be your choice to stop using the textbook?

The Minna no Nihongo Chuukyuu I is alright. The Minna no Nihongo Chuukyuu II is much more frustrating. It focus very heavy on vocab. In the last 4 lessons out of final 7 that I took, I pick up a horrible amount of 85 - 100+ words each lesson and that doesn't count in the listening exercises that I skipped. The difficulty of the second book doesn't rise too much from the first one but I've to strive myself up and went through a lot of gotten bogged down moment to complete it. There are too much boring articles for reading. It doesn't feel like enjoying the study definitely.

Toritoribe said:

It can't be your choice to stop using the textbook?

Click to expand...

Of course I won't.

4) yeah, not 3 ^^
Okay that makes sense. The description for the syntactical rules for
-ても phrases is a bit ambiguous and makes it look like the mainclause has to follow directly, making it impossibe to embed the phrase into a subclause. Now I know better ^^

3) okay.

1) Then 意見がいろいろ出ている basically expresses the same as
いろいろな意見が出ている but organizes it differently?

According to how I understood your example:
結構な量の問題を解いた。(attributive)
この問題は結構難しい。(adverb)
This would be the case in context of my question.

My understanding might be wrong though because I have problems with the term "adverb" here.
"concerning this exercise, its quite difficult." I usually would call that a "particle", but not in the sense of japanese grammar: Grammatical particle - Wikipedia ("In modern grammar, a particle is a function word that must be associated with another word or phrase to impart meaning, i.e., does not have its own lexical definition. On this definition, particles are a separate part of speech and are distinct from other classes of function words, such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs.").

--------------------------------
Wether in this case there is a grammatical necessity for the adverbial construction of
意見がいろいろ出ている
instead of the attributive construction in
いろいろな意見が出ている
to express what should be expressed in the sentence
意見がいろいろ出ているので、 ミーティングはまだおわりそうもありませんI still don't know.
Even if both options are viable, I don't know if they convey a slightly different meaning or if they are basically the same, but are simply using a different grammatical approaches.

5) IMG_20170124_0001_NEW.pdf - DocDroid
Some textproduction again, it's exercise 1.
I wrote a bit more than necessary to practice more.
On the other hand I must admit that I didn't research polite forms of greeting on the phone or apologizing very intensely. ^^
I'm just more focussed on the basics right now.

1) 山田です。今日は私の車は故障しているので、電車で学校へ通うことにしました。 でも、早い電車に乗ったのに遅れそうです。
何とかりゆうかわからないんですが、電車はごふん前にとまって、事故があったという発表をしました。
申し訳ありません。
2) すみません。今日は会えないと思っています。来週の1月14日にもういちどう会ってみましょうか。
3) この事件はほんとう申し訳ありません。