Understanding and effectively using adverbial nouns

私は平仮名を全部読めます

Notice 全部 (zenbu = all/entire/etc.) is an adverbial noun. Crazy enough in the 6 months of studying Japanese I guess I have been studying simplified sentence structures. But Google showed pretty much nothing about adverbial nouns and very little on adjectival-nouns. Maybe it's just not a common occurrence.

Can anyone shed light on this subject? I understand it's modifying the verb 'read', I just don't understand how to utilize this grammatical phenomenon myself.

Thanks,
Craiggles.

What materials have you been using?

Mike Cash said:

What materials have you been using?

Click to expand...

Hmm, ANKI Japanese core 2000. The one where they speak it/hiragana/katakana/English. It's amazing. I believe I'm growing rapidly. And I'm using tae Kim's grammar guide but that has no information. Also, I'm using "Japanese the manga way". I've figured out a lot of grammar thus far but this sentence came up in anki and I was like, WHAAAAAT?!?!? Haha. Soet, I'm replying on my phone because I'm out. Any help would be appreciated. Even books I could buy. I have seriously invested myself into japanese. Been studying every day for 6 months now as I said before. I just feel like I get hit with curveballs left and right with this language.

In Japanese grammar, adverbial noun(副詞的名詞) often refers to conjunctions to make an adverbial clause/phrase with a modifying verb, adjective or clause, e.g., ところ, ため, 限り or 途端. It's not so commonly used, though.

全部 is an adverb in your example sentence, and a noun in, for instance, 私は全部の平仮名が読めます. "All" is an adjective in "All the people are happy", an adverb in "I'm all wet", and a noun in "I lost my all" also in English, no?

I've always thought of this structure as equivalent to the two ways you can use counters:

猫を３匹飼ってます。
３匹の猫を飼ってます。

Instead of number + counter, you can put in things like たくさん etc - most of the ones that come to mind are related to measurement. The tricky ones are things like 多く ・ 遠く which look like the adverbial form of 多い ・ 遠い but 多くのX etc are acceptable and if you look in a dictionary you'll find a separate listing for these forms which show they're both nouns and adverbs (as opposed to other similar looking forms like 長く).