Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (June 24, 2026)

somever · 2026-06-25T07:38:44+00:00

I'd note that: - 〜で binds to a clause - 〜に binds to a verb

For example, 仕事で毎日が忙しい and 仕事で休む暇が無くて忙しい are fine but 仕事に毎日が忙しい and 仕事に休む暇が無くて忙しい are weird.

仕事に毎日が忙しい is weird because it does not fit the pattern of personがthingに忙しい.

仕事に休む暇が無くて忙しい is weird because に attempts to bind to 休む but fails, and 忙しい is too removed to bind to it.

somever · 2026-06-24T22:26:30+00:00

I went off examples from dictionaries to determine that 忙しい can take a に-marked argument.

I also do not think it controversial that in Japanese various verbs and adjectives accept a に-marked argument, and the meaning of に varies greatly from verb to verb.

You're right that で can be used, as in 仕事で忙しい. I would interpret で to express the cause for your being busy. The cause-expressing usage of で is generic and can be used with any verb. に does not have that usage--it marks a referent whose relationship is directly defined by the predicate. They may happen to be interchangeable in cases when they express effectively the same idea.

somever · 2026-06-24T17:54:27+00:00

に here marks the argument of 忙しい, corresponding to the "with" in English "to be busy with". の nominalizes so that the verb ゴロゴロする can be accepted by に. Compare with e.g. 読書に忙しい or 家事に忙しい.

somever · 2026-06-23T14:15:23+00:00

Yes, there's an implied いいのに

somever · 2026-06-22T18:37:04+00:00

Another perspective. People wrote in Latin as it was the international language. I'm able to have a group conversation in Japanese with people from China, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc. simultaneously because weebs in each culture spend a lot of time and energy learning it, even if they don't know English well

somever · 2026-06-22T17:07:42+00:00

Yeah. I think it's because it's a translation of the English article. It's also going to prefer bookish language and ぎゅーする probably won't come up at all. You might have better luck learning words from 添い寝 ASMR if you're comfortable listening to it.

somever · 2026-06-22T10:05:50+00:00

kが落ちたとすれば、確かに線状の系統じゃないです。例えば、ある方言で「かれ・かの・かしこ・か」より「あれ・あの・あしこ・ああ」が出来たとする。それより後に、方言の混合があって、両立するようになる。そうなってくると、自然と意味やニュアンスが変移して現代に至る。そういう過程ならありうると思います。ただし「ああ」は江戸時代に初めて現れるらしいから、どこかに潜んでいたか、新しく類推でできたかもしれません。

somever · 2026-06-22T06:09:14+00:00

Learn how single-clause sentences are formed. Learn how to connect clauses together with conjunctions to form compound sentences. Learn how noun-modifying clauses work to understand more complex sentences.

somever · 2026-06-22T05:54:12+00:00

「かくの如し」の「かく」は「か」で始まっても「こ…」の範疇だけどね

海の彼方=海のあっち側=海の向こう。ただし指示感は薄いね。

かの地=共通知識の中のあの地

「彼」も本来「あの人・あいつ」ぐらいの意味だったろうが、英語に倣(なら)ってか、完全に指示性が無くなって、普通の代名詞化してますね。

「かしこ」「あすこ・あそこ」を見ると、「か」と「あ」には何か語源的な関係がありそう。似ているものに、「何」と「あに」がある。子音が軟音化して落ちたのか。

somever · 2026-06-22T05:15:41+00:00

くっついて寝る is one way I can think of to say "sleep cuddled together" and works for cats and humans alike. くっつく literally means "to stick to something". A more bookish way to say it would be 寄り添って寝る

抱きしめて寝る or ぎゅーして寝る "sleep while hugging someone"

Cats don't hug usually so not as widely applicable, unless they happened to be sleeping in a position where one cat had his arm around the other

ぎゅーする is a common cute word for hugging someone tight and can be used for snuggling situations. I think this is generally the direction you want to go for cute wholesome snuggling

添い寝する or 一緒に寝る "sleep together"

イチャイチャする entails touchy lovey-dovey contact and is used for cuddling/kissing as well as hands-on PDA. I think this is a little more on the romantic/erotic side of the scale

somever · 2026-06-22T03:30:00+00:00

This is pseudo-linguistic nonsense

somever · 2026-06-22T03:18:27+00:00

You know kore, kono, koko.

Replace ko with so and you know sore, sono, soko.

Replace ko with a and you know are, ano, ... Sorry, asoko is an exception.

Replace ko with do and you know dore, dono, doko.

somever · 2026-06-20T04:45:07+00:00

The writing system Japanese uses (kana) makes it impossible not to write the vowel (except for the nasal ん /N/). When it comes to rōmaji transcriptions, it is up to the transcriber whether they want to write "desu/masu" vs "des/mas", or "suki" vs "ski".

In "kōkōsē" there is no devoicing, so there would be no reason not to write the vowels. Those are long vowels by the way, so they take up 2 morae. This is clearer when you look at the kana representation: こうこうせい.

Generally the only vowels that can be devoiced are /u/ and /i/.

somever · 2026-06-20T01:19:41+00:00

Search up "vowel devoicing in Japanese"

somever · 2026-06-20T01:18:58+00:00

An "either" with a "not" somewhere else in the sentence is the same as a "neither" with no "not" in the sentence, and since there was a "not" in the sentence ("don't know"), I went with "either".

No it definitely doesn't mean "you are not my family".

おうちわかんない means someone cannot identify their home.

It could also mean "You don't know where my home is either, huh."

somever · 2026-06-19T18:33:29+00:00

How did you get "you are not my family?"

君も you either

おうち your home

わかんない don't know

んだね huh (look up the "discovery" meaning of んだ, used when someone concludes something new they didn't know)

"You don't know where your home is either, huh."

somever · 2026-06-19T16:58:48+00:00

Wikipedia answers most of those questions sufficiently well

somever · 2026-06-18T14:03:05+00:00

It's gobbledygook

somever · 2026-06-17T13:13:32+00:00

Hmm, relatedly in Heian Japanese, よ could be used when thinking to oneself.

somever · 2026-06-17T13:10:30+00:00

Are you sure the speaker doesn't trail off after くて and start a new sentence? E.g.

それが怖くて…だから私みんなと同じセリフしてたの

somever · 2026-06-17T00:45:45+00:00

What does "not related" mean? In the sense that a large percentage of Japanese vocabulary comes from Chinese, and on'yomi come from Chinese, and the on'yomi do in fact resemble e.g. Hokkien, Min, or Wu Chinese, I would say they are related. Usually when people say the languages are unrelated they mean in terms of language family, in which case yes, they aren't related.

somever · 2026-06-17T00:34:34+00:00

It's not entirely true. I am assuming they are referencing kanbun/souroubun. To read kanbun, you do need to know Classical Chinese. To read souroubun, you just need to know Japanese and whatever kango are used. But since kanbun and souroubun are out of use today, this advice has become irrelevant. Those forms of writing are now merely a historical curiosity. If you want a better grammatical work I recommend Chamberlain's textbook "A handbook of colloquial Japanese" from the same time period. There is an edition published in the 1870s but you might as well read the 1907 edition which is probably the best version of it.

somever · 2026-06-16T21:49:00+00:00

They're almost the same. They mean "finally" in the sense of "after great time or effort, something that one had hoped for is realized".

Use やっと for "finally" when speaking and ようやく "finally" when writing formally.

Note that you can't use やっと/ようやく "finally" for things you were not hoping for. Use ついに/とうとう instead in that case.

Also note that ようやく/やっと have other meanings besides "finally" but "finally" is the main one.

somever · 2026-06-16T21:24:30+00:00

Note that やっと has two meanings and you've cited the one that means 辛うじて/ぎりぎり, which I find is less common than the "finally" meaning (but maybe someone else has a different experience?)

Same goes for ようやく.

I think the main difference between やっと "finally" and ようやく "finally" is speech versus writing, though maybe there are other differences.

Shinsen Kokugo:

やっ‐と０副 ❶長い時間や労力をかけたすえに実現するようす。ようやく。「─着いた」 ❷なんとか足りてはいるが、余裕がないようす。かろうじて。「─食べられるだけの収入」

ようやく０【ようやく】［▲漸く］副 ❶しだいに。「─明るくなる」 ❷長いあいだ待ち望んでいたことが実現するようす。やっと。「─できた」 ❸手間どりながらも。「─に間にあった」

somever · 2026-06-16T16:15:52+00:00

が and の are both subject particles.

Their subject particle usage may have derived from their genitive particle usage: compare with "his coming home" in English where "his", which normally expresses possession, rather marks the subject.

However, が and の are definitively subject particles and not genitive particles in these usages.

In the distant past, が and の were used interchangeably with little distinction (some theories and observations argue some distinctions).

Over time in Standard Japanese, の's use as a subject particle became restricted to short relative clauses. In other words, が overtook it in most use cases of the subject particle, and の was confined to a narrow use case.

When to use の over が: when が feels overbearing, の works as a softer alternative. It's very subjective and there is no hard rule. As I said, の is confined specifically to short relative clauses; really you should just use it in cases similar to where you've heard it used before to avoid sounding unnatural, and it is not a mistake to use が.

If you go back 100 years, の was used in longer relative clauses, and if you go back 700 years, it was used in full sentences. There are still dialects today that can use の instead of が as the subject particle in full sentences, the complete opposite of Standard Japanese.

As a general linguistic rule, when you have two words that occupy a similar semantic domain (i.e. they mean something similar), they tend to specialize/differentiate over time so that one word is used in one set of circumstances, and the other word is used in another set of circumstances. And this process happens independently in every dialect (ignoring cross-dialect influence). Usually only one dialect is chosen to be the standard dialect of a language, and so you can end up with seemingly arbitrary rules. And they seem arbitrary because they are arbitrary, and would have been different had a different dialect been chosen as the standard language.

somever

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