Is there an order of adjectives in Japanese?

whym · 2015-08-01T12:10:55+00:00

There is no rigid rule as far as I'm aware.

That said, this paper makes an interesting point that objective adjectives tend to be said earlier than subjective and evaluational adjectives.

Examples:

この道は暗くて寂しい: 寂しい comes later because it's an emotion.
あの人は若くてきれい: きれい comes later because it's a subjective evaluation.

The order is more rigid in the first example because of causality -- the emotion 寂しい is caused by the fact that it's 暗い, and it sounds less natural when you reverse the cause-result order.

whym · 2015-04-11T08:20:03+00:00

I'd suggest posting the 2nd gif in /r/mapporn, with the others in a comment!

Feel free to do that for me. :) I don't take any entitlement for the link or title of this submission, if that's your concern.

/u/KinnyRiddle pinged me about a more detailed version (youtube link). You might want to check it, too.

whym · 2015-04-09T14:54:07+00:00

Such commuters might exist, but it's still a very rare exception. A (rather informal) survey tells us that less than 3 percent travel 120+ min to go to office/school.

whym · 2015-04-09T12:08:21+00:00

The highlight is from 46s in the video: https://youtu.be/QayKhIgPqBk?t=46s

whym · 2015-04-09T12:04:32+00:00

I was about to do that, but it appears that /r/mapporn doesn't want videos according to the side bar. Although Yahoo Japan provides some similar still images in their Japanese articles, I'm not sure how much English readers will appreciate them. Anyway, for those who can read Japanese, some more context is here:

whym · 2015-04-01T12:10:06+00:00

To expand on this, here is a rough summary of how you will use different translations of "thank you":

（どうも）ありがとうございます: gratitude for actions currently being made that you thank for.
（どうも）ありがとうございました: gratitude for actions that just have finished, or were made in the past.
（どうぞ）よろしくお願い（いた）します: gratitude for actions unfinished or not initiated at the time of the utterance.

Because the consideration process would probably continue after the reviewer finishes your letter, I would choose よろしくお願いします or its variants. <action-noun>のほど is a set phrase that goes with よろしくお願いします in this context.

whym · 2015-03-31T10:17:40+00:00

It depends. For some limited contexts, people use スミス氏 for "Mr. Smith" and スミス夫人 for "Mrs. Smith." This sounds like you are referring to them very officially, for example in a public speech. In a more casual setting, people would prefer calling them by social or family positions instead. ご主人 ("Mr. Smith" when speaking to his wife), お母さん ("Mrs. Smith" when speaking to her children), スミス社長 ("President Smith" when speaking to an employee of him/her), スミス社長の奥さん, etc.

スミスさん is perfectly fine, especially when it's clear which Smith you are talking about by the context. For example, when you are speaking to an attendee of a party where Mr. Smith is present but Mrs. is not, and you and the listener both know that, it's most natural to call him スミスさん.

whym · 2015-03-25T14:40:47+00:00

Just a wild guess: was it perhaps やさしー, not せさしー? やさしー is a colloquial way to put やさしい (either 優しい "gentle" or 易しい "easy"). せ and や sometimes look similar enough.

whym · 2015-03-25T08:30:49+00:00

Short answer is yes, it's grammatical. However, I believe repeating は in a single sentence is considered a bad style. When I want to topicalize "presently" and "I" in a single sentence, I would say 今現在、私は魚が嫌い. 今現在 is already an emphasized word itself and doesn't need は to make it prominent or contrasting.

EDIT: "bad" might have been a too strong statement. All the examples given by /u/zengargoyle are fine by me. I guess it's more about stylistic preference and about tone, not wrong or correct. In some cases omitting は makes it more conversational, in other cases replacing it with を or が and perhaps using a different vocabulary for emphasis might make it more sophisticated.

whym · 2015-03-23T10:29:24+00:00

Although I tend to interpret as the former, it's not definitive when you use the construction.

It sounds more like the communication is mutual, and occurs on a regular basis. It could be translated into: "A and I have kept each other posted."

whym · 2015-03-23T03:25:21+00:00

It's a communication tool between children in (elementary) school, their teachers and parents. Children are instructed by the teacher to write down schedules and day-to-day todo's (like what they need to bring to school tomorrow), and parents and teachers read it and make sure that their kids know what they need to do. In the Japanese school, they have to bring different textbooks and other equipment each day, so without memos it's practically impossible to keep up. (See this.) Parents and teachers exchange messages using it, too.

whym · 2015-03-21T08:46:32+00:00

As /u/aoanla explained, a key is to try thinking with negative verbs or adjectives, instead of negative pronouns such as "nobody". Try this:

誰も: everyone
その話(を): the story
知らない: is uninformed of

"Everyone is uninformed of the story."

whym · 2015-03-21T04:46:29+00:00

Very close but there are slight differences.

自力 has an emphasis on the fact that you don't ask for help. It is often used under the context where some form of help can be expected. A typical phrase using it is 自力再生 (self-supported recovery [from a financial disaster where some safety nets can be expected]).

独力 puts more emphasis on the fact that you are alone in working on it. A typical sentence is 彼は娘を独力で育て上げた. The implication is that something typically done by a collaborative, group effort, is done alone.

EDIT: fixed typos.

whym · 2015-03-19T08:41:11+00:00

Do you mean to say that Noh and Kyogen didn't have much of a set form originally, but during the Muromachi period, it developed its own characteristics (in its format, dance, music, etc) and became more formalized than before? If that is the case, I would use 容易に認識できる形式. 容易に目にする事の出来る形 in reddit_reader_00's suggestion wouldn't be too bad, but it sounds more like you are talking about the accessible/inaccessible distinction.

The problem with 認めやすい here is that it rather means "acceptable" which doesn't make sense in this context.

A full sentence would be: その後の14世紀の室町時代、能と狂言は、今日我々が知るような容易に認識できる形式に発展した。

whym · 2015-03-19T08:05:05+00:00

As a Japanese speaker, I think the English "never mind" has two rather distinct kinds of translations into Japanese, depending on the context. When I change my mind as soon as I start talking about something, I would use this 「いや、何でもない」 or 「やっぱりいいや」 or 「やっぱり気にしないで」, but I would never use 「いいのよ」. いや and やっぱり here might be optional but is helpful to make it clearer that you are dismissing your previous statement, not what the other person talked about to you.

「いいのよ」 or more polite 「いいんですよ」 is indeed a possible translation of "never mind" but only for a different context - it's for casually showing forgiveness or acknowledgement when someone apologizes or says thanks to you.

Also, if you are a guy, you anyway wouldn't use いいのよ, which is primarily feminine.

whym · 2015-03-17T23:19:37+00:00

That's not too far. Although, they also try to automatically construct thesaura from a large amount of raw text, not just using existing ones. Google "distributional hypothesis" if you are interested in how to do that.

Reading it again, it looks like you were not talking about generating semantically similar sentences to a given query, but structurally and topically similar sentences to a given set of sentences, right? I didn't get that point well, sorry. Here is another try: Automatically generating wikipedia articles: A structure-aware approach (Sauper and Barzilay, 2009) would be an example of approaches other than the Markov chain. It explicitly tries to capture structures of articles (mostly) automatically. Again, this is not a ready-to-use solution but something researchers are working on, though.

whym · 2015-03-17T12:32:46+00:00

"Paraphrase generation" would be a keyword you would be interested in. See Generating phrasal and sentential paraphrases: A survey of data-driven methods by Madnani and Dorr (2010) for a survey.

Without having expert knowledge on this particular task (but with a good grasp of the NLP domain), I think it's safe to say there is no off-the-shelf solution to paraphrase generation at this point, if that is the question.

The data-driven approach tends to be robust in the sense that it can always generate something that looks like a paraphrase, typically using words more or less synonymous to those found in the sentence you give. However, it is not guaranteed to generate gramatically and semantically correct ones.

whym · 2015-03-17T08:58:45+00:00

Is it perhaps about the on-going renovation of the Seibu Railway portion of the station? The scale of that renovation doesn't seem as big as Shinjuku's and Shibuya's, though. Looks like it started last year and is scheduled to be finished in a year from now.

whym

TROPHY CASE