OldBrushNewPaper @OldBrushNewPaper@wandering.shop

Time for #introductions again.

First of all, I love chatting BEFORE I start following. You'll improve your chances if you do the same - just a short note, say "hi!" and how I happened to catch your attention enough for a follow.

I'm 50+, born&raised in the US, married 30+ years to Loving Spouse.

We got together via #sciencefiction, discovered overlaps in other interests, now have a stable house hold with two #cats.

Most of the time, I like nice & kind. But Hard-Ass Me remains vigilant.

Feeling... interstitial? at the moment.

Not exactly unpleasant, but also not really comfortable.

I'll survive. I'm just thrashing about right now, that's all.

So, like... I know I'm "supposed" to be reading generously, but for somethings like language learning? Especially for exam prep?

Yeesh. Japanese is hard enough, without introducing errors into the materials. And while this was a tiny, TINY thing, it's also one classroom students get drilled into them.

(Now I'm wondering idly if this was also a sentence from the Tanaka Corpus... hmmm...)

Anyway, that's the bee in my bonnet right now. *exhale*

Done!

and, for "if (respected someone) is..."
irassha•ttara.

Okay, if you've slogged through this far, congratulations. But, I'm afraid I've just indulged in a refined form of "someone is wrong on the Internet".

Still, the mistake I saw? was "irashite" and OMG that's not the word that belongs there. (Although "irasu" turns out to be a word, just not one in the Japanese-English part of my electronic dictionary; and it's meaning was completely unrelated to the context.)

Other verbs take slightly different endings. Ka•u, to buy, goes thus (present & past in polite form, then past in plain form, and conditional)

ka•i•masu, ka•i•mashita
ka•tta, ka•ttara

Our friend irassharu does the same, despite ending its dictionary form ending in "-ru" (there are two different things going on here, so this explanation is simplified, possibly to the point of distortion - mea culpas on request!)

irassha•i•masu, irassha•i•mashita;
irassha•tta...

To speak 話す hana•su
(someone) speaks (polite form) hana•shi•masu
(someone) spoke (polite form)
hana•shi•mashi•ta
but, when we have to describe an action in a dependent clause, before the final verb...
(someone) spoke (plain form)
hana•shi•ta.
and for a conditional
if (someone) spoke
hana•shi•ta•ra.

Now, for the annoying part: those forms change their conjugation depending on the ending after the stem. "Hana•su" isn't so bad, but with other verbs, well...

The dictionary form is important because other "moods" of the verb are built on it. Particularly, a form that indicates a clause we would begin with words like "if" - conditionals.

Funnily enough, this conditional is itself built on the *past* "plain" form (i.e. not ending in -masu, which typically appears at the end of the final clause of a sentence, not in the preceding ones.) So, I suppose I should try to illustrate with an example...

Given that most English speakers learning Japanese are adult learners, we get taught a non-root form of most of those verbs, then sort of have to "work backwards" towards understanding how it works, and what that implies for its declensions.

So, if I ask if Prof. So-and-so is around, I would have learned the verb as "irasshaimasu" (いらっしゃいます) But, that's not the root, or "dictionary" form; eventually we learn that is "irassharu" (いらっしゃる).

I know it sounds trivial, but at the same time, it's a basic error, so it... *itches*

There are verbs in Japanese that are reserved for describing actions performed by those above one's own social status; using these are a mark of respect. It's no surprise that the construction of some of those verbs is... well, containing archaisms that have disappeared from more "normal" language.

TFW...

you spot what is probably a mistake in the Japanese language, of an Internet resource presenting itself as a study resource for Japanese language exams.

I'm just going to natter about what the mistake is on the next rock, behind a CW cut.

Good morning, Shop and Fediverse.

This morning... there is just not enough coffee in the WORLD.

And that's *before* I have to reach for the remote, muting the latest gibbering of Putin's Elf on the Shelf.*

*not my expression, but Sen. Warren's.

Everything and nothing

Starting with a stray bit of woolgathering about the Japanese writing system - what everyone else called "complicated", I'm coming to the conclusion of "flexible".