JSLL #10 - Urashima Tarou - Ninth sentence

If you've followed along so far, this sentence should be fairly easy. It only introduces one new kanji and  two new words.

 浦島太郎はまた船にのって海で魚をつっていました。

The sentence is a te-form followed by a progressive polite past tense.

Topic (and subject):  浦島太郎 (marked with は): Urashima Tarou.

また: "again" or "once more"

船 (ふね, fune): "boat, ship" followed by the particle に ("in")

船 is the only new kanji, an N3 occurring in 21 common words, all of which are about shipping or (sometimes) about air travel.

のって: te-form of 乗る (のる, noru): "to board," "to embark."

Knowing the tense of the main verb, we can translate this first half as:

"Urashima Tarou boarded his boat once again and..."

海で: at sea, on the sea

魚を: fish (object)

つっていました: progressive polite past tense of "to fish."

So the second half is: "[He] was fishing on the sea."

The whole sentence: "Urashima Tarou boarded his boat once more and was fishing on the sea."

In the previous post, we said that the previous sentence, a full sentence in Japanese but more like an adverbial in English, could be added to this sentence. So the combination of the 8th and 9th sentences would then be:

"And then, one day, only 2 or 3 years later, Urashima Tarou boarded his boat once more and was fishing on the sea."

JSLL #9 - Urashima Tarou - Eighth sentence

 This one is again short, and in fact, wouldn't qualify as a sentence in English.

それから二、三年たったある日のことです。

それからに、さんねんたったあるひのことです。

sore kara ni, sannen tatta aru hi no koto desu.

The sentence starts with それから. This is the word "that" as a noun (それ) followed by the particle meaning "from" (から). The combination means "after that" or "and then."

Next is 二、三年 which means "2 or 3 years." The first 2 kanji 二 and 三 are easy to understand. Both N5 kanji, they're found in 78 and 57 common words, respectively. 年 means "year": it's an N5 kanji too, this one occurring in 117 common words.

たった may look like a plain past tense of a verb, but it's written in kana only, which means that it's an adverb here, meaning "only, merely, no more than."

Next is ある日 which we already knows as "one day."

The hardest part of this sentence is the のこと that follows. こと literally means "thing," but it's very often used more like a grammatical tool, for example, a "nominalizer" that turns a verb into a noun. のこと (literally "the thing of") means something like "regarding, with regards to." It's a way to emphasize the thing that came before.

The only thing after this is です which is just a form of "to be."

As I said at the beginning, translating this "sentence" on it's own is hard. Literally, it's something like, "Only 2 or 3 years after that, it's the case of one day." If you want to make that sound halfway sane, it's something like, "Now let's turn to one day, only 2 or 3 days after that."

But actually, the most logical translation is as an adverbial clause attached to the next sentence: "And then, one day, only 2 or 3 years later, [next sentence]."

JSLL #8 - Urashima Tarou - Seventh sentence

 Seventh sentence: short and sweet.

そして、海の底の方へ戻っていきました。

Kana: そして、うみのそこのほうへもどっていきました。

Romaji: soshite, umi no soko no hou he modotte ikimashita.

そして is a word for "and" that connects sentences (unlike と which is "and" between nouns). It can also be translated "and then," "and now," "and finally" or "thus."

The subject of the sentence is not mentioned, so it must be the baby turtle from our previous sentence.

The verb at the end is once again polite past: 戻っていきました。This is the て-form of the verb 戻る followed by いきました。

We mentioned the intransitive verb 戻る, meaning "to return, to go back" as the counterpart of the transitive verb 戻す, "to return, to put back" in an earlier post. What I forgot to do then is discuss the kanji 戻. This kanji is N3 and occurs in 11 common words. All of which are about returning, refunds etc.

The ~ていく verb ending indicates a movement away from the speaker, or just generally movement away. いく, which is always written with kana, represents the verb 行く ("to go," pronounced the same way). The counterpart of ~ていく is ~てくる, which indicates movement toward (the speaker). 来る, again always written with kana, is 来る ("to come," also pronounced "kuru").

In English, you could translate 戻っていきました as "[he] went back" (and 戻ってきました as "[he] came back").

Where did our baby turtle go back to? 海の底の方へ. へ (he) means "toward" as you may remember. 方 (ほう, hou) means direction. This kanji is N4 and is found in 106 common words. Combined with the の before it, の方へ is "in the direction of." Of what? 海の底. We know the first kanji, 海, already: it's the sea. 底 is new: it means "bottom, sole." So "in the direction of the bottom of the sea" or just "toward the seabottom." The kanji is N2 and occurs in 12 common words. It resembles 低 somewhat, which means "low."

So, to summarize, the sentence is: "And then, [the baby turtle] went back toward the seabottom."

JSLL #7 - Urashima Tarou - Sixth sentence

 Sentence six is long and has many little grammar points and surprises:

太郎が亀の子を手にのせて海の水の中に戻してやると、亀の子は喜んで甲羅から首や手足を出して、すいすいと泳ぎ始めました。

In kana:

たろうがかめのこをてにのせてうみのみずのなかにもどしてやると、かめのこはよろこんでこうらからくびやてあしをだして、すいすいとおよぎはじめました。

In romaji:

Tarou ga kame no ko wo te ni nosete umi no mizu no naka ni modoshite yaru to, kame no ko ha yorokonde koura kara kubi ya teashi wo dashite, suisui to oyogi hajimemashita.

The と in the middle of the sentence, following a verb, is a nice way to divide the sentence. Everything to its left is a "when"-clause, and everything to its right is the main clause.

The と-clause itself has one clause ending in a te-form (のせて), and another clause ending in -てやる.

のせて is from the verb 乗せる (のせる, noseru) and is normally written with a kanji. It means many things, but the first meaning is "to place on," which works here, as we'll see. The three noun phrases-with-particles for this verb are:

太郎が Tarou + subject particle

亀の子を baby turtle + object particle

手に (てに, te ni) "hand" + location particle, here "on"

The only new kanji here is 手, an N4 kanji occurring in 147 words, with a wide variety of meanings.

So this part translates to "When Tarou put the baby turtle on his hand and..., ..."

The second half of the "when"-clause ends in 戻してやる. This is, as we've seen before, a ～てやる ending, indicating the granting of a favor to someone socially lower on the ladder. The verb is 戻す (もどす, modosu), the transitive verb "to return, to put back." This is not to be confused with 戻る （もどる, modoru), the intransitive verb "to return, "to go back." Japanese has many of these intransitive/transitive pairs, where the kanji is the same but the ending is different.

Even though it's transitive, it's not preceded by an を-phrase, but the first half of the と-clause does, so we can assume the object is the same, "the baby turtle." The verb does have a location phrase 海の水の中に. の中に means literally "to the inside of," but "into" or just "in" is usually a better translation. The kanji 中 was already covered before. 海の水 means "water of the sea." We already discussed 海 ("sea") but 水(みず, mizu) is new. It means "water," specifically cold water. This N5 kanji occurs in 98 common words, almost all related to water or liquid.

So this と-clause in its entirety reads "When Tarou put the baby turtle on his hand and put it back into the water of the sea, ..."

On to the main clause, which reads: 亀の子は喜んで甲羅から首や手足を出して、すいすいと泳ぎ始めました。These are two te-clauses followed by a main verb, this one in the polite past tense. 

The first te-clause has the verb 喜んで (よろこんで, yorokonde), from the verb 喜ぶ, which means "to be delighted, to be pleased, to rejoice." This N3 kanji has 9 common, "joyful" words. Who is doing the rejoiing something out? That's the topic at the start, the baby turtle, marked with the topic particle は.

The second te-clause has 出して(だして, dashite), from 出す, "to take out, to put out," a transitive verb (again, this has an intransitive counterpart, 出る (でる, deru, "to leave, to exit, to go out")). An N5 kanji with no less than 173 common words.

The subject must be the same as the previous te-clause, so it's again the baby turtle. So what is it taking out or putting out? That is the complex noun phrase 首や手足 before を. These are two nouns connected with や. You can enumerate two nouns X and Y with と or with や. XとY means "X and Y." XやY means "X and Y and so on" or "things like X and Y." In other words, や implies that the enumeration is incomplete, while と implies that it's complete. In this case, X is 首 (くび, kubi), which means "neck," and 手足(てあし, teashi) meaning "hands and feet, limbs." The kanji 首, N3, occurs in common 24 words. 手足 simply consists of the kanji for hand/arm followed by the kanji for foot/leg. We've already seen the kanji 手 above, in the と-clause, but 足 is new: it's an N4 kanji occurring in 42 common words.

To the left of this complex noun phrase is 甲羅から. The particle から here means "from," which can refer both to time and to place. The noun 甲羅 (こうら, koura) is "shell" (of an animal like a turtle or a crab). The kanji are 甲 (N1, 12 common words) and 羅 (N1, 11 common words). So both kanji are fairly rare and advanced, which is what you would expect for such a specialized word.

So the first and second te-clauses read: "The baby turtle was delighted and put its neck, limbs and so on out of its shell, and..."

The last part of the sentence is すいすいと泳ぎ始めました。Again, the verb is in the polite past. It takes the form of 泳ぎ (およぎ, oyogi), which is the stem of the verb 泳ぎます (plain form 泳ぐ, "to swim"), followed by 始めました (はじめました, hajimemashita, the polite past tense of the transitive verb "to begin"). This combination of a -ます stem + 始める means "to begin to X," so in this case "began to swim." 

You may have noticed that the kanji for "swim" 泳 looks like the kanji for "water" 水 with what look like waterdrops coming off of it. 泳 is an N3 kanji that occurs in just 6 common words.

Before this verb is すいすいと. This is an onomatopoeia, すいすい, followed by the  (optional) particle と. You can recognize an onomatopeia by the fact that they are repeated (ぺらぺら,ぽかぽか and so on). In English, onomatopoeia imitate a sound (like "honk" or "toot"), but in Japanese, they can refer to soundless things, too. That's the case here: すいすい means "lightly and smoothly (of movement), swiftly, glidingly."

We've now figured out the right half of the sentence: "The baby turtle was delighted and put its neck, limbs and so on out of its shell, and began to swim smoothly."

And the whole sentence then becomes: 

"When Tarou put the baby turtle on his hand and put it back into the water of the sea, it was delighted and put its neck, limbs and so on out of its shell, and began to swim smoothly."

JSLL #6 - Urashima Tarou - Fifth sentence

 Our fifth sentence is a bulky one, so brace yourself. As you will see, a lot of parsing of Japanese goes from right to left.

この亀の子をかわいそうだと思った浦島太郎は、「生き物をいじめてはいけないぞ。」と子供たちに言って、亀の子を助けてやりました。

In kana, this reads as:

このかめのこをかわいそうだとおもったうらしまたろうは、「いきものをいじめてはいけないぞ。」とこどもたちにいって、かめのこをたすけてやりました。

And in romaji it's:

kono kame no ko wo kawaisou da to omotta Urashima Tarou ha, "Ikimono wo ijimete ha ikenaizo." to kodomo tachi ni itte, kame no ko wo taskete yarimashita.

First, note the quotation, offset by the Japanese quotation marks 「 and 」. Before the quotation is the topic, marked by the topic particle は, and after the quotation, the main clause continues.

Let's look at the topic first. Directly before the は particle is our hero 浦島太郎 who you hopefully recognize by now as Urashima Tarou. Everything before this name is a relative clause saying something about Tarou. It's best translated as "who" followed by the contents of the clause.

Working from right to left again, you'll see there's a verb directly to the left of the name, 思った (おもった, omotta). This is the plain past tense of 思う, to think. The kanji 思 is N4 and occurs in 34 common words, most of which are related to thought or memories. There are two verbs that mean "to think" in Japanese; 思う is the one that's always used after the particle と, which here translates as "that." In other words, と思った浦島太郎 means "Urashima Tarou, who thought that..."

Working from right to left again, we see the clause この亀の子をかわいそうだ. The end of this clause is だ, the plain form of です, "to be." The clause starts with この亀の子. We know from before that 亀の子 means baby turtle. The この at the beginning means "this." Japanese distinguishes between "this" used as an adjective (as in "this book"), which is この, and "this" used as a pronoun (as in "You remember this?"), which is これ. Here it's この, because a noun follows.

For some reason I can't understand, この亀の子 is followed by を, the object particle. This makes no sense, because a) as we shall see, the baby turtle is obviously the subject of the clause, and b) the verb is だ/です, which doesn't take an object. I believe the particle should be が.

After this, there's かわいそう, which is an adjective typically written using only kana, and it means "poor" in the sense of "pitiful, pitiable, sad."

So, the topic (and also the subject) of the sentence is "Urashima Tarou, who thought that this baby turtle was pitiful, ..." A less literal, more natural-sounding translation might be the one given in the book: "Urashima Tarou, who felt sorry for this baby turtle, ..."

What follows is a quote (which we'll get to in a minute) followed by と子供たちに言って、

This is a te-form of the verb 言う (いう, iu) which means "to say." The kanji 言 is an N4 kanji occurring in 73 common words. All these words are somehow related to speaking or communication: words like promise, excuse, assertion, and so on. The -te form shows us that there's something else that Tarou was also doing, but we'll get to that later.

子供たちに features 子供, the word "child" we encountered before, たち (tachi) the pluralizer, and に (ni) meaning "to" --in this case, identifying the audience of the speech.

Finally, the と on the far left connects the verb "to say" with the quote. Because it's followed by an actual quotation, you'd probably leave it untranslated. Compare:

太郎はうれしいだと言った。Tarou said that he was happy.

太郎は「うれしいだ」と言った。Tarou said, "I'm happy."

So now we have:

Urashima Tarou, who thought that this baby turtle was pitiful, said to the children, "..."

The quote itself is a sentence: 生き物をいじめてはいけないぞ。This sentence ends in the particle ぞ (zo), which male speakers use to add force to the statement, and to make clear that the statement is a command. The te-form followed by はいけない means "You mustn't X" or "It's morally bad if you X." The verb X is here いじめて, from いじめる, the verb we saw before as meaning "to bully, to torment." So いじめてはいけないぞ is "You mustn't torment!"

The object of the verb is, as usual, indicated by the particle を, and it's 生き物 (いきもの, ikimono). The first kanji, 生, is N5 and occurs in 140 common words, many of which are about life or birth. 生きる means "to live." (We saw before that "live" in "I live in Tokyo" is a different verb, 住む, but that means "live" in the sense of  "reside." This "live" means "to be alive, to lead your life.")

The second kanji 物 means "thing" or sometimes "person." Note that it's pronounced the same way as the second kanji of 若者 ("youngster"), and note that the meaning of the two is also fairly similar. You'll see this sometimes in Japanese: the same sound and meaning expressed by different kanji.

The kanji 物 is N4 and occurs in 135 common words, mostly at the end. Many words ending in 物 offer a clue to their meaning if you translate them literally: 着物 (kimono), "a thing to wear"; 化け物 (bakemono, "monster, ghost"): "a thing that transforms/assumes the shape of something"; 食べ物 (tabemono, "food"): "a thing to eat"; 動物 (doubutsu, "animal"): "a thing that moves."

It should make sense that 生き物 means "living thing."

So what Tarou says, forcefully, is "You mustn't torment a living thing!"

The last part of the sentence, after 言って, is what Tarou does after saying this:

亀の子を助けてやりました。

On the left is our baby turtle again, this time as the object of 助けてやりました。which is a verb in the polite past tense. The verb やる (literally "to do") after the te-form of a verb, like here, conveys something being done for someone else. It specifically refers to a favor being done to someone of equal or lower social status. You wouldn't use this construction when someone is doing something for, say, their boss or their parents. In this case, the little turtle is obviously Tarou's inferior, so it's OK. The construction is a bit hard to translate, if it needs to be translated at all.

The verb 助けて comes from 助ける (たすける, tasukeru), which means "to save; to help." 助 is an N3 kanji that occurs in 24 words, most related to saving or helping.

So this part of the sentence means: "[Tarou] saved the baby turtle." Or, more literally, "[Tarou] was so kind as to save the baby turtle."

So, in summary, the entire sentence reads:

Urashima Tarou, who thought that the baby turtle was pitiful, said to the children, "You mustn't torment a living thing!" and saved it.

(I used "it" at the end because, unlike in Japanese, there's no need to repeat "the baby turtle.")

JSLL #5 - Urashima Tarou - Fourth sentence

 Our fourth sentence is not very long, but requires a lot of explanation.

のぞいてみると、小さい亀の子を一匹つかまえて、　皆で棒でつっついていじめていました。

In kana: のぞいてみると、ちいさいかめのこをいっぴきつかまえて、　みなでぼうでつっついていじめていました。

In romaji: nozoitemiruto, chiisai kame no ko wo ippiki tsukamaete, mina de bou de tsuttsuite ijimeteimashita.

For whatever reason, the sentence contains relatively few kanji, even where some could be used. Also, no subject or topic is explicitly defined.

のぞいてみると、

This is a verb phrase followed by と (to) which in this case is a clause-level particle. It means "when" or "whenever." The verb phrase, のぞいてみる has the end ～てみる, which is the -te form of a verb followed by みる (which is always written in kana, never as 見る). It means "try to X" where X is the verb before it. In this case, the verb before it is のぞく, which can mean one of two things: "to remove; to exclude; to kill" (written 除く) or "to peek; to look down into; to peek into; to sneak a look at; etc." (written 覗く). Given our context so far, and given the fact that the verb has no object, the second reading is obviously the right one, and the subject of the clause is the same one as in all the earlier sentences, Tarou.

So this part translates to: "When he tried to sneak a look..."

The next part:

小さい亀の子を一匹つかまえて、

It's a verb in the -te form, つかまえる, means "to catch, to capture." The main verb of this sentence follows in the next part and is in the past tense, so this should be too: "caught." The verb is normally written with a kanji, 捕まえる, and I'm not sure why it doesn't occur here. Maybe because the kanji looks very similar to the first kanji of "Urashima" (浦島).

The clause also has an object, marked by the particle を: 小さい亀の子.

小さい (ちいさい, chiisai) is a well-known i-adjective: "small." The kanji 小 is an N5, occurring in 77 common words, not all of which have to with smallness. 亀 (かめ, kame) is an N1 kanji that occurs in just 2 words, one of which is 亀 itself, which means "turtle" and also "heavy drinker" for some reason. And the kanji 子 was discussed in the previous post. On its own, it means "child."

The particle の between two nouns usually indicates that the second noun belongs to the first noun in some way. If you imagine that meaning here, the object would be "the child of a small turtle." 

But it makes more sense that の is used in a slightly different way: as an appositive. An appositive is a noun phrase that further describes another noun phrase, such as in "Frank, a neurosurgeon, likes to party on the weekends." The "a neurosurgeon" part is the appositive: it says something more about Frank. In Japanese, an appositive is not enclosed in commas, but preceded by の. So 小さい亀の子 is "a little turtle, a child." Or as we would say in English: "a little baby turtle." This is the object of "caught."

In between the object  小さい亀の子を and the verb つかまえて is 一匹 (いっぴき, ippiki). This is the kanji 一 followed by a counter, 匹. As you may know, a number+counter follow the particle (in this case を) that follows the noun phrase that they count (小さし亀の子). The specific counter to use depends on the type of noun: either the shape of the thing it describes (flat, cylindrical, small and round) or the sort of thing it describes. The counter 匹 (ひき, hiki) is used for small animals (excluding birds): specifically, small enough that an adult person can pick them up. This definitely includes cats, monkeys, hedgehogs, fish, and most dogs, to name a few, but also turtles. The number is 一 (one). Also note that a number needs to be specified to make clear that this is a single turtle, not multiple.

一 is probably the first kanji you learned, so it's obviously N5, and it occurs in 281 common words, the most we've seen so far. And careful: it doesn't always mean "one" in each of those words. By contrast, 匹, which is N2, occurs in only 3 common words.

In summary, this part means: "[someone] caught one little baby turtle." It's unlikely that the [someone] is Tarou: "when Tarou tried to sneak a look, he captured one little baby turtle" doesn't really make sense. It makes more sense that [someone] refers to the children, the only other people in the story so far. And because Japanese has no distinctions between types of past (like simple past, present perfect, past perfect and so on in English), again we must deduce the specific tense. "The children had caught one little baby turtle."

The third part of our sentence is the clause 皆で棒でつっついて, again a clause with a te-form. The verb is つっつく, typically written with kanji: 突っ突く. It means "to poke, to nudge," or "to peck at (food), to pick at." Whatever the exact meaning, the children are being little shits. And to make clear that it's a group effort, it says 皆で ( Our fourth sentence:

のぞいてみると、小さい亀の子を一匹つかまえて、　皆で棒でつっついていじめていました。

In kana: のぞいてみると、ちいさいかめのこをいっぴきつかまえて、　みなでぼうでつっついていじめていました。

In romaji: nozoitemiruto, chiisai kame no ko wo ippiki tsukamaete, mina de bou de tsuttsuite ijimeteimashita.

For whatever reason, the sentence contains relatively few kanji, even where some could be used. Also, no subject or topic is explicitly defined.

のぞいてみると

This is a verb phrase followed by と (to) which in this case is a clause-level particle. It means "when" or "whenever." The verb phrase, のぞいてみる has the end ～てみる, which is the -te form of a verb followed by みる (which is always written in kana, never as 見る). It means "try to X" where X is the verb before it. In this case, the verb before it is のぞく, which can mean one of two things: "to remove; to exclude; to kill" (written 除く) or "to peek; to look down into; to peek into; to sneak a look at; etc." (written 覗く). Given our context so far, and given the fact that the verb has no object, the second reading is obviously the right one, and the subject of the clause is the same one as in all the earlier sentences, Taro.

So this part translates to: "When he tried to sneak a look..."

The next part:

小さい亀の子を一匹つかまえて

It's a verb in the -te form, つかまえる, means "to catch, to capture." The main verb of this sentence follows in the next part and is in the past tense, so this should be too: "caught." The verb is normally written with a kanji, 捕まえる, and I'm not sure why it doesn't occur here. Maybe because the kanji looks very similar to the first kanji of "Urashima" (浦島).

The clause also has an object, marked by the particle を: 小さい亀の子.

小さい (ちいさい, chiisai) is a well-known i-adjective: "small." The kanji 小 is an N5, occurring in 77 common words, not all of which have to with smallness. 亀 (かめ, kame) is an N1 kanji that occurs in just 2 words, one of which is 亀 itself, which means "turtle" and also "heavy drinker" for some reason. And the kanji 子 was discussed in the previous post. On its own, it means "child."

The particle の between two nouns usually indicates that the second noun belongs to the first noun in some way. If you imagine that meaning here, the object would be "the child of a small turtle."

But it makes more sense that の is used in a slightly different way: as an appositive. An appositive is a noun phrase that further describes another noun phrase, such as in "Frank, a neurosurgeon, likes to party on the weekends." The "a neurosurgeon" part is the appositive: it says something more about Frank. In Japanese, an appositive is not enclosed in commas, but preceded by の. So 小さい亀の子 is "a little turtle, a child." Or as we would say in English: "a little baby turtle." This is the object of "caught."

In between the object  小さい亀の子を and the verb つかまえて is 一匹 (いっぴき, ippiki). This is the kanji 一 followed by a counter, 匹. As you may know, a number+counter follow the particle (in this case を) that follows the noun phrase that they count (小さし亀の子). The specific counter to use depends on the type of noun: either the shape of the thing it describes (flat, cylindrical, small and round) or the sort of thing it describes. The counter 匹 (ひき, hiki) is used for small animals (excluding birds): specifically, small enough that an adult person can pick them up. This definitely includes cats, monkeys, hedgehogs, fish, and most dogs, to name a few, but also turtles. The number is 一 (one). Also note that a number needs to be specified to make clear that this is a single turtle, not multiple.

一 is probably the first kanji you learned, so it's obviously N5, and it occurs in 281 common words, the most we've seen so far. And careful: it doesn't always mean "one" in each of those words. By contrast, 匹, which is N2, occurs in only 3 common words.

In summary, this part means: "[someone] caught one little baby turtle." It's unlikely that the [someone] is Tarou: "when Tarou tried to sneak a look, he captured one little baby turtle" doesn't really make sense. It makes more sense that [someone] refers to the children, the only other people in the story so far. And because Japanese has no distinctions between types of past (like simple past, present perfect, past perfect and so on in English), again we must deduce the specific tense. "The children had caught one little baby turtle."

The third part of our sentence is the clause 皆で棒でつっついて, again a clause with a te-form. The verb is つっつく, typically written with kanji: 突っ突く. It means "to poke, to nudge," or "to peck at (food), to pick at." Whatever the exact meaning, the children are being little shits. And to make clear that it's a group effort, it says 皆で (みなで, mina de), "everyone." The furigana in the book transcribe 皆 as みな but it's just as often written みんな (minna). This N3 kanji occurs in just 4 common words. The で simply creates a meaning "all of them" or "as a group." 

棒 (ぼう, bou) means "stick, pole, rod." This N2 kanji occurs in only 7 common words. The same particle で is here used in a very different meaning: "using, with."

When you see a sequence of te-forms, the subject needs to match across them. So this clause reads: "[the children] were all poking it with sticks." (I chose "sticks" rather than "a stick" because multiple kids all handling the same, single stick is a bit hard to imagine.)

We're now at the final part of the sentence: いじめていました。This is the polite progrssive past form of いじめる, which means "to bully, to be cruel to, to torment, to tease." So it translates as [the children] were bullying." Although you can write this verb with a kanji, the online dictionary explicitly says, "Usually written using kana alone." 

Now we can put all the clauses together to get:

"When Taro tried to sneak a look, [he saw that] the children had caught a little baby turtle, which they all poking with sticks to torment it."

JSLL #4 - Urashima Tarou - Third sentence

 Here's the third sentence from Urashima Tarou:

ある日、浦島太郎は海から帰る途中、浜で子供たちが集まって騒いでいるのを見ました。

The sentence starts with ある日, meaning "one day, on a certain day." The construction is explained in JSLL #2, and the kanji 日 is explained in the previous JSLL post.

Next is the topic 浦島太郎, Urashima Tarou, followed by the topic marker は. The only noteworthy thing here is that the topic is repeated in this sentence, even though it's the same as in the previous sentence. Either this was done deliberately for the audience (foreign readers or children, or both), but I don't think this is typical practice in Japanese. You would just omit the topic.

Next is 海から帰る途中、where 途中 (とちゅう, tochuu) is an adverb meaning "en route, on the way." It consists of two kanji:

• 途, an N3 kanji occurring in 23 common words. It has connotations or road, route etc.
• 中, an N5 kanji occurring in 150 common words. It conveys "middle" or "inside" depending on context.

Modifying this adverb is 海から帰る. The word 海, "sea," which we discussed earlier, is followed by the particle から meaning "from" and the verb 帰る (かえる, kaeru), "to return." This verb is used specifically to refer to returning to one's home or to one's home base, for example, back to the office from a business trip, or back to HQ after a mission. 

So the adverbial as a whole means "en route returning from the sea," or, more logically, "on his way back from the sea." 

Next is the main clause, whose main verb at the end is 見ました. This comes from 見る, "to see." 見 is an N5 kanji occurring in 123 common words, mostly associated with seeing (also metaphorically, such as in 意見 meaning "opinion" or more similarly "viewpoint." 見ました is the polite past tense and it takes an object that is followed by the を particle. That is, the object of seeing is the entire phrase 浜で子供たちが集まって騒いでいるの. This is a verb phrase follow by the nominalizer particle の. This particle is needed to make the verb phrase usable as an object.

So the sentence we have so far is, "One day, on his way back from the sea, Urashima Tarou saw..."

The verb phrase that is the missing object is itself complex, and breaks down into a number of parts.

First there's a location, 浜で. This is the noun 浜 (はま, hama), which means "beach" or "seashore," followed by the particle で meaning "in, on, at." で is used if the verb indicates an action rather than a state.

The kanji 浜 is N1 and occurs in only 6 common words. It always means something like "shore." It's also the second kanji of the place name 横浜, Yokohama.

Next is 子供たちが, with the particle が indicating that this is the subject of the verb in the clause. That subject is 子供たち, the noun 子供 (こども, kodomo, "child") followed by the plural suffix たち, so "children." Note that たち is not used very often, and that you should absolutely not infer that a noun is singular if there's no たち present (like you would in English). 

The kanji 子 is an N5 kanji, which also means "child" on its own. It occurs in 131 common words, which often have nothing to do with children.

The kanji 供 is an N3 kanji occurring in just 14 common words. It often has a connotation of submitting or providing something.

After が is a verb in the -te form, which means that at least one other verb will follow. The verb is 集まって (あつまって, atsumatte), which means "to gather, to come together, to assemble." Because this verb can only apply to multiple people or things (one person cannot assemble), the たち suffix after 子供 seems especially unnecessary. This may again be a concession made for foreign speakers or children.

The second and last verb in the clause 騒いでいる (さわいでいる, suwaideiru), which is the ~ている　form of すわぐ, to make noise, to be noisy, to make a racket. The use of the ~ている here implies a progressive (= "making noise, being noisy").

So the sentence in full is something like, "One day, on his way back from the sea, Urashima Tarou saw children on the beach gathered together making noise."

Book Review: Kohei Saito - "Slown Down: How Degrowth Communism can Save the Earth

 

I don't know what made me decide to buy and read this book, but I found it an interesting read, if ultimately unsatisfying. I expected a Japanese philosopher to offer a fresh, unusual look at the ecological crisis threatening the world today, but he ended up sounding disappointingly like a Western marxist intellectual.

Saito claims that even the most "radical" and ambitious plans for combatting climate change, such as the Green New Deal, are doomed to fail. The reason, he claims, is that those plans are trying to preserve the capitalist illusion of unlimited growth, which by its very nature will exhaust the earth's resources. For example, even if we would all switch to electric cars, we'd soon deplete the earth's rare earth metals that those cars' batteries need.

Next, Saito takes a detour to discuss the intricacies of Marxism. He first explains that the Marx that most marxists know and recognize is an advocate for growth, just as much as capitalism is; it's just that in Marx' vision, the workers, as the adage goes, have seized the means of production. Saito then spends many paragraphs explaining that this is a misconception, and that Karl actually had a change of heart in his later years, and turned into an eco-warrior. That fact is not very well known, Saito argues, because marxists don't spend enough time reading Marx' lesser-known writings. All this seems like one marxist trying desperately to convince other marxists, which strikes me as not only typical for the discipline, but also uninteresting to me, who doesn't find something more worthwhile just because Marx thought it.

What's also typical for marxists is this: when confronted with a big, intractable problem, they tend to offer an even bigger, even more intractable, non-solution. Saito keeps hammering on the fact that dismantling capitalism itself, not to mention reinventing democracy as a side project, is the only way to combat climate change. It never seems to occur to him that those goals form an even bigger challenge than climate change itself.

And this to me is the core problem of the book. It's not a book about how to stop climate change; it's a book about how climate change is the kind of crisis that communism has been looking for all this time as the ultimate opportunity to get rid of capitalism. Saito suffers from the Golden Hammer delusion: if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Is capitalism, and the capitalist mindset, at the heart of the climate crisis? Absolutely. Would abolishing capitalism stop climate change in its tracks? Probably. Is abolishing capitalism feasible? Definitely not. In short, Saito offers a destination, but no real directions showing how to reach it. He does talk admiringly about small-scale cooperative initiatives that exist here and there, for example in Barcelona, that to him are hopeful signs of a rejection of capitalism in pursuit of what he calls "degrowth." But it's hardly a real solution.

JSLL #3 - Urashima Tarо̄ - Second sentence

 The second sentence of this story is long:

浦島太郎は心のやさしい若者で、毎日海へ出かけて魚をつって年老いたお父さんとお母さんを養っていました。

Grammatically, it's a sequence of -te forms followed by a main sentence:

• The first one ends in で, the -te form of です.
• The second one ends in 出かけて, the -te form of でかける
• The third one ends in つって, the -te form of つる.
• The main sentence ends in the main verb, 養っていました.

Because the main verb is in the past tense, the three clauses before it also need to be translated in the past tense. 

Let's look at each clause in turn:

First clause

浦島太郎は心のやさしい若者で、

In kana: うらしまたろうはこころのやさしいわかもので、

In romaji: urashima tarou ha kokoro no yasashii wakamono de,

The first four kanji form Urashima Tarou's name, as discussed in previous post. Following it is the topic particle は (ha, pronounced wa), indicating that everything that follows concerns Tarou.

This first part says who Tarou was: 若者 (わかもの, wakamono), "a young person." The kanji are:

• 若 N3 kanji that occurs in 21 common words and means either "young" or "perhaps, possibly."
• 者 N4 kanji that occurs in 118 common words. It's almost never pronounced もの (mono) but rather しゃ (sha) or じゃ (ja). It usually acts as a suffix meaning "person who..." or "-er" like in 芸者 (geisha, literally "one who performs") and 忍者 (ninja, literally "one who spies").

Qualifying this "youngster" noun is 心のやさしい which breaks down into 心の (こころの, kokoro no, "of heart") and やさしい (yasashii). So the whole thing means "kind of heart."

The kanji 心  is an N4 kanji that occurs in 77 common words, most of which have something to do with a mental state or emotion. It's also used as a metaphor, such as the "heart of the city."

やさしい, an i-adjective, is written in kana, which is important: the meaning is different depending on the kanji used:

• 優しい means tender, kind, gentle
• 易しい means easy, plain, simple

By avoiding the kanji, the writer implies both meanings, although "kind" is the more logical choice.

So this part means: Urashima Tarou was a youngster with a kind heart.

Second part

毎日海へ出かけて

In kana: まいにちうみへでかけて

In romaji: mainichi umi e dekakete

毎日 (まいにち, mainichi) means "every day." 

毎 is an N5 kanji which means "every" in almost all of the 11 common words in which it occurs.

日 is an N5 kanji which occurs in 184 common words. It's probably the most frequently occurring kanji in Japanese. It means "day" or "sun." It occurs twice in the word 日曜日 (にちようび, nichiyoubi, "Sunday") and is pronounced differently both times. It's also the first kanji of 日本  (にほん, nihon, "Japan").

We've already talked about 海 ("sea") in a previous post. Here, it's followed by the particle へ (he or e), which means "to" or "toward."

出かけて (でかけて, dekakete) is the te-form of 出かける, "to go out."

出 is an N5 kanji that occurs in 173 common words. Most of the words have a connotation of departure or going outward.

So this part means: [Tarou] went out to sea every day.

Third part

魚をつって

In kana: さかなをつって

In romaji: sakana wo tsutte

We briefly mentioned the kanji 魚 (fish) before when we discussed the first kanji of 漁師 (fisherman). The kanji 魚 is N4 and occurs in 12 common words, all of which are related to fish. Here, it's followed by the object particle を (wo or o).

つって is the -te form of つる, "to fish, to catch." The verb is not commonly written with a kana, and I'm not sure why a kanji wasn't used.

So this part means: [Tarou] caught fish.

Combined with the previous part, it makes sense to translate the two parts as: [Tarou] went out to sea every day in order to catch fish.

Fourth part

年老いたお父さんとお母さんを養っていました。

In kana: としおいたおとうさんとおかあさんをやしなっていました。

In romaji: toshioita otousan to okaasan wo yashinatteimashita.

The verb at the end is the ～ている past tense of 養う, whose first meaning (applicable here) is "to support, to maintain, to provide for." I'm not sure why the ～ている form is being used here.

The kanji 養 is N1 and occurs in 25 common words.

So who is being supported? It's a complex object consisting of two nouns joined by と, to ("and" as a noun connector), and qualified by a past participle 年老いた (としおいた, toshioita).

The two nouns are お父さん (おとうさん, otousan) and お母さん (おかあさん, okaasan), meaning "father" and "mother," respectively. Both are being referred to in a respectful way, preceded by the exalted prefix お (o-) and followed by the "Mr/Ms" suffix さん (-san, also used when referring to people: 浦島さん is roughly equivalent to "Mr Urashima").

The kanji 父 is an N5 kanji that occurs in 17 words. It always refers to a male family member (father, grandfather, uncle).

The kanji 母 is an N5 kanji that occurs in 27 words. It always refers to a female family member (mother, grandmother, aunt), mostly a mother, including in compounds like motherland and mother tongue.

The qualifier 年老いた (としおいた, toshioita) is the past participle of 年老いる, to grow old. So it means "grown old" or "aged."

The kanji 年, an N5 kanji, occurs in 117 common words. On its own, it means "year." It mostly means "year" or "age" when combined with other kanji.

The kanji 老 is an N3 kanji that occurs in 28 common words. It refers to old age/elderly.

So this part means: [Tarou] supported his aged father and mother.

The whole sentence

The -te form can indicate all kinds of connections between clauses. The most basic connection is simply "and," which could be used to string all the clauses in this sentence together. It's even possible to translate this one Japanese sentence as up to four English ones. But it's also easy to see causal connections between the clauses. So I think a good translation would be:

Tarou was a kind-hearted young man, who went out to sea every day to catch fish, to support his elderly father and mother.

Note the theme of filial piety, the love and respect for one's parents, which is highly valued in Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, and by extension in Japanese culture.

JSLL #2 - Urashima Tarо̄ - First sentence

Continuing from our previous post, we now have our first sentence.

昔々、ある海辺の村に、浦島太郎という漁師が住んでいました。

昔々、is pronounced むかしむかし (mukashi mukashi) and is the Japanese equivalent of the English fairy-tale opening "Once upon a time." Literally, it means "long, long ago." The kanji 昔 on its own means "the old days, the past, long ago." It's an N3 kanji that occurs in only 4 common words. The second symbol, 々, is a repeater symbol: it simply means, "repeat the previous kanji." After the repeater symbol comes 、(a Japanese comma).

ある海辺の村に、is an adverbial phrase of place. Reading it from right to left, it breaks down as:

• 村に (むらに, mura ni) "in a village"
• 海辺の (うみべの, umibe no) "of the coast"
• ある (aru) "some"

Which amounts to "in some coastal village" for the whole phrase. "Aru" normally means "to exist" when applied to things without a heart, like plants and inanimate objects. But when placed on its own before a noun, like here, it means "some." A typical combination is ある日, "one day, on a certain day."

Words with kanji are as follows in this phrase:

• 村 is an N2 kanji that occurs in 11 common words (and it means "village" in all of them).
• 海辺 "coast" consists of the N4 kanji 海 meaning "sea" on its own, which occurs in 60 common words; and the N2 kanji 辺 meaning "area, vicinity, region; side, edge" on its own, which occurs in 20 common words.

Next is the subject of the sentence, 浦島太郎という漁師が, marked by the subject particle が.

The main noun is 漁師 (りょうし, ryoushi), "fisherman." Qualifying this noun is 浦島太郎という, which consists of the proper name 浦島太郎 (Urashima Tarou, explained in the previous post), and という, "who is/was called." Note how this is just the particle と combined with いう, the verb "to say," but いう in this sentence is not written with a kanji ,言う. Compare:

• はいと言う人 (はいというひと, hai to iu hito) "Someone who says yes"
• 太郎という人 (たろうというひと, Tarou to iu hito)  "Someone called Tarou"

Returning to 漁師, it consists of two kanji:

• 漁 is an N2 kanji that occurs in 10 common words. It always refers to fishing or fishery. The kanji very obviously resembles 魚, the kanji for fish.
• 師 is an N3 kanji that occurs in 24 common words. It occurs mostly as the last kanji, best translated as "-er" or "-ist" or "person doing X."

So the whole phrase 浦島太郎という漁師が translates to "A fisherman called Urashima Tarou"

Finally, there is the main verb of the sentence, 住んでいました (followed by the Japanese period 。). This is 住んで (すんで, sunde), the te-form of the verb 住む, "to live" (in the sense of "to reside" rather than "to be alive") followed by いました, the polite past tense. A ~ていました ending of a verb would normally be translated as a past progressive ("was Xing") or as a perfective (indicating a finished state), but 住む is a bit unusual: it takes the ～ていました form where in English you would say "lived."

The kanji 住 is N4 and occurs in 27 common words. It always refers to residence or habitation.

Putting it all together, the sentence reads:

"Long, long ago, in some coastal village, there lived a fisherman called Urashima Tarou."

Japanese Stories for Language Learners (JSLL) - #1 - Urashima Tarо̄ - Story title

 Warning: This blog post is about the Japanese language. If you're not learning Japanese, this post is probably not interesting to you.

A friend who had traveled to Japan brought back the book "Japanese Stories for Language Learners: Bilingual Stories in Japanese and English" by Anne McNulty & Eriko Sato, illustrated by Rose Goldberg (StoryGraph link). It contains five short stories, in English and in Japanese.

I'm going to translate these five stories, one sentence at a time, and walk you through the translation. 

The title of the first story is 浦島太郎 (うらしまたろう, Urashima Tarо̄). It's the name of the main character, where Tarо̄ is the given name (and a common name for a Japanese man) and Urashima is the surname. 

The first kanji of the surname, 浦, means "inlet" or "seashore, beach" on its own (also pronounced うら, ura). This is one of the jо̄yо̄ kanji, the roughly 2000 kanji taught in Japanese primary and secondary school, and you're supposed to know it for the N1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), the last of the JLPT tests. (Unless indicated otherwise, all kanji mentioned from here on in are jо̄yо̄ kanji.)  The standalone kanji is the only common word containing this kanji.

The second kanji of the surname, 島, means "island" on its own  (also pronounced しま, shima). (It can also mean the territory or turf of a gang or a prostitute.) This is JLPT level N2.  There are 17 common words containing this kanji. You might encounter it as the "shima" in "Hiroshima" (広島, ひろしま, literally "the wide island"), the 6th largest city in Japan.

The first two kanji together are not a word, only a name.

The first kanji of the given name, 太, means "fat" (noun) or "fatty" (noun as prefix) on its own (pronounced ふと, futo).  This is JLPT level N3. There are 24 common words containing this kanji, including 太い (ふとい, futoi) meaning fat, and 太陽 (たいよう, taiyо̄) meaning the Sun.

The last kanji of the given name, 郎, means "son" (as a counter) on its own (also pronounced ろう, rо̄).  This is JLPT level N1. There are 82 common words containing this kanji. Combined with 太, the combination 太郎 literally means "first-born son."