Sunday, February 23, 2025

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."

No comments:

Post a Comment

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...