Comments on: Language

By: Stu

Stu — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:51:04 +0000

Yeah! Good. Easy!

By: sweavo

sweavo — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:50:35 +0000

lol @ grammar boy. There ya go, Stu! Fixed!

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:57:53 +0000

You ‘go shopping’ because in that context the word ’shopping’ is acting as a participle of the verb ‘to shop’. Just in the same way that you ‘go walking’ or ‘go climbing’.

When you ‘do the shopping’, ’shopping’ is an abstract noun representing the act of buying provisions.

When you ‘put the shopping away’, ’shopping’ is a concrete noun representing the physical bundle of stuff that you bought.

All good old-fashioned grammar!

By: Jess

Jess — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:55:02 +0000

Yes, language is very complicated, you must be doing well if you’re starting to notice little nuances like that in Japanese!
The vast majority of people learning a second language in adulthood never reach a native-like competence of those kinds of things… especially one that’s as different from English as Japanese. It’s as if people who grew up with a language have certain “instincts” about it that are very difficult (near-impossible!) for a foreign learner to acquire.

By: Lois

Lois — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:55:31 +0000

“Shopping” – blowing the whistle on. “Blowing the whistle” – oh, to hell with this. I love it, though!

By: lordhutton

lordhutton — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:08:49 +0000

Cripes. Is German like that, where they put lots of words together to form a bigger one eg Fernsehenapparat. I would imagine many languages reduce the options, like english, Swahili, or some creoles, to make the word and usage as simple (and more difficult for forreners) as possible. Like Shopping

By: ScottJ

ScottJ — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:19:59 +0000

One of the most fascinating things about ideographic languages is that there’s such a huge difference between literal and common translations. For example, “Non-superconducting maglev train” has parts of about six English words in it, but I count at least 10 characters in the line you posted. (The spacing looks close so the characters kind of run together on my screen.)

I once asked a high school friend, David Tang, why his parents’ Chinese restaurant had four characters in its name when the English name only had three words. He explained that in his language, there was no one word meaning “restaurant,” so it was a combination of the word for “meal” and the word for “house.” I imagine that Japanese is similar.