![]() Therefore, a reasonable translation would be: The trick in this case is to know that the volume of sounds in Japanese is often described with words like 小さい and 大きい. Yet here thinking in terms of “screamed widely” or “screamed largely” doesn’t really make much sense. Here we see the same adverb that was used two examples ago, 大きく, which we had decided could be translated as “widely” or “largely”. However, if you try the word “slightly” you’ll find it makes more sense and would make a reasonable translation (there are other ways though). After all, 軽く is technically “lightly”, but “shaking his head lightly” sounds a little odd. Whereas the lion example may have been easy to understand, this example may be a little cryptic. 彼は首を 軽く振った (kare wa kubi wo karuku futta).If you think about it long enough (a thesaurus may help speed up the process), you’ll think of words like “widely” or “largely” which can give a natural translation. However, the word “big” is also technically an adverb (ex: “Don’t write so big”), so let’s try to translate it using that: So what is the adverbial form of “big”? “Bigly” seems to technically be a word, but I’ve rarely heard it used before. The adverb here is 大きく which comes from 大きい, the latter being an adjective that means “big”. ライオンは口を 大きく開いた (raion wa kuchi ga ookiku hiraita).To give another example, let’s look at this sentence: It turns out that Japanese adverbs will often not match up perfectly with their English counterparts. But how would you express this in English? You could use the adverb form of “cute”, which is “cutely”, but while that does convey the meaning I think the word “cutely” is not used very often and may sound a little unnatural. For example, if we take the verb かわいい (cute) and replace the last い with a く we get かわいく, which is effectively the adverbial form. Adjectives, on the other hand, describe nouns (ex: “the red car”)īut let’s get back to how adverbs can be made from verbs in Japanese. Adverbs can also modify adjectives or other adverbs. As a quick refresher, an adverb is something which modifies a verb, like “quickly” (that can be applied to the verb “run”). One nice thing about Japanese is that it’s really easy to make an adverb out of an i-adjective. ![]() (However, for someone who speaks English as a native language, Japanese grammar can still pose quite a challenge, hence the need for blogs like this and many other resources). Finally, word order is a bit more flexible in Japanese than English.įor sure, mastering Japanese particles can take some effort, but overall I think Japanese grammar is significantly easier than English. ![]() There is also no plural form (except for a few rare exceptions), and no articles such as “the” and “a” that appear in many Latin-based languages. Compared to English, I feel that Japanese is a grammatically pure language, meaning that there are less complex grammar rules, and those rules can be used more freely without becoming ungrammatical or awkward.įor example, Japanese has much fewer verb tenses than English, and factors such as the subject are not taken into account when conjugating. ![]()
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