Aren't you interested in what kind of person will come?

By the standards of this website, I'm on a roll! This is the second lesson in a week. But I'll try not to rest on my laurels. Actually, we are just starting to get to a point where I can reduce my discussions. Probably in another 10 or so lessons, you will have covered the most of the grammar you will need to read manga. It's surprising, isn't it?

Today's lesson discusses a very useful grammatical construction: using question phrases. I'll give you an example. Here's a question: What do I want? I can use this question in a sentence like: I don't know what I want. You can do the same thing in Japanese, except that because of the structure of the language, it's considerably easier than English. Let's get to it!

ね！どんな人(ひと)が来(く)るのか興(きょう)味(み)ない！？

Let's break it down. The first sentence is just ね！ We've seen ね before, used in the same way. It basically means "isn't it" or "aren't you". But girls will use it as a way of getting attention, sort of like "hey". Keep in mind that this is cutesy and *only* girls speak this way.

The next sentence is the interesting part. In fact, you should already be able to read the beginning of it: どんな人(ひと)が来(く)るの? It means "What kind of person will come?", requesting an explanation. This is followed by the particle か, which is the "question" particle. At the end of the sentence, か turns the sentence into a question. We'll see how it's used here in a minute. First lets look at the rest of the sentence.

The rest of the sentence reads: 興 (きょう)味(み)ない！？ 興 (きょう)味(み) means "interest" and in Japanese it is a noun. In English we can say "I am interested", but in Japanese you say "I have interest". I'm surprised to realize that we haven't learned the word "to have", so I'll spend some time on that now.

In Japanese there are two verbs for "to be" We've seen one of them already: いる. This is the verb "to be" for animate objects. For instance, 猫(ねこ)がいる means "There is a cat". 猫(ねこ) is the word for cat, and the が particle tells you that 猫(ねこ) is the subject of the sentence. いる just means "to be".

We can say the same thing about a chair 椅子(いす), but we can't use いる because いる is only used for animate objects (cats, people, bugs, etc). For inanimate objects we use ある. It works exactly the same way. 椅子(いす)がある means "There is a chair".

So if I say, 興(きょう)味 (み)がある, it means "there is interest". But let's look at the phrase 僕(ぼく)は興 (きょう)味(み)がある. The は sets the "topic" of the sentence, as you know, and has the meaning of "As for me". So the sentence is "As for me, there is interest". Very clearly that means "I have interest".

So in this way ある can mean "to have" as well as "to be". Even if we just say, 興(きょう)味 (み)がある, we know the 僕(ぼく)は is implied and we know that it means "I have interest", or I am interested.

Now, the negative form of ある is ない. You have to memorize this one explicitly because it is an exception to the rules of making negative forms (incidently, the negative of いる is いない). But once you know that, you can easily see that 興(きょう)味(み)がない means "I do not have interest" or "I am not interested".

If you are *really* paying attention, you will notice something strange. The sentence in the book says, 興 (きょう)味(み)ない. Notice that the が is missing. This is quite typical of casual conversation in Japanese. The particles will get dropped. In fact, the phrase なになにがない (where なになに just means "blah blah" in Japanese), is so common that the が almost always gets dropped in conversation. It becomes なになにない. And that's what's happened here.

Finally we are at the fun part! We have two sections, どんな人(ひと)が来(く)るのか and 興(きょう)味(み)がない. I can now tell you what the か is for! It takes whatever's before the か and turns it into question phrase. So, for instance, なになにか興(きょう) 味(み)がない means "I'm not interested when blah blah" or "I'm not interested in what blah blah" or "I'm not interested in how blah blah" or "I'm not interested in if blah blah", etc. Of course which question word to use depends on what you put in for なになに.

I won't get into all the different ways to make questions now, since we will undoubtedly see it in the manga. But in this specific case, you can see that どんな人(ひと) が来(く)るのか興 (きょう)味(み)ない means "I'm not interested what kind of person will come." The construction is very easy in Japanese.

There is a small snag, though. The correct sentence is どんな 人(ひと)が来(く)るのかに興(きょう)味(み)ない. That is, there is a に missing between the か and the rest of the sentence. As I said previously, か turns what ever is before it into a noun phrase. And after every noun we need a particle to indicate it's purpose in the sentence. However, in the case of question phrases, the particle that is needed is almost always obvious. And since か is also a particle, it "feels OK" to drop the next particle from the sentence. So in conversation it is almost always dropped, unless it is a confusing case for some reason.

Finally, if we add the question mark to the end of the sentence, we see that the whole sentence says, "Aren't you interested in what kind of person will come!?" Colloquially taking into account the context, todays entire script says, "Ya! Aren't you interested in what kind of person is coming!?"

For the first time, there are no new characters to learn! And, in fact, there are quite a few characters in this sentence. Give yourself a good pat on the back for a job well done. As long as you study every day, you will learn very quickly.

There are only 2 words to learn today. You really do have it easy, don't you?

As usual, we will jam a little bit with the sentence. I find that breaking the sentence up, putting it together in various ways and then memorizing them leads to a very real fluency with the grammar.

Today's Mnemosyne file.

Today your reading for today is another chapter on particles. This one has perfect timing because it has a very good discussion of の which we talked about yesterday. Please pay close attention to it!