That disease

I'm sorry for the cliff-hanger last time. But today we get to see the conclusion of the sentence. In the process we'll talk a little bit about sentence order.

よく(yoku) 見(み)(mi)かける(kakeru) あの(ano) 病気(やまい)(yamai)

Today you should be able to read a lot more than on previous days. We're already to the point where we've done most of the common hiragana characters. It's surprising how fast it goes. Memorizing as we go lets us accelerate our learning process. If we were to have just looked up the characters without memorizing them, we'd be going slightly faster, but we wouldn't learn nearly as fast.

I'm going to take this in two parts. The first is よく みかける (mikakeru). The first word, よく, in this instance means "often" or "frequently". The よく also means "well", as in "well done". It's easy to get the two usages confused, so try to keep that in mind.

The second word, 見かける (mikakeru), means "to happen to see". Another word, 見る (miru), means "to see". As you can see, they both have the same kanji character which means "to see", but the two words have slightly different meanings. This is very common in Japanese.

So what do we have so far? The text from part one was ドラマ や しょうせつ では, or in english "As for by way of dramas and novels". Now we add よく みかける (mikakeru), or "often happen to see". So putting them together "As for by way of dramas and novels, often happen to see". And if we un-engrishize the sentence we get something like "Often happen to see in dramas and novels".

There are a couple of important points to realize. First, don't get stuck up on the english word "in" as a replacement for で. It really only words a fraction of the time. Think about the sentence. It is by way of the dramas and novels that we happen to see whatever it is we are going to see. Keep that in mind.

Another important point to realize is that we haven't mentioned a subject for the sentence yet. This is totally normal in Japanese. If the subject is obvious from context, it's omitted. Who do you suppose is "happening to see". Well, the author of course. Why bother mentioning it. In english we would probably say "I often see in dramas and novels". But in Japanese you just don't say it that way. In fact, if it is obvious from context there isn't any point in describing the object of the sentence either. If we were talking about ice cream cones and someone says "In dramas and noves, often happen to see", it's perfectly obvious who is seeing, and what it is they are seeing.

But in this case, we don't know what the person is talking about. Which leaves us with the last part of the sentence. あの (ano) やまい (yamai). あの (ano) means "that". In Japanese there are two "that"s. Imagine a situation where two of us are speaking. If I point to a novel near me, that's "this novel", or "この (kono) しょうせつ". If I point to a novel near you, that's "that novel", or "その (sono) しょうせつ". If I point to a novel on a bookstand far away from either of us it's "that novel" but "あの (ano) しょうせつ" in Japanese.

The other word is やまい (yamai). This means "illness, disease". Interestingly the kanji for やまい is 病. But isn't it 病気 in the manga??? Yes, but 病気 is read びょうき (byouki). It's a different word that also means "illness, disease". This is pretty common in manga. They will write one thing in kanji, but another similar thing in the furigana. It's a means of providing more explanation about what you are actually talking about without writing more text.

The question arises, why are we saying あの (ano) やまい (yamai) here? Is the disease far away from the speaker and the listener? Well, in fact it is. Neither the speaker or listener have the disease (I hope!!!) What the auther is trying to say is that he is referring to "that disease" in general, rather some disease he's pointing to with his finger. It's a subtle point that we don't have in english. But it adds to the expressiveness of Japanese.

So we finally got to the end of the sentence. We have "As for by way of dramas and novels, often happen to see, that disease". I think it's pretty straightforward what is being said. "One often sees that disease in dramas and novels". It's important to think about it in the engrish sense, though. This is a fairly simple sentence. As we'll find out, sentences get much more complicated. If you are trying to make english "translations" out of the text, it will be difficult to understand what's going on. So while I will occasionally un-engrishize the text, try your best to work with the engrish version.

This leaves us with one small detail. In general, Japanese sentences have a different sentence order than english. While english is "Subject, Verb, Object", Japanese is usually "Subject, Object, Verb". The verb almost always comes at the end. But this sentence doesn't work that way. The object is at the end. This underscores an important point about Japanese. You can order your sentences any way you want. There is a natural order, but nothing is written in stone. In this case, the author wishes to emphasize the words "that disease". He does so by putting them at the end of the sentence.

This will be a light day on the character front. Only hiragana, and not many of them to boot. This will start to be fairly normal from now on. There's not even anything to talk about. While learning a new alphabet may seem daunting, I hope you are finding that the process is actually surprisingly easy.

We've got the largest section of vocabulary to date: 4 words! As we move forward, this section will grow. Eventually almost everything we learn will come from the vocabulary section.

You will notice that I didn't add "well" to the list of definitions for よく. That's because while they sound the same, they are actually different words. The よく that means "well" as in "well done" has the kanji 能く. よく, meaning "often" is never written with kanji. This is why kanji is so good.

Keep in mind that the word あの is always followed by a noun or a noun clause. It is describing "that (thing) over there". You must always specify the thing if you use あの. Japanese has a different word, あれ (are), if you just want to say "that over there".

If you have been astute, you will notice that words in Japanese are usually separated by "particles" We've seen two kinds so far. は and で (in the form of では). Some words aren't followed by particles, and we have seen two kinds of these: adverbs and adjectives.

You may not have noticed it, but よく is and adverb and あの is an adjective. They are placed directly before the verb/noun (respectively) without any intervening particle. It's a small point, but it's a good opportunity to drive it home.

Today's Mnemosyne file. By my count, we have 10 new items bringing us up to 42 in total. Not bad at all. If you've been practicing every day (no, I'm not going to stop highlighting those words!), you will have a fair arsenal of Japanese already. Keep it up!

I'm going to assign you a fair amount of reading today. I have to take the next 2 days off, so you should spend the time reviewing with Mnemosyne and doing the additional reading. You can read one page per day.

The first page is Tae Kim's discussion of kanji. And the second one is his page on particles. As always, the intent behind the additional reading is not to memorize things. Tae Kim goes into a fair bit of detail in each page. Ideally you want to just get an idea of what's going on. As we see these ideas in actual usage, you will start to develop an intuitive sense for the language.

That brings us to the end of another lesson. Keep at it and I will see you again after 2 days. As a teaser, I'll tell you that you will learn how to say "Dissociative Identity Disorder". Well, OK it's not much of a surprise since it's printed in English in the manga...