Recently we learned the concise endings of sentences that were introduced in the section 20 of Minnano Nihongo. The followings are review about use of concise endings;
<1> Concise ending is used for casual conversation with your friends and family members often with some final particles describing friendliness (-yo, -ne, -yone, and so on) at the end.
<2> Concise ending is used for formal writings such as newspapers, technical reports, contract documents, and so on. The important difference from <1> is that final particles describing friendliness are not used.
<3> CE is used when studying Japanese grammar because of its conciseness to save your time and spaces on notebook.
<4> CE is used when you are talk to yourself and write a diary.
<1> through <4> about concise ending are all about sentence endings. But concise endings are used not only for sentence endings but also in the middle of a sentence. It is a kind of nested complex sentences using perceptual verbs. Today, such sentences with a perceptual verb “Omou/Omoimasu (think)”. As a preparation, looking at the following English sentence.
– I think that it’s going to rain soon.
= [Subject]+[Perceptual Verb]+that+[Subject]+[Predicate]
But “that” can be omitted, probably because of the linearity of language (Though I am not good at English grammar). When you say “think”, people can expect what is coming next is a nested [Subject]+[Predicate] structure, even if “that” is omitted. Then what about Japanese?
– Watashi wa Mousugu Ame ga Furu to Omoimasu. (I think that it’s going to rain soon.)
In the case of Japanese, a nested [Subject]+[Predicate] structure is placed before the Verb. In terms of the linearity of language, you need to know where the end of the nested [Subject]+[Predicate] structure is. The end is marked by “to”. This “to” cannot be omitted.
The examples shown below are classified with type of “nested” predicates
<Verb; present-positive>
– Watashi wa Mousugu Ame ga Furu to Omoimasu. (I think it’s going to rain soon.)
<Verb; present-negative>
– Watashi wa Ame wa* Furanai to Omoimasu. (I don’t think it’s going to rain.)
<Verb; past-positive>
<Verb; past-negative>
<I-adj; present-positive >
<I-adj; present-negative >
<I-adj; past-positive >
<I-adj; past-negative>
<Na-adj; present-positive >
<Na-adj; present-negative >
<Na-adj; past-positive >
<Na-adj; past-negative >
(Example sentences will be added, soon)
This post was written with reference to the exercise A1 on Section21 of “Minna no Nihongo (2nd Edition)” published by “3A Corporation”
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