This content is a Japanese language lesson that uses excerpts from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to explain various grammatical structures and vocabulary, focusing on compound verbs, adverbs, and the topic-marking particle "mo."
Mind Map
คลิกเพื่อขยาย
คลิกเพื่อสำรวจ Mind Map แบบอินเตอร์แอคทีฟฉบับเต็ม
Konnichiwa.
Today we're going to go back to Alice's adventures.
If you remember, Alice had spotted a white rabbit running along.
The white rabbit looked at his watch and said,
"I'm late! I'm late!" and ran off.
Alice called to him to stop but, whether he heard or not, he didn't stop.
"Arisu-wa tobi agatte, usagi-no ato-wo otta."
"Tobi agaru" is another one of those words of the kind we looked at last week, where
a verb is joined to the i-stem of another verb to create a new verb.
The first verb here is "tobu", which means either "jump" or "fly".
In this case, it obviously means "jump", since Alice can't fly.
And "agaru" means "rise up".
So when you put them together, "tobi agaru" means "jump up".
And we might notice that "agaru" here, it's the same kanji as "ue", which means "up",
and "agaru" is a verb meaning "rise up", and we can see that it's related to "ageru", which
we looked at recently, and that means to "give to someone upwards / (to) raise up toward someone else".
But "agaru" means for something to "raise itself up / rise up in itself".
So we can see that the two are related.
They're both "upping" verbs.
"Usagi-no ato-wo otta."
"Ato" means "behind" or "after", and "ou" (which is spelled おう) means "follow ".
"Ato-wo ou" is a common expression and it means to "follow after / follow behind".
But, as we've seen before, these positional expressions are always nouns in Japanese.
We talk about the "on" of the table, the "under" of the table, the "beside" of the river.
And here we're talking about the "behind" or the "after" of the rabbit.
So Alice followed the "rabbit's after" or the "rabbit's behind".
This is how we put it in Japanese.
"Arisu-wa tobi agatte, usagi-no ato-wo otta." –
"Alice jumped up and followed after the rabbit."
"Shaberu usagi-wo mita koto-ga nai."
"Shaberu" means "talk" or "chatter".
It's a bit like "jabber" in English, isn't it?
"Shaberu usagi" – in this case obviously "shaberu", the verb, is being used,
as any verb-engine can be used, as an adjective.
So "shaberu usagi" is a "talking rabbit" or a "talk-rabbit" literally.
"Mita koto-ga nai" is a usage we're going to find very often: "koto-ga nai", "koto-ga aru".
What does it mean?
Well, "koto", as we know, means a "thing" and it means a thing in an abstract sense,
a condition, not a concrete thing like a pen or a book.
So, "mita koto": "mita" is modifying the noun "koto", isn't it?
It's telling us what kind of "koto" it is, and in this case "miru" means "see",
"mita" is "see" in the past tense, so the "koto" is actually "seeing" in the past tense.
So "mita koto" means "the fact of having seen".
"Mita koto-ga nai" means "the fact of having seen does not exist".
So what this is saying is, "Alice had never seen a talking rabbit".
("The fact of having seen a talking rabbit does not exist")
"Shaberu usagi-wo mita koto-ga nai" – "Alice had never seen a talking rabbit."
And of course in English we always want to make Alice the actor of this sentence, but
actually the subject of this sentence, the A-car, is not Alice, it's "koto".
Even if we put Alice into the sentence, we would say, "Arisu-wa shaberu usagi-wo mita koto-ga nai".
She would still not be the actor of the sentence.
She would just be the topic about which the sentence was.
"Speaking of Alice, the fact of having seen a talking rabbit does not exist."
