Finally!

こんにちは！

With only two weeks left in Ball State's Spring semester, I am looking forward to some down-time that will allow me to go back and strengthen what I have learned in the past year. I am already amazed at how much I have learned over these two semesters! What seemed like an unsurmountable task of simply learning hiragana has become second nature--although, my tongue is still rebelling against the language; as with Mandarin, I'll eventually adapt.

But I want to share one more lesson before the semester ends.

As a linguist, one of my favorite areas is syntax--which is basically the investigation of grammatical structures. My personal favorite structure is the relative clause (a.k.a. the adjective clause). In English, we use relativizers (like "who", "whom", "whose", "that" and "which") to help further describe or define a noun in a sentence.

Ex: The girl who is dancing....
      The book that I read....
      A man whose bald head is blinding me....

I have done a bit of research in relative clauses because the concepts used can be expressed in a number of ways.

Ex. The girl who is dancing....= The girl dancing.... = The dancing girl....=The young female dancer

To move away from English, I have studied relative clauses in other languages, particulary Mandarin. From my colleagues and research, I have learned that Korean and Chinese both use a prepostional relative clause/adjective structure.  So, now, I have learned that Japanese does too. Here's the basic structure with some examples:

[short form*]  [noun]

ピアノをひいている人      piano-o hiiteeru hito                the person who is playing piano....
美味しい魚　　　　　      oishii sakana**                        the fish that is delicious...
                                                                                               the fish that was delicious...





* Note that the short form is sometimes in the "ている" form to distinguish the action or state as being current.

** Note: "The delicious fish" and "The fish that is delicious" are translated the same! (For now...from my amatuer perspective. Could this be a "general"/"specific" issue--like English articles the, a, an?

Please forgive my haste and poor limited example...でも、昼ご飯を食べるのがいります！

じゃあ、また！