Making Sense of Japanese is the fruit of one foolhardy American'sthirty-year struggle to learn and teach the Language of the Infinite.Previously known as Gone Fishin', this book has brought Jay Rubin morefeedback than any of his literary translations or scholarly tomes,"even if," he says, "you discount the hate mail from spin-casters andthe stray gill-netter."
To conveyhis conviction that "the Japanese language is not vague," Rubin hasdared to explain how some of the most challenging Japanese grammaticalforms work in terms of everyday English. Reached recently at arecuperative center in the hills north of Kyoto, Rubin declared, "I'mstill pretty sure that Japanese is not vague. Or at least, it's not asvague as it used to be. Probably."
The notorious "subjectless sentence" of Japanese comes under closescrutiny in Part One. A sentence can't be a sentence without a subject,so even in cases where the subject seems to be lost or hiding, theauthor provides the tools to help you find it. Some attention is paidas well to the rest of the sentence, known technically to grammariansas "the rest of the sentence."
Part Two tackles a number of expressions that have baffled students ofJapanese over the decades, and concludes with Rubin's patentedtechnique of analyzing upside-down Japanese sentences right-side up,which, he claims, is "far more restful" than the traditional way,inside-out.
"The scholar," according to the great Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume,is "one who specializes in making the comprehensible incomprehensible."Despite his best scholarly efforts, Rubin seems to have done just theopposite.
Previously published in the Power Japanese series under the same titleand originally as Gone Fishin' in the same series.
Download link
- HIDE: BẬT
- Bạn cần phải trả lời bài viết thì mới xem được nội dung ẩn