Tuesday mornings I have Japanese class. Aiso Sensei is a retired English teacher who takes time out of his busy retiree life to teach Japanese to foreigners. Of course, he would not really say so, instead he phrases it as “we are studying Japanese together”. Lately, we have been talking about complex sentence structures, and although the topic is a bit too advanced for me, I am having fun and do learn a lot of new vocabulary and expressions.
Today we were talking about the “use of adversative conjugations” or, to put it more simply: How to use the word BUT. It sounds easier than it is, and if you think about it, even in English there are different expressions for “but” like “though, although, still, nevertheless, yet, however” and probably a whole bunch more, all of which have a slightly different connotation. We were talking about the following five different Japanese “buts” today:
- monono or tohaimonono (ものの,とはいうものの): and yet, but still, that said…
- toittemo (といっても): tough…
- nimokakawarazu (にもかかわらず): in spite of…
- nagara (ながら): though I admit…
- karatoitte (からといって): just because…
The last two are easy: Though I admit that chocolate makes me fat, I will not stop eating it. and Just because I speak English doesn’t mean I’m American. The first two are much more difficult to distinguish, because after both there should be a phrase “contrary to expectation”, which does depend on the context and the speaker. For example, the sentence: Although I am sick, I will go to work has a connotation of because it’s not that bad, really when using toittemo; and it implies an I’m feeling terrible, but I’ll do it anyway with monono.
So far, so complicated… The fun thing about today’s lesson were the exercises at the end of the chapter: ten sentences for five expressions, so each one was correct exactly twice (the instructions said that much). Since my sensei and I are studying Japanese together, we did the exercises together – and we promptly ran into issues where my sensei wanted to use decidedly more toittemo‘s than was expected… It was quite fun to watch him go “I’m sure this is the right answer here, but we already had it twice, so… where did we put the other two exactly?” In the end we did manage to use each expression exactly twice though. But I do wonder: How am I supposed to ever learn Japanese if the natives have problems already?
