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Pardon if the excerpt is a little weird, but I learn by translating things I find myself and my main sources are anime, manga, and games (Which I know isn't really the best place to learn)
姉以外の女の子なら俺がリードしなくちゃと思っていたのだが。
The rough translation that I could come up with is along the lines of "As for me, the fact is that I don't think I'll be lead to any girl other than my older sister."
Like I said, a little weird.
My main trouble points:
以外 - I don't really understand the position of this in the sentence, but I am led to believe the word means "with the exception of". I'm fairly certain it refers to older sister, but if so, why does it come after?
しなくちゃ - Wiki says that this is a colloquial form of the negative conditional tense, I believe of する, yes? If so, is there a place I can find all such colloquialisms? I find that they give me the most trouble when translating.
いたのだが - I never really know how to split things up when there's more than one word of hiragana in a row. I translated "Ita" as the past tense of Iru, and "noda" as "the fact is . . .", but that leaves a "ga" just hanging there on the end.
As for the rest, my concept of grammar is rudimentary at best, so forgive me my shortcomings. I've tried different learning books, but none of them really gave a whole lot of stuff to practice with, so I had to jump directly to the harder stuff. And I'm rambling like an idiot now so I'll just shut up and say thanks for whatever help you can give. -
Prepositions come after the noun in Japanese, e.g. 木の下, 箱の中. Since 以外 is a sort of preposition ("outside of"), albeit not in a literal physical sense, it comes after the noun.
が means "but", and in keeping with the general Japanese sense of vagueness, uncertainty, ambiguity etc (i.e. reluctance to make definite statements) is often tacked on to the end of phrases.
As long as the English sentence conveys that sense (which you've done through "I don't think"), the が doesn't necessarily need to be translated. -
There are far too many colloquialisms to list all of them. Some common ones are listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_%28grammar%29
http://recom.org/forum/showthread.php?t=301&page=4
When I first started learning, I used a lot of different books also. You just need to find some books you like. Even if you know a lot of what's in the book already, it can still be very helpful to review/solidify the basics. It's important to get a solid foundation in grammar (even if you don't remember all the rule about how to make a sentence, in order to be able to understand them). Books I liked at first were Contemporary Japanese (I think there's a second volume now, but I didn't see it on Amazon) and Japanese for Busy People. (An Integrated Approach to Japanese is also good for reading, though the dialogues are usually pretty simple.) UH Press also has a series of books (Learn Japanese?) that get pretty advanced by the end. They're cheap and they have lots of exercises, which is nice. There are also some books about learning Japanese through Manga, which I personally don't feel they're worth buying, but they're fun to sit in a bookstore and read.
Also, to figure out how a word like 以外 is used in practice, the sentences section of DenshiJisho is great!
がんばって！ -
Thanks for the help. Also, I'll have to look into those books you've mentioned. Every book I see has all the theory and whatnot but never gives anything to practice with (I guess I'm just a textbook learner, I need all those excercises to drive something in).
Again, thanks for all the help.
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- harbinger728 March 2010
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