nihongo wo benkyou shitai

Rule #1 - Always make sure your laptop battery is plugged in when you unplug from the mains. I had already written 90% of this update when I had a blonde moment...

Today's update looks at the wonderful world of presumptive auxiliaries - the grammatical class that conveys hearsay and opinions. So, this covers 'looks like', 'seems', 'I hear' and so on. Over the past couple of years, I been taught a number of ways to convey this is Japanese and frankly, I really didn't understand how and when each should be used. So I decided to sit down and sort it out.

There are four ways in Japanese I have come across that can be used to convey information that is presumed:

• みたい (です)
• ようです
• らしい (です)
• そうです

You can actually divide when to use these into 3 classes: (1) When you've learnt the information from some external source - say a newspaper, TV, friend etc., (2) when you have come to the presumption based on your own senses or reasoning and (3) when you don't really care about where the presumed information came from, you just want to get the information out. Naturally, some of these are more polite than others.

To convey presumed information gained from an external source, use either そうです or らしい. らしい is a more casual way of communicating this and as such frequently used without です. Both of these follow the short form of a verb, so bases 1 (negative), 3 (dictionary) and 7 (past) can be used.

To convey presumed information derived from your own senses or reasoning, use ようです. Again, this follows the short form of a verb.

And that leaves みたい. This can follow the short form of a verb and indicates that the information is presumed, but does not indicate whether you have come to the presumption yourself, or gained the information from others. Again, this is frequently used without です as it is seen as pretty casual. みたい can also follow a noun and essentially means that noun 'looks like' something. If you watch Japanese drama, you'll hear ばかみたい！an awful lot.

Let's nihongo...

English: It looks like it will rain
Jenglish: [rain][fall][looks]
日本語1: 雨が降るそうです
日本語2： 雨が降るらしい
日本語3： 雨が降るようです
日本語4： 雨が降るみたい

We can translate these better as:

1. I hear that it will rain. (formal)
2. I hear that it will rain. (more casual)
3. It looks like it will rain.
4. It looks like/seems it will rain.


And that's it. Simpler than cracking the DaVinci code and more useful.

またね。。。