"Desu" is Extremely Easy to Understand. Japanese Copula (だ、です、である)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 มิ.ย. 2024
- "Desu" is a very common word in Japanese that is very easy to understand, yet is so heavily mistaught, some people don't even see it as a word. It is very much so a real word and it has a very clear, distinct meaning.
Desu is the formal version of the Japanese Copula, DA.
Despite how even some native Japanese speakers (like Joey The Anime Man) want to make Desu sound like this overly complex and confusing "word but not a word" entity. Desu is a very simple word with a very straightforward meaning.
Other sources of misinformation come from Tae Kim sensei, who created the Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide. Tae Kim sensei denies the function of the copula completely and rejects the idea that Desu and Da are the same. This is because his understanding of the Japanese language is fundamentally flawed.
Desu (and the Japanese Copula) is one of the core elements of Japanese and MUST be understood properly in order to truly grasp what Japanese is saying.
Credits to Cure Dolly Sensei (RIP):
/ @organicjapanesewithcu...
🎬 Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:55 What is a "Copula"
01:16 English's Copula
02:05 Japanese Copula
02:46 だ＝です
03:16 Difference between English & Japanese Copulas
04:43 Example sentences
05:51 The ONLY exception
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She would be proud of you
You're not joking when you say "I'll be teaching what Japanese textbooks didn't"
Cure Dolly would be proud of you.
I hope so. I actually had the pleasure of interracting with her a few times before she passed and she honestly tries to help every single one of her viewers personally. She really was an incredible person!
@@JouzuJuls yeah I was on her Patreon. People would ask a short question and she would generously reply with a comprehensive multi-paragraph explanation and examples.
@@__adachi__167 Same here!
@@JouzuJuls Do you know what Cure Dolly's background was? Was she a linguist, or just someone fascinated with languages?
@@DANGJOS I know as much as anybody else. As far as I know, she wasn't a linguist but was simply fascinated by languages and particularly Japanese. She also speaks Spanish and Portuguese (and English). Most of her teachings are from Dr.Jay Rubin, including the most important theory of the ∅が.
Also just want to clarify, I don't know Dolly on a personal level nor was I a star student of hers of anything. I just studied her teachings a lot and know them like the back of my hand. My senpais in her community still help me out with things to this day!
You're so underated
This needs more attention, you put a lot of effort into this, the quality and explaining of this is awesome. Thank you :)
Another really well scripted video! Immediately grabbed my attention and retained it, leading into the educational part really well. Please continue to share your experiences like this! Thanks again Cheif. :)
Thank you for the kind comments! Glad you enjoyed the video!
You went to the depths of language and linguistics and made so confusing topics so easy to understand. Thank you. I must say: you are so underrated.
This is my third video today, can't get over how succinctly you make your lessons! Definitely going to recommend you to anyone else I meet learning japanese
thank you so much for your mathematical/logical descriptions! this is exactly what i need to understand this and makes me want to learn more (i just started 4 days ago)
I'm very glad I was able to share this approach with you! This method was taught to me by the late Cure Dolly sensei, so please check her out too if you'd like more explainations for Japanese that follow this method!
.
Also thank you for watching and commenting! :D
Great explained! Thanks ❤
Hello, again. Thank you for your video. Actually, I've already read very similar explanations in some textbooks about the "copula" and about the "i" of the adjectives (for example "Grammaire japonaise systématique Volume I" from Reiko Shimamori, but it is not written in English).
You have also an interesting way of explaining the formation of である that i approve ("limit particle + existence").
First of all, one question: can we considerer the か particle as a copula in some of interrogative sentences? In fact, the combination だか at the end of a sentence is considered as "ungrammatical", so normally, we cannot say e.g. 日本だか, but 日本人か in a neutral (but stiff) way.
Anyway, Japan consider です, だ and である not as 動詞 ("verb"), but as 助動詞 ("auxiliary"), which we could define as "variable words that are ''helpers'' to other words, but cannot be alone in a sentence" (we make the distinction with verbs that can be used as auxiliaries, like あげる or はじめる, but are not "pure" auxiliaries" because they can exist alone in a sentence as "verbs", so we don't call them 助動詞). There are many 助動詞 in Japanese, some of them varying like verbs (like です, ます, た...), other like adjectives (like たい, らしい (*), ない...).
But even if I prefer statying close to the Japanese words defining grammar concepts, from time to time, I do not like some Japanese names, such as 形容動詞 (or "na adjective"): I understand why they call them like that, but I prefer calling them "adjectival nouns" that seems more suitable to me.
One last thing: I would not consider です as a "formal" version of だ. What I call "formal version" is rather でございます (more specifically a "deferential version" or "respectful version") or でいらっしゃいます (more specifically as an "honorific version"). If it was me, I would have called です a "neutral version" ("neutral" because we use it when speaking to people who are not considered as "close" to the speaker, but to whom we don't express particular respect nor disrespect, so it's just the most basic level of politeness, we are "neutral" with them), and だ "informal version" or "casual version" (we are not "neutral" anymore, because we consider people we speak with as "close to us", or maybe as "inferior to us", so we have a judgement about them). Sadly, the word "neutral" is already used by many teachings when speaking about だ, which is annoying to me. So, to avoid ambiguity by using the word "neutral" that means another things in other teachings, I could consider です as a "basic version" or "ordinary version", and だ as an "informal version" or "casual version".
In fact, I prefer teachings that are first focusing the most on です (and ます), because I think it remains the most basic and fundamental way of speaking Japanese (the most "neutral" in my point of view), before talking about other ways of speakings that contain a certain form of judgement (だ in a casual speech, でございます and でいらしっやいます in formal speech). It is also because this "basic" way of speaking that is using です and ます is also, by far, the easiest one to learn from a conjugation perspective, before teaching people more complicated conjugated forms of "casual speech". Besides, using だ in real conversations of daylife is quite tricky, it creates unpleasant situations for both the speaker and the listener, so I don't think beginning a teaching by something tricky that we don't use as much in daylife is a good idea.
(*) Speaking of らしい, we could also consider らしい as a possible "copula", isn't it?
You need to teach more bro ur actually so good at it.
Thank you so much! Finally l understood it! Really nice job!
Congrats on understanding it, glad you found the video helpful!
@@JouzuJuls Thank you!
What awesome video!
Thank you very much!
The set perspective is interesting! Can you point us to any more resources on that? The only thing I could find (via the bit about で marking the boundaries of a set, which I had never heard before) is a (paywalled) medium article titled "Japanese Particles Debunked".
In, “‘Is’ is the copula”, “is” is the copula.
it "is"
I've just discovered your videos and I'm hooked! Thank you for your clear explanations and concise videos! I just wish they were a bit longer... Sometimes they're a bit too fast for my ADHD brain haha! But far be it from me to complain, I'm just glad you're putting this material out there! Hey, by the way, is the video about not being able to address someone's feelings in a direct statement out yet? It's a subject I'm struggling with and I'd love to see what you have to say about it.
you can slow down the speed.
@@dannychan7357 yeah no, I feel stupid doing so lol... I just re-watch it a couple more times and usually that does it for me...
I can't believe there are people who believe that だ/です/である is not a word... My native language is Spanish, and だ makes so sense for us because we have two copulas: "ser" and "estar". We also have the verbs "tener" and "haber", and all this four auxiliary verbs ("tener" is kind of, because its main meaning is "to possess/to have") are somehow equivalent, or at least similar to だ ("ser", in some instances "estar")、いる ("estar", "haber", "tener", animate, used for "estar haciendo algo")、ある ("estar", "haber", "tener", inanimate, used for "algo está hecho"). It's just that English only has "to be" and "to have" to express all the meanings I mentioned.
Languages work different one from another at grammar level. Each language uses its own logic to explain certain nuances of the events it speak of, and of course, one valid logic in a language is not 100% translatable to another valid logic from another language.
Your explanation on い adjectives not using だ was perfect. This Japanese Language teacher takes off his literal hat to you n_n
I feel like i m studying philosophy rather then japenese ,
damn bro. i have been SEARCHING for someone who can explain this, LOGICALLY, CONCISELY! you're AMAZING. period. I know you DON'T consider yourself a teacher, but, you're a SENSEI man. you're a japanese god bro.
とんでもないです、everything I know and shared in this video was because my teacher, Cure Dolly Sensei taught it to me. The real god here is Dolly Sensei.
Glad you found the video helpful!
i respect your humility. thank you for your knowledge and time. :) @@JouzuJuls
Cure Dolly was a phenomenon. I have the transcripts of all her videos. After her explaining how the grammar actually works I never again thought of it as complicated. (That, of course, is a far cry from actually being able to easily understand Japanese, not to mention speaking it fluently.. there's a huge difference between knowing about a language and actually using the language. I'm pressing forward with the latter, but the former isn't a problem anymore - thanks to Cure Dolly, and you're doing good here on this channel. Interestingly, I see more and more teachers now referring to zero-が and other things Cure Dolly was teaching, so somehow her and Jay Rubin's understanding of Japanese grammar finally seems to get exposure. About time, every old grammar textbook I have owned (and apps) have these impossibly complicated tables of conjugations and whatnot. Not to mention not even understanding "が").
@@tohaason "Interestingly, I see more and more teachers now referring to zero-が": I'm glad that this way of teaching helps some people. But considering the fact I'm mastering now Japanese construction of a sentence, since I still don't understand what people are meaning about that "zero particle" (I've listened to several videos like those of this channels, those of Cure Dolly's channel, and read different articles about that like Imabi's one though), I think I would have "suffered" as a Japanese student if I was taught that way (in fact, I don't agree with this "invisible particle" and "が is everywhere" concepts without finding some contradictions).
@@Rudolphhhhhh I'm wondering about the contradictions you mention, so some examples would be interesting. As for zero-が, it's only really about a) not mentioning the subject if not necessary (common in many languages, including Japanese), and b) that it's not mentioned doesn't mean that it's not there. *someone* or *something* is the subject, the one doing something, even if not explicitly mentioned.
Thank you for all of the incrediblly helpful information you share in your videos. I anticipate to learn mo ra from you. Ugh.. that was a really lame dad style joke. 😒
5:33 oh my god I remember that crap with the "母は悲しい" guy or something like that, from a super entitled visual novel translator trying to pick a fight with everyone and defending his point even though being proven wrong numerous times because he read it in a 1800's book somewhere and took it as a fact
I remember that because he tried to mess with me so I dig a bit about his personal life and got so disgusted I just blocked the guy and called him out on it, he deleted his account, good times
1:29
Done do done lo ❤️👌
Definite, not definate