Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #15: If You’re Ever On a Reality TV Show…
July 13th, 2009 | View Comments
This week’s “essential travel phrase” is actually quite useful for those traveling, say, to a remote island or to a glorified hamster cage with the hopes of winning lots of money and becoming famous (not necessarily in that order).
“I have no regrets.”
我毫無遺憾.
Wo3 hao2 wu2 yi2 han4.
私は残念だと思いません。
Watashi wa zannen da to omoimasen.
The Chinese is easy. 我 = I, 毫無 = don’t have any (literally, “in the least, don’t have”), 遺憾 = regret. Chinese doesn’t really have a plural form.
The Japanese…confuses me. I think it’s because I hardly know any Japanese and not because the sentence is somehow wrong. 私 = I, は = subject marker. That’s the easy part. My dictionary says 残念に思う (zannen ni omou) is “to feel bad” (literally “‘hard luck!’ [adverb marker] to feel”), so I think 残念に思いません (zannen ni omoimasen) should be “to not feel bad”. But the phrasebook has 残念だと思いません (zannen da to omoimasen), and I’m not quite sure what function the だと in the middle serves.
Google Translate defines だと as “if it’s the case”. EnglishJapaneseOnlineDictionary.com gives an example sentence using だと: そうだと思います (sō dato omoimasu), “I guess so”, which I guess literally translates to “yes, if that’s the case, I feel it.” If that’s the case, then 残念だと思いません is “hard luck! If that’s the case, I don’t feel it.”
On the other hand, it might be that だ and と are supposed to be separate, and I think the audio suggests this. My dictionary defines だ as “be”, and と思う as “to regard as”. If that’s the case, then 残念だと思いません is “hard luck it be!, I don’t regard it as.”
If you know which interpretation is right (or if neither interpretation is right, or if it’s six of one, half dozen of the other), please leave a comment and let me know!
The beauty of learning through immersion is that you really don’t have to fret this much about the specifics of the grammar. Just learn the sentence (and many, many others) and your brain will figure out the patterns of correct usage.
Yvonne posted this on July 13th, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #15: If You’re Ever On a Reality TV Show…"
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American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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