Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #2: That’s Your Problem
February 9th, 2009 | View Comments
This week’s essential travel phrase is, “That’s your problem.”
那是你的問題.
Na4 shi4 ni3 de5 wen4 ti2.
それはあなたの問題です。
Sore wa anata no mondai desu.
Note that 問題 means “problem” in both Chinese and Japanese. 漢字 (Hanzi/Kanji—Chinese characters) doing double duty! The pronunciation is even somewhat similar, wen4 ti2 vs. mondai. The Taiwanese dialect gets even closer to the Japanese pronunciation: wen3 dei2.
Also note that 的 (de5) in Chinese and の (no) in Japanese serve essentially the same function—”of” or to mark possession. 你的 and あなたの both mean “your”.
That leaves the rest of the sentence for “that is.” The Chinese sentence basically parallels English: 那是 (na4 shi4) = “that is”. The Japanese grammar is a bit more complicated.
それ (sore, pronounced soh-ray) means “that”, while は (pronounced wa, even though it’s the hiragana letter “ha”) is a grammatical marker to indicate that それ is the subject of the sentence. There’s no English equivalent. The end of the sentence, です (desu, pronounced dess—the u gets chopped off), more or less means “is”.
See you next week on Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook!
Yvonne posted this on February 9th, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #2: That’s Your Problem"
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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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