"本をかすのがわたしのしごとです。"
Translation:My job is to lend books.
36 Comments
図書館司書です！としょかんししょ I never knew the word for this before :) the literal meaning of 司書 is something like administer of books, but the meaning changed in Mandarin to secretary
"Administer of books" is ungrammatical in English, to my knowledge. Did you mean minister of books? Administrator of books?
"My work is to lend books" should be an acceptable answer... the system insists on 'job' instead.
Similarly, Duo rejects "It's my business to lend books". Would "business" be a bad interpretation of しごと?
When "g" appears in the middle of a word, it's usually pronounced as a soft "ng". I was so confused until I learned that! ^^
As you can read in the Wikipedia article on 'Japanese phonology' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology), a G in the middle of an utterance is pronounced by some speakers as [ŋ] rather than [g] (The symbols are from the International Phonetic Alphabet.).
I should probably understand the difference by this point...but why is ga used here rather than wa?
Because the speaker is introducing the subject that they lend books, 【が】 is used. Had that fact been a known topic for both participants in the conversation, 【は】would have been more appropriate.
The Pocket Kenkyusha Japanese Dictionary gives the rule of thumb that the first time something is mentioned in conversation, it is marked with が, and subsequently with は. Of course, as it also states, が emphasizes the subject, while は emphasizes the predicate. As others have said, you can think of は as meaning 'as for'.
That would be romanized toshokan'in. toshokanin would be としょかにん. The apostrophe distinguishes んい from に
669
The の (no) makes the verb into a noun, so かす (kasu) usually means "to lend", but かすの (kasu no) means "lending". The が (ga) is just the usual subject marker particle.
"My job is lending books.*
Does the 'no' form followed by ga/wa make this more like "lending"? Just trying to work out what the function is here.
- 669
Yes, that's exactly right. It makes the verb into a noun, and "lending" would be a more precise translation.
Can it also mean "I lend books at work"? If not, how would you say that in Japanese?
In the unit HOBBY 3. The lesson is about gerund. It is just how we can see in the phrase UP THERE. My question is: Why to teach the correct forme and , then soon depreciate that we wrote. Are the instructions of HOBBY 3 insignificants?
adding の to the end of the short form of a verb turns the verb into a noun
