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- "本をかすのがわたしのしごとです。"
"本をかすのがわたしのしごとです。"
Translation:My job is to lend books.
31 Comments
That's useful to know; however, they were actually making an in-joke about an American TV game show called "Wheel Of Fortune" with that comment, not actually asking. :)
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
"My work is to lend books" should be an acceptable answer... the system insists on 'job' instead.
300
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
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.
Yes, that's exactly right. It makes the verb into a noun, and "lending" would be a more precise translation.
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Can it also mean "I lend books at work"? If not, how would you say that in Japanese?
