Nominalizers and Questions

[Ian_Dickey_489166]

今日は Ianです。I have a question about asking questions. I learned about nominalizers in class and was wondering if it was incorrect to incorporate this structure into a question. If I wanted to say "Does anyone play guitar". Without a nomilizer, I guess it would look like this: だれもギターをひきますか？ Would it be incorrect to say だれもギターをひくのがしりますか？. Would that be like asking " Does anybody know how to play guitar"? I haven't been studying Japanese very long but I always find myself trying to construct more complex sentences with the grammer points I have learned. Does this question make sense? Could someone give me another example of asking a question incorporating a nominalizer. どうも有難う。

[anomalous58]

It is acceptable to use normalizations in questions, but the form is a little wrong, I think. You want to say something like this:　"ギターを弾くのはだれですか？". Using ”知っている” with ability is a little weird in Japanese. The most natural sentence I can think of using nominalization is "ギターを弾けるのはだれですか”　とか　”ギターを弾くのはだれかいますか”とかいうのが普通だと思います。 I'm not sure if you know about "potential" form or not, but that's the best way to express somebody's knowledge in something when it comes to an instrument. Changing "弾く" to "弾ける" changes it from "to play" to "can play". Basically, "Who can play guitar?" or "Is there anybody here who plays guitar?". It's great that you're trying to use complex grammatical expressions that you just learned, but try not to force them too much. English and Japanese are too completely different languages, and often what sounds natural in one language sounds completely unnatural in the other. This kind of knowledge, unfortunately, just comes with time.

[natsukoy9313]

Ian-san, anomalous58-san,
こんにちは！
Thank you, anomalous58-san, for advice! It's quite close!
In English, "play the guitar" and "know how to play the guitar" are the most common expression, while
we Japanese consider it as "skill" or "ability". So we use potential form 弾ける in such questions.

When we ask "does anyone play guitar?", we say 誰かギターを弾ける人はいますか。
We start the sentence with 誰か because we don't even know whether or not anyone plays the guitar.
If we know someone in the group plays the guitar but we don't know who, then we say ギターが弾けるのは誰ですか。
誰か is really "does anyone..."

Natsuko(奈津子),
Team JapanesePod101.com