word of the day: kowai

[imburns20126786]

街を一人で夜、出歩くのが怖いです。
まちをひとりでよる、であるくのがこわいです。
Machi o hitori de yoru, dearuku no ga kowai desu.
I am afraid to go out alone at night in the city.

Could someone please help with the particles in this sentence?

Why is it "machi o"?

And I forget what place "no ga" holds in the second phrase.

I guess what I'm saying is that if I'd been given the sentence to translate into Japanese, I would have written all the wrong particles!

[thegooseking]

imburnsさん、

There are several different particles in Japanese that mean 'in'.

'de' can mean 'in' if it's providing contextual location for a verb, i.e. if the place is part of 'how' the verb is done.
'e/he' can mean 'in' if it's paired with a verb of motion.
'ni' can mean 'in' if it's paired with a verb of existence (いる, ある).
'wo/o' can mean 'in', 'through' or 'across' a space.

As for "no ga", 'dearuku' is a verb, so cannot directly be scary (or have any adjective applied to it). The 'no' is a nominaliser that turns the verb into a noun (in English we use the '-ing' gerund to perform broadly the same function, right?). So it's simply 'dearukuno' is scary, just like you would say with any other noun.

小狼

[mmmason8967]

街を一人で夜、出歩くのが怖いです。
まちをひとりでよる、であるくのがこわいです。
Machi o hitori de yoru, dearuku no ga kowai desu.
I am afraid to go out alone at night in the city.

Could someone please help with the particles in this sentence?

I'll have a go. You can simplify the sentence like this:-

nani ga kowai desu.
I am afraid of something.

Hopefully that explains the ga. The something in the sentence is dearuku, which is a verb, not a noun. But kowai is an adjective and what it describes needs to be a noun. You can 'nominalise' a verb (that is, turn it into a noun) by using no. So now the sentence says:-

dearuku no ga kowai desu.
I am afraid of going out.

But it's not going out just anywhere that I'm afraid of. It's going out in the city. The particle を doesn't just mark the direct object of a verb; it also marks what is traversed where verbs of motion are involved. That's what it's used for here. So now the sentence says:-

machi o dearuku no ga kowai desu.
I am afraid of going out in the city.

Actually, it's doing this at night that I don't like, so the sentence should be:-

machi o yoru, dearuku no ga kowai desu.
I am afraid of going out at night in the city.

Finally we need to add 'by myself'. The word hitori means 'one person' or 'alone' and is fine for being somewhere on your own but not for doing something on your own: for that you need hitori de. To be honest, I can't really explain why de is the chosen particle here; I just know it as a fixed expression. Anyway, it gets us back to where we started:-

machi o hitori de yoru, dearuku no ga kowai desu.
I am afraid of going out by myself at night in the city.

Hope that helps.

マイケル

[thegooseking]

But it's not going out just anywhere that I'm afraid of. It's going out in the city. The particle を doesn't just mark the direct object of a verb; it also marks what is traversed where verbs of motion are involved. That's what it's used for here. So now the sentence says:-

machi o dearuku no ga kowai desu.
I am afraid of going out in the city.

This is 100% true, but since I used verbs of motion to explain 'e', that might be a bit confusing. The truth is, 'e' means 'in' more in the sense of 'into'. It marks a destination. On the other hand, 'wo' marks a place where the movement is happening. To confuse matters, another meaning of 'wo' is the opposite of 'e': it's used to mark a departure point, a place you're leaving from.

I should also clarify that 'ni' does mean what I said, but it also can mean basically the same thing as 'e'.

[community.japanese]

imburns20126786-san, 子狼さん、マイケルさん、
great insights!

Like マイケルsan wrote, the particle "o" in this case marks the place (= city/town) where
you'd wander
If the verb was 出る, "to go to the city", the particle would be に [ni].

Natsuko (奈津子),
Team JapanesePod101.com