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Lesson 25: らしい

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Last week we talked about the helper adjectival noun "sou" and how we use it to express what something might be like, our impression of something, and hearsay.

Today we're going to talk about other ways of expressing a similar range of ideas, how they work, how they are similar, and how they are different.

So, we're going to look at "rashii", which is a helper adjective.

And this is an adjective ending in -shii, which is what we can call a subclass of adjectives.

All real adjectives, as you know, end in -i.

So-called adjectives that don't end in -i are in fact adjectival nouns.

But a group of those i-ending adjectives ends with -shii.

As you see, it's still ending in -i but it also has -shi, so it's -shii.

And the characteristic of this group of adjectives is that on the whole they express subjectivities.

That is to say, not exact measurable qualities but things which are to some extent dependent upon human or other sentient beings' impression of them.

So, for example, "kanashii" is "sad"; "ureshii" is "happy".

"Muzukashii" means "difficult" and while this seems somewhat more objective than "ureshii" and "kanashii", it's still in some way a subjectivity because difficulty is relative to particular individuals.

Whether you find a thing difficult or easy depends to a large extent on who you are and what your abilities are.

So this, as we'll see, gives us an indication of what kind of a word this is and how it differs from "sou".

Its use is very simple.

Like "sou" it can be attached either to an individual word or to a complete logical clause or sentence.

And the attachment is absolutely simple, because we never do anything at all except just put "rashii" after the word or after the completed logical clause.

We don't change anything, we don't do anything, so it really couldn't be easier.

Now, as with "sou", if we put it after a single word we are talking about our impressions of that particular object.

If we put it after a completed clause, we are saying "it seems to be that way".

However, there is a difference.

If we put "sou da" after a completed clause, as you know, we complete the clause, if necessary with another "da", and that usage means that we've heard that that sentence is the case.

So if we say, "ano doubutsu-wa usagi da sou da", we're saying "I've heard that that animal is a rabbit".

Now, if we say, "ano doubutsu-wa usagi da rashii", we're saying "It seems that animal is a rabbit".

Now, that can mean the same thing as "usagi da sou da".

It can mean "I've heard that it's a rabbit", and sometimes the textbooks get quite convoluted and confusing about whether "rashii" actually means "I've heard" or whether it means "it seems", but it's very simple if you understand exactly what it's doing.

What it's doing is actually saying "it appears" or "it seems", and this has exactly the same ambiguity and lack of ambiguity as that has in English.

So let's take the case of this mysterious animal.

Suppose I'm looking at it with a group of people and afterwards you come up to me and say, "What is that animal?" and I say, "Usagi da rashii".

Now, I've given a complete sentence with "rashii" on the end, and the natural meaning here would be "I heard from those people that it was a rabbit."

Now, you see this is just the same as if in English I say, "It appears that it's a rabbit."

Now, you would take me, in English and in Japanese, to be saying, "From what I heard (from those people), it's a rabbit".

Now, take a different scenario.

The rabbit's gone and I'm examining its footprints and you come up to me and say, "What was that animal?" and I say, "Usagi datta rashii".

Again, "It appears that it was a rabbit", or "It seems that it was a rabbit."

In this case, you would probably conclude from what I'm doing that by saying "It appears it was a rabbit", I'm saying, "From the evidence I'm looking at here, the appearances are that it's a rabbit."

So you see, there's nothing particularly grammatical or complicated about this.

It's just the same as in English if you said "It appears that it's a rabbit" or "It seems that it's a rabbit", it depends on context whether that implies that that's the information you've heard or that that's the conclusion you're drawing from your observations.

If you want to be completely unambiguous that you're talking about hearsay, that you're talking about something you heard from other people, then you say, "usagi datta sou da".

That is unambiguous. That can only mean "I heard it from somebody".

Now, when we apply "rashii" to an individual word, the most immediate difference between "rashii" and "sou da" is that we can't apply "sou da" to a regular noun.

We can only apply it to an adjectival noun, and there's a good reason for that. We'll get to it in a moment.

"Rashii" you can apply to any kind of noun, whether it's an adjectival noun or whether it's a regular noun.

But it really comes into its own when it's being applied to regular nouns.

As you would expect from the fact that it is a -shii adjective – that's to say, that we would expect it to be expressing a greater degree of subjectivity – it has the ability to liken one thing to another.

So we can say "ano doubutsu-wa usagi rashii" – "That animal is rabbit-like/that animal's like a rabbit."

Now, the difference between this and "sou", apart from the fact that you can only apply "sou" to adjectival nouns – and this is why you can only apply "sou" to adjectival nouns – is that when we say "ano doubutsu-wa usagi rashii" we are not necessarily conjecturing that it is in fact a rabbit.

We may be completely aware that it isn't a rabbit and we're simply saying that it's like a rabbit, it's a rabbit-like animal.

And of course, we can turn it around into that kind of an adjective too:

"usagi rashii doubutsu" – "a rabbit-like animal".

And again, it's just the same as in English.

If we say, "That animal looks like a rabbit", we could mean "I'm guessing that it is a rabbit" or we could mean "It's probably not a rabbit, but it certainly looks like one."

Now, this widens out into even greater areas of subjectivity.

For example, we can say that something has the qualities of something.

For example, "otoko rashii otoko" is a "manly man", a man who possesses the qualities of a man.

If we talk about someone who's not a teacher and we say "sensei rashii" – "That person's like a teacher."

We might or might not be conjecturing that she is in fact a teacher.

But if we know that she's a teacher and we say, "Sakura sensei-wa sensei rashii", we mean that she behaves like a teacher.

She is a teacher and she has the right qualities and manner for being a teacher.

Conversely, we could say, "Sakura sensei-wa, sensei rashikunai" and in that case, we're saying, "Well, we know she's a teacher, but she doesn't behave like one, she doesn't act like a teacher."

So you see, with "rashii" we are getting into much more subjective areas.

We're not simply guessing whether something is in fact delicious or interesting, which we can confirm by experience.

We're talking about our impressions and beliefs and subjectivities surrounding the phenomenon.

Now, we can also say things like, for example, if Sakura says something unpleasant and usually she's a very sweet girl, we might say, "sore-wa Sakura rashikunai" – "That wasn't like you, Sakura."

So we're talking about the qualities, the subjectively perceived qualities of a thing.

So, in some areas it overlaps with "sou da", but in other areas it moves forward into more subtle and subjective areas.

Now, we're also going to quickly look at -ppoi, which is a small tsu followed by -poi, so we have a little break between that and what we're saying.

So if we want to say "childish", we might say "kodomo-ppoi".

It works very much like "rashii". It's also a helper adjective.

It's much more casual than "rashii" and we usually hear it in exactly that form – "kodomo-ppoi", "usagi-ppoi".

You can't use -ppoi on the end of a completed clause.

You can only attach it to a word.

And apart from its colloquial nature, a difference in tendency from "rashii" is that "rashii" will tend to imply that the quality is what something ought to have.

-Ppoi often tends to imply the opposite.

There's no hard-and-fast rule here, but there tends to be a positive inclination in "rashii" and a negative one in -ppoi, although you will certainly hear them used the other way round on some occasions.

So "kodomo rashii" is more likely to imply the child's behaving in a way proper to a child, whereas "kodomo-ppoi" tends to mean "childish".

In fact, in English we could say "kodomo rashii" means "child-like" and "kodomo-ppoi" means "childish", although it's not as hard and fast as that is in English.

It could be used the other way round without breaking any actual laws.

When I first appeared in this particular shell, this body that I'm wearing now – I am of course the ghost in the shell –

I was talking in English, introducing it, but I made a little aside in Japanese because I really don't know quite how to say this in English.

I said, "What do you think of me when I look like this?

Ningen-ppoi ne?"

"Ningen-ppoi ne" – "It's very human-looking, isn't it?"

And while it wasn't exactly disparaging, the sense of what I was saying was "Good heavens, in this shell I look really more human than I actually am, don't I?"

Which I think is why some people call me "creepy", because I'm probably just a little bit too human-looking for someone who isn't human.