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Lesson 36: Concept of Place

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Today we're going to talk about the concept of "place" in everyday Japanese, because this is something that often confuses people, and I've seen even quite good amateur translators getting it wrong.

The word for "place" in Japanese is, of course, "tokoro", and we learn this from quite early on.

It means a literal place and it quickly takes on slightly metaphorical uses.

For example, we can say "watashi-no tokoro", which means "my apartment or house / the place where I live".

"Come and hang out at my place."

In English, that doesn't mean "hang out" as in "hang out of the window". It means...oh, forget it, English is too complicated.

However, in Japanese, the figurative sense of "place" goes a lot further than it goes in English.

For example, if I say "Sakura-no doko-ga suki nano?"

I'm asking, literally "Sakura's where do you like?" or "What place of Sakura do you like?"

Now, if I ask this, I'm not expecting an answer like "I like her left ear."

An appropriate answer might be something like "Yasashii da" -- "She's gentle / What I like about her is that she's gentle / The place I like about her is that she's gentle."

And we might say "This is, in my opinion, Sakura's ii tokoro'" -- "Sakura's good place or one of Sakura's good places".

So "place" here doesn't mean anything remotely like a physical location.

It means an aspect of something, even a really abstract something like a person's personality.

If I listen to a complicated lecture, someone might say to me "Wakarimashita ka?" -- "Did you understand it?" -- and I might reply "Wakaru tokoro-ga atta ga wakaranai tokoro-mo arimashita" -- "There were places I understood and places I didn't understand."

And here, as you see, this is closer to a usage we might have in English:

"I mostly understood it, but there were places that I didn't understand."

This could lead to a subtle misunderstanding in that what I'm most likely to be saying in Japanese is not that there were times during the lecture when I didn't understand, but there were aspects or subtleties that I wasn't quite grasping.

So, especially if you're more advanced, it's good to be aware of this metaphorical depth of the concept of "place".

Now, "place" is also often used to mean a place not in space but in time.

And if we understand this analogy, we can understand certain usages that are often explained without explaining the structural underpinning for them, which ends up by just giving you a list of things to memorize and as usual say "well, this goes with this and happens to mean that and we don't particularly know why."

So, for example, we can use "tokoro" -- "place" -- with "A does B" sentences in all three tenses, that's to say, the past, the present, and the future.

So, for example, if we say, using the plain dictionary form of the word "taberu" -- "eat" (which, as we know, from our lesson on tenses is not present by default; it's future by default).

If we say "hirugohan-wo taberu tokoro da", what we're saying is "I'm just about to eat lunch."

What's the structure of this?

Well, it ends with "da", so we know that what we have is an "A is B" sentence, even though the original sentence sandwiched into it is an "A does B" sentence.

So we're saying that "(something) is place".

The zero-car here is "it", as it would be in English, and what it means is the present time, exactly as it does in English when we say "It's time to leave" -- "the present time is time to leave".

The "it" is "the present time" in both Japanese and English in these constructions.

So, we're saying "It (the present time) is I-will-eat-lunch time", so what it means is "I'm just about to eat lunch".

So how putting "tokoro da" onto this sentence changes it from what it would mean if we just said "hirugohan-wo taberu" is that it's telling us that we are right now at that place where I'm going to eat lunch, therefore I'm just about to eat lunch.

Not I'm going to eat lunch possibly in half-an-hour.

I'm just about to eat lunch right now.

This is the place where I'm just about to eat lunch.

"Hirugohan-wo taberu tokoro da."

Now, if we use it with the actual present, the continuous present, which is what we use when we're actually saying we're doing something right at this moment, so we say "hirugohan-wo tabete iru tokoro da", what we're saying is "I'm eating lunch right now."

And just as with the previous example, what that "tokoro da" is doing is making it immediate.

It's the difference in English between saying "I'm eating lunch" and "I'm eating lunch right now."

Now, in the past, if we say "hirugohan-wo tabeta tokoro da", what we're saying is "I just ate lunch."

The "tokoro da" is adding to that past tense the immediateness: "The place in time that we're at now is the place where I ate lunch / I just ate lunch."

Now, in this case we could say "hirugohan-wo tabeta bakari" - "I just ate lunch."

The two mean pretty much the same thing.

And I've seen textbooks giving us this set of rules : "You can use bakari with a noun.

You can say "Kono omise-wa pan bakari uru" -- "This shop sells nothing but bread" -- or we can say "hirogohan-wo tabeta bakari da" -- "I just ate lunch."

But you have to remember that the rules say that "tokoro" can't be used with a noun."

Now, this is true, but it's a strangely abstract way of putting it.

It's putting it as if these are just some random rules that somebody made up, perhaps in the Heian era because they had nothing better to do with their time.

In fact, if we understand the logic of it, we don't even need to be told this, because it's obvious.

I can say either "I just ate lunch" or I can say "I'm at the place where I've eaten lunch".

We can say "This shop just sells bread", but "this shop bread place sells" doesn't make any sense at all, does it?

And this is why I think it's so important to learn structure.

People sometimes say to me "Am I supposed to be working out all this structure you teach in every sentence I speak or read?"

And of course the answer to that is "No".

What you're supposed to be doing is getting used to Japanese by reading, listening, and preferably speaking too.

If you're not doing that, you'll never get used to the grammar however many textbooks you study.

But if you understand the structure you won't be confused by things like whether you can use "tokoro" with a noun or not, and why can't you use "tokoro" with a noun when you can use "bakari" with a noun, and you have to think all that out.

You don't have to do that because you understand how it's actually working.

This is what the textbooks could usefully be teaching, but they don't.

Now, having learned the structure, it's also important to be aware of the times when bits of the structure can get left off.

As with many regular set expressions, the copula "da" can be left off, and more than this, even the end of "tokoro" can be left off.

The "ro" can be left off and we can just say "toko".

This is the case in all languages, that there are places where, colloquially, we can leave bits out.

And so long as we know what the structure is, it's not very difficult to understand the omissions too.

So, we might say "Nagoya-ni chakurikushita toko" -- "I just landed at Nagoya."

And we often use these abbreviations like "toko" -- leaving off the "ro" and the "da" from "tokoro da" -- when we are trying to express a sense of immediacy.

But people do it on various occasions, just as they do the equivalent thing in English.

So, we see that "tokoro" can be literal, a "place in space".

It can express very abstract concepts like an "aspect of someone's personality", and it can very often mean a "place in time".

And it can be used in various ways as a place in time; for example, if someone says "ii tokoro-ni kita, ne?"

That is most likely to mean "You came at a good time, didn't you?" not "You came to a good place, didn't you?" although in fact it can mean either.

Remember that, in Japanese, context is king.