Adjectives.. I ate a tasty fish

[Ensomniak86]

I read somewhere that you can take an -i adjective and turn it into a -na adjective by dropping the final -i before attaching it to the noun. Ex. Oishi na sakana wo tabeta. I don't know if I was wrong or not, but when trying to talk fast, I tended to use this form a lot when I was over there. This is probably colloquial though.

[skrhgh3b]

well, i know 大きな is pretty common, but i don't know if this applies to any i-adjective. if i make any sweeping statements, harisen and kates will hit me with a rolled up newspaper

[Harisenbon]

Ensomniak86,
Wow. Another Tennessian. How crazy. Anyhow, you cannot change an い adjective to a な adjective or vice versa. They are what they are, and are grammatically conjugated differently.

HOWEVER, there are a few adjectives that are な adjectives, wherein the な is often dropped, and used like an い adjective.
The main ones are
おおきい
ちいさい
きれい

[remyremy]

so so sorry to seemingly intrude on this thread, but for all those offering 'Yuube tabeta sakana wa oishikatta' as an alternative, aren't verbs meant to come at the end of a setence?

sorry, please enlighten me .. -_-

[InsanityRanch]

remyremy wrote:
so so sorry to seemingly intrude on this thread, but for all those offering 'Yuube tabeta sakana wa oishikatta' as an alternative, aren't verbs meant to come at the end of a setence?

sorry, please enlighten me .. -_-

Verbs do come at the end... of clauses. In the example above, "yuube (watashi ga) tabeta" is a subordinate clause -- the fish (I) ate last night. The verb, or rather the clause implied by the verb, is modifying the noun "fish".

In general, when you see a terminal form of a verb and it isn't the end of a sentence, what you have is a subordinate clause. Often the verb will be followed directly by a noun. Or the noun may appear later after further modifiers. For example: "yuube tabeta, sugoku chisana sakana ha oishikatta" -- the teeny little fish I ate last night were delicious.

This is confusing when you first come across it. In fact, I still get foxed by this construction on occasion, thinking I've reached the end of something when in fact it's just a modifier for a noun-to-be-specified-later. You can and usually should leave out the subject of any clause where the subject can be understood from context, which adds to the possible confusion.

HTH!

Shira

[remyremy]

haha, that helped quite a lot, thanks! its quite a coincidence actually, i was thinking today how to make longer sentences with multiple verbs/differing statements into just one sentence. i guess this is part of the answer!~

thanks!~