This is the exact same function of the word 'legend ary' that came from 'legend.' In the phrase above, the word 'mystery,' nazo 謎, became 'myster ious,' nazo no 謎の. The mysterious idol producer!! Tatsumi Koutarou!! Which is just another reason why you shouldn't rely on translations too much. So sometimes even if two no-adjectives work the same way, the way they become translated to English is different. On the other hand, English and Japanese are still different languages.

Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu 伝説の勇者の伝説.

Japanese words do tend to make sense and follow a semblance of logic, and no-adjectives often mean the same thing in different contexts. Of course, even if such ambiguity didn't exist, there's still the ambiguity of Japanese plurals and the lack of a, an, the, definite and indefinite articles, so you never get rid of ambiguity anyway.īut not everything is an ambiguous Asiatic nightmare. (he just told you about hitting an arrow into another arrow. Instead, we'd have to interpret it as:Īlthough the above is a rather far-fetched example, it illustrates that the same no-adjective can mean two different things in two different contexts. Naturally, an elder isn't a ' child that is a woman,' so 'that girl' doesn't work here. That isn't to say onna no ko always means 'girl.' It usually means 'girl.'īut say you're reading a manga and a character says the phrase above while he pointing at an elder woman. When we try to connect onna to ko, our first guess is probably going to be the possessive: 'the child of a woman,' that is, 'a woman's child.' However, the term onna no ko normally means 'a child that is a woman,' instead.

And it means that a same phrase no の phrase can mean two different things in two different contexts where they have two different variants of the genitive case. This means that there's ambiguity on what no の really means in a phrase if you don't have necessary context. You have to guess from context and from the nouns involved. There's no way to tell what variant of the genitive case a no-adjective is just by looking at it.

For example, sometimes the genitive describes what something is or is made of: The translation above using 'of' and the contraction ''s' will not work for all cases. However, the genitive case isn't limited only to possessions.

In English, this is usually associated with the 'possessive' case, in which a noun possesses the other. The term 'genitive case' refers to having a noun as modifying another word, usually a noun. Furthermore, no-adjectives can be used in a hundred different ways, so it'd be very difficult to explain what is a no-adjective exactly, and perhaps even a futile effort. There doesn't seem to be a Japanese equivalent for this term. The term ' no-adjective' is mostly used when teaching Japanese to non-native speakers, because a noun marked by the genitive case-marking particle no の acts like an adjective.

Nihonjin no shiranai nihongo d-addicts