July 15, 2011

Kotoaru

In Dog Days, and a few other times, there are places where someone is presented with an offer or demand,  and they respond kotoaru which gets translated as "I refuse." (There was at least one instance of that in one of the Keroro Gunsou movies that I can remember. I think it was the third one.)

"aru" is obviously one aspect of the copula. Is this ç•° the koto? Making it someone similar to saying chigau!, perhaps?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 07:27 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 It's "kotowaru" [æ–­ã‚‹]. Literally, "I refuse." Aru isn't actually the copula (though it is part of the copula in "de aru.") But this isn't "aru." Just part of this verb.

Posted by: tds at July 15, 2011 07:48 PM (BlygJ)

2

I still have problems parsing some of the sounds. That one sure wasn't obvious. And I have a terrible time differentiating りょ from よ, for instance.

Anyway, thanks.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 15, 2011 08:08 PM (+rSRq)

3 It's hard. I'd like to think my Japanese is at least conversational, but I still sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between certain phonemes. I get better at it every year, but that has a lot to do with the fact that my Japanese gets better in other respects.

I wouldn't mistake "kotowaru" for "koto aru," but that is mostly because I would know that it was "kotowaru" from the context. I'm not sure how well I would do at transcribing a string of nonsense from Japanese. Phonetics is definitely the hardest thing about a foreign language for adult learners.

Posted by: tds at July 15, 2011 08:41 PM (BlygJ)

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