8.3 スーパー で — at the supermarket — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read a five-hundred-beat narrative in the past tense. Recognise borrowed words in katakana at reading speed, without sounding each one out. Follow a reason given with the clause-final particle of cause. Read a line of reported speech, which is marked but not punctuated as in English. Prerequisites : lessons 8.2 and 2.4 — the second text, and the borrowing rules. Count the katakana as you read. This text has more of it than anything else in the course, because a supermarket is one of the places where modern Japanese borrows most heavily, and almost every borrowing is from English. That makes this the easiest of the four texts in one respect and no easier in any other: the grammar has moved on again, into the past tense and into the reason-giving and quoting patterns. Read it once for the shape and once for the words. About this text Five hundred beats, nine paragraphs, one shopping trip. Written for this course. The vocabulary is what you have met up to 7.8, plus the borrowings, which are treated as free — and the next section argues that they genuinely are. The whole text is in the past. 8.1 was in the present and 8.2 mixed present and continuing; this one narrates. Every polite verb ends in the past form you met in 4.14, and the one negative in the fourth paragraph is the past negative, which is four syllables long and worth reading twice. Two things appear that were not in the grammar volume. The particle at the end of a clause meaning because , in the second and eighth paragraphs, and the quoting particle before the verb for saying, in the eighth. Neither has been taught; both are transparent in context, and meeting them here is the point. The second phase deals with them properly. Read it first, then read this Go and read the text before the next section. It is a separate document beside this one. The notes below assume you have been through it once, and the first reading is the only one you get. What the text does Nine paragraphs in the order of the trip: arriving, vegetables, bread, meat and fish, dairy, sweets, the till, the bag question, home. The structure is the route through the shop, which is why you can follow it even where a word escapes you — the same principle as the clock in 8.1. The comparisons are from 4.15. The third paragraph picks between two kinds of bread with the side-phrase, twice, and settles it with a verb meaning to decide on that takes the particle meaning into . That verb is how Japanese chooses from a menu, a shelf or a list, and it is worth stealing. The reason particle. たかかったので、やめました — the carrots were expensive, so I gave up on them. The reason comes first and the consequence second, which is the opposite of the English order with because and the same as the order with so . Japanese always puts the reason first; there is no construction that puts it last. The joke. The sixth paragraph puts the chocolate in the basket, takes it out again, and then puts it back. Nothing in the vocabulary tells you it is funny; the timing does. Noticing that a text has a tone is a later reading skill and this is a very small first instance of it. The reported speech. The eighth paragraph quotes the assistant and then the writer. Japanese marks a quotation with a particle immediately after it and before the verb of saying — the brackets are optional and are used here for clarity. There is no change of tense or pronoun of the kind English reported speech requires. How much of it was free Count them. The text has seventeen different words in katakana: the shop, the list, the pocket, the trolley, the corner, the tomato, the lettuce, the bread, the croissant, the yoghurt, the cheese, Germany, the chocolate, the till, the card, the reusable bag and the coffee. Of those, fifteen are from English and fourteen are recognisable on sight to an English speaker who has done volume 2. The three that are not: the word for the till, which is a clipping of register ; the word for the reusable bag, which is eco bag and exists in no other language; and the name of Germany, which came through Dutch and looks nothing like the English. The croissant is from French and gives no trouble. That is about a fifth of the content words in the text. It is a real advantage and it is worth being clear about its limits: the borrowings are all nouns, they are all concrete, and they carry none of the grammar. You cannot read a Japanese sentence by knowing its nouns — but in a shop, a station or a restaurant, knowing the nouns is often enough to act. Notice also that the borrowings are not the words for the things Japan had before contact: the vegetables, the fish, the meat, the milk and the sweets are all native words in this text, and the packaged, the imported and the institutional are borrowed. That division runs through the whole vocabulary and is the most reliable guide to which word to guess. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. On Friday evening I went to the supermarket near the station. My shopping list is in my pocket. At the entrance I took a cart, and first I went to the vegetable section. I put tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce in the basket. The carrots were expensive, so I didn't get them. Next is bread. There was sliced bread and there were croissants. The croissants looked more delicious, but the sliced bread is cheaper. Today I decided on the sliced bread. In the meat section I bought one pack of chicken. I looked at the fish too, but it was not very fresh. Then I took milk, yogurt, and cheese. The cheese is from Germany. It is a little expensive, but I buy it sometimes. Finally I went to the sweets section. I put some chocolate in the basket and immediately put it back. After that, I put it in again. Many people were lined up at the checkout. I waited fifteen minutes. It came to three thousand eigh