ShirumA Wakaru
To Know You Is Not Necessarily to Understand You
Believe it or not, one of the first instructors I had when I was a sincere, impressionable beginning student of Japanese at a great educational institution that shall remain nameless but which is situated very close to the shores of Lake Michigan in a very windy city, once told me that the reason the Japanese say shitte iru rather than shim for "to know" was to avoid the embarassment of having to say shirimasu, containing the shiri that means "backside" (in the sense of "butt" or "tush"). Even more amazing than the fact that she told me this was that I BELIEVED HER!
What's that? They told you the same thing?
No, impossible. Any decent textbook will give you the straight dope early on, complete with the information that it's okay to say shiri in shirimasen when you have to tell someone you don't know something.
Well, if shirimasen is okay, why not shirimasu?
Obviously, there is something more going on here than delicate avoidance of an anatomical feature—especially among the Japanese, who are far less delicate than we are in discussing physical matters.
The fact is that shim does not mean "to know." It means "to come to know"—"to find out," "to learn."
As the Japanese conceive it, "knowing" consists of finding out about something and keeping it in your brain. When you want to say "I know" in Japanese, you have to say "I have found out about that and I still have it up here where it belongs," or, "I am in a state of having found out."
Shitte im is very common, but you won't hear shim being used very often in conversation. Unless you realize
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that shim doesn't mean "to know," however, it could seem stranger than it actually is when you encounter it, as more often happens, in written material. Thus, when Nakamura Mitsuo tells us that the Japanese mazu gaikei no moho ni yotte kagaku o shiri [blush] etc., he is saying they first learned about science through the imitation of external forms, not that they knew science—and certainly not in the biblical sense.
When you want to say "I don't know" in Japanese, you need to say "I haven't found out about it yet" {shirimasen) rather than "I am not in a state of having found out about it" (shitte imasen), which, if you could get away with it, would sound more like a declaration of ignorance to be maintained: "I intend to remain in a state of not having found out about it," and although this may, in fact, reflect your own personal conviction, it would sound very strange.
Aside from these problems of meaning and form, shim is not too mysterious. It is transitive, taking direct objects the same way that "know" does in English: Ano hito o shitte imasu ka I "Do you know him?" For speakers of English, however, wakaru is much trickier.
Wakaru, when it causes trouble, does so through a combination of back-translation and misunderstanding of wa. Because "understand" is a transitive verb in English ("I understand that"), students tend to think of wakaru as a verb that people do to things (Watashi wa sore o wakaru: wrong). Under ordinary circumstances, wakaru does not take an o-object. People don't wakam things; things themselves do wakaru: they "are clear" or they "are understandable," and if we happen to be in the neighborhood, they are clear to us. Notice I said to us. If we are going to put people into a sentence about things being clear, they are usually followed by ni, as in Watashi ni wa waka-ranai. When the people in the sentence are not followed
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by ni, you should think of this as a kind of contraction: Watashi wa wakaranai is short for Watashi ni wa wakaranai I "To me, it is not clear."
The trouble probably starts with those contracted forms. Watashi wa wakaranai looks awfully close to the transitive English "I don't understand (it)." If you've read "Wa and Ga: The Answers to Unasked Questions," however, you realize that a vwz-topic is never the subject of a verb. And if you've read the paragraph before this one, you know that people don't do wakaru: things do it themselves, so for that reason, too, watashi can't be the subject of wakaru. Kenkyusha gives us Share ga wakaru as "to see [i.e., understand, or get] a joke" and Share ga wakaranai as "miss the point of a joke." In both cases, you are saying that the joke itself (subject marked by ga) wakaru's or doesn't wakaru. If we put "me" into the latter sentence, we get a form that looks like this:
Watashi ni wa sono share ga wakaranai.
Let this be our model for a "full" expression in which the understander and the understandee are both named in a sentence using wakaru. A natural English version of this model would be "I don't get that joke," but of course it is a good translation only because it avoids any attempt to reflect the Japanese structure, which is something like "To me, that joke doesn't clarify itself." Perhaps better would be: "That joke doesn't make sense to me."
So you think, Hey, that's easy! The subject of wakaru is going to be marked by ga! No problem!
Uh, not so fast. Sometimes it'll be ga but often it'll be wa, too.
And this brings us to another source of vagueness regarding wakaru. It seems to be drowning in wa's: some-
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times the understander is marked by a wa, and sometimes the thing the person is understanding or not understanding is marked with a wa instead of a nice, clean ga. Let's look at some of the examples from Kenkyusha's long definition of wakaru.
Kimi ni wa koko no imi ga wakaru ka I "Can you make out the meaning of this passage?" This corresponds to our "full" model and should be no problem—unless you're not friends with the speaker, who is being far from polite.
Watashi no iu koto ga wakarimasu ka I "Do you understand what I'm saying?" Here, the "you" is understood from context, but otherwise we're still with the model.
Sonna koto wa watashi ni wa chinpun-kanpun de wakaranai I "It's all Greek to me." Here, the "to me" looks familiar, but the "matter" that we are not understanding is marked by wa and comes at the beginning of the sentence. If you've read "Wa and Ga" and "The Myth of the Subjectless Sentence," though, this shouldn't be much of a problem. "As for matters such as that: to me, they [zero pronoun: actual subject] are nonsense and un-understandable."
Kimi no iu imi wa wakatte iru I "I know what you mean." "As far as the meaning of what you're saying goes, it [zero pronoun] is in a state of having become clear." (More on wakatte iru later.)
Kare ni wa sono share wa wakaranakatta I "The joke was lost upon him." Wait a minute, here's the same dictionary that gave us share ga wakaranai now suggesting share wa wakaranai. Why can't they be more consistent? Actually, with a negative verb like this, wa would be more common than the ga of the model sentence, merely because in a negative sentence you usually want to throw the emphasis ahead to the negative verb. With wa, it's more
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"He didn't get it." With ga, it's more "He didn't get it."
Sore o wakaraseru koto ga dekinakatta I "I could not get it across to them." This might look like an o-object with wakaru, but with the causative, you're causing somebody to act upon something. Plain vanilla wakaru does not take objects—except (there's always an exception), as Makino and Tsutsui point out, "when 'non-spontaneous comprehension' is involved ... in which the experiencer makes a conscious effort to understand something," e.g., Jakku wa Rinda no kimochi o wakard to shinai I "Jack does not try to understand Linda's feelings."
And finally a word on permutations: wakaru, wakatta, wakatte iru: "It is clear," "It has (just) become clear," and "It is in a state of having become clear (some time ago)." In English, we might say for these, respectively, "I understand," "Oh, now I understand!" and "Alright already!" Wakatte iru is a way of shutting someone up: "Look, that was clear to me long before you opened your mouth" = "I know." Of course, if you politen it up, wakatte imasu, it's a bit softer. Wakarimasu tells people you are understanding what they are now telling you. "Is it clear? Yes, it's clear." Wakarimashita denotes instantaneous understanding of something you hadn't seen before: "I see!"
If you read Makino and Tsutsui's neat little article on wakaru, meaning "the [spontaneous] process of figuring something out," in contrast to shim, meaning "to get some raw information from some outside source," you, too, will doubtless find yourself saying, Aa, wakarimashitaV This is another instance in which English tends to fudge distinctions that Japanese keeps clear. We say "I know," both when we mean "I comprehend that concept" and when we mean "I am aware of that fact." So the answer to "What are you going to do tonight?" is "I don't know yet," meaning "I haven't figured it out yet"/ Mada wakarimasen, not
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"I have not come to know that fact yet" / Mada shiri-masen. JSL 1:10:280-81 also offers some enlightening analyses and the useful contrasting pair:
Tanaka-san o shitte imasu ka I "Do you know Mr./s. Tanaka?"
Michi ga wakarimasu ka I "Do you know the way?"
Taming Tame
The word tame can be confusing because it seems to have two entirely different—in fact, virtually opposite—meanings. Sometimes it seems to mean "because so-and-so happened," and at others it seems to mean "in order to make so-and-so happen," which is sort of close to "for the sake of," another common interpretation. How can we tell the difference? By far, the easiest way is to ask the author. Failing that, we are left with our old friend, G. D. Context. One clue that will not work is the presence or absence of ni after the tame. Either kind of tame can have a ni after it, so don't expect a mechanical approach to work. Look at these pairs:
Shiken no tame (ni) benkyo shita I "I studied for the exam."
Shiken no tame (ni) ikenakunatta I "Because of the exam, I couldn't go."
*
Sakana o taberu tame ni tsuri o shite iru I "He is fishing in order to eat fish."
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