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こんいちは！
So I just came across this in Lang-8, and it’s been something I wanted to learn for a while so I hope you can help me out.
I wanted to say “I like to read.” I took a stab at this with. “よむ すきだ。”、and it got corrected to: “読む ことが すきだ.”
My question is, what is the ことが doing in there? I already knew “こと” as “thing”, and rikaikun confirms that, but I can’t make much sense of it on my own. If anyone has the time could they give me a quick overview of how to say “to like to do something” or point me to the appropriate page? I might not be to that point yet or I missed it. Thank you!
Eric
To generalize, こと is used in this case to make a verb behave like a noun. It is much like “-ing” in English, but that’s an over-simplification. Once you’ve done that you can attribute other things to it, like saying 読むことが好きだ
Another common example you may see is expressing the ability to do something, in the form 「dict. verb」こと が できる
This isn’t the only means of expressing such things, as you’ll sometimes see の serving a similar role as こと but its usage is a little different. The TF lesson on nominalization goes into more detail on that, however.
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This reply was modified 10 years, 11 months ago by
Jason.
P.S. It’s こんにちは. Be careful when using an IME, because odd things can happen when ん is followed by an あ-line or な-line character. =)
Haha thanks Joel, I dashed that off and didn’t check it, rough start to a post.
And thanks Jason, that helped a lot. The できる tip is great too, doubling up on my expressions in one sweet post. I’m somewhere in Season 5 now, good to know there will be a full explanation coming up down the road soon.
Thanks again for the help, both of you!
Eric
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This reply was modified 10 years, 11 months ago by
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