It takes me more time to size out three note boxes than it took Paracite to translate this. I mean, not like it's complex, but you don't usually see the notes on the image when the page refreshes after swapping the source from the direct link to the page.
It's Paracite. That person can tear down the Jap-Eng language barrier faster than I can pronounce the phrase "language barrier". It's amazing, no? I am very thankful for this.
Meanwhile I have no faith in my abilities and have to type it all out and have a dictionary handy 90% of the time when I really should only need a dictionary 45% of the time. And I've looked up the '-zu' conjugation/associated grammar 5 times in the last 3 month (one of the bits my classes/textbooks never covered, that and non-Tokyo accents).
Meanwhile I have no faith in my abilities and have to type it all out and have a dictionary handy 90% of the time when I really should only need a dictionary 45% of the time. And I've looked up the '-zu' conjugation/associated grammar 5 times in the last 3 month (one of the bits my classes/textbooks never covered, that and non-Tokyo accents).
What, the negative -zu? It's from Classical Japanese (most of the time in the 未然形 (imperfective), it's not surprising that it's not covered in standard textbooks - even though it's not terribly uncommon. I remember learning about it in Japanese linguistics classes before seeing it higher-level Japanese language classes, though. Fun fact! In classical, ず can also conjugate into ぬ (in the 連体形) and ね (in the 仮定), but with the merging of the 連体形 (attributive) and 終止形 (sentence ending) forms over time, you can use ぬ in many places where you could also use ず! E.g. 知らぬ・知らず. It's not 100% the same, and there exists grammatical restrictions on proper usage, but The More You Know~♪
Generally, it's fine to just do a straight ず>ない in your head, you'll be right 90% of the time for general meaning.
Most classes don't have the time to cover non-standard accents, beyond where words have snuck into standard Japanese from other dialects (as aspects of Kansai-ben (and more specifically, Osaka-ben spoken by comedians) has). It's not something that the average language learner will encounter in any great capacity unless they're physically in the place where it's spoken. The real shame is that there's a great deal of research and learning material to help people with dialectal Japanese - but it's mostly in Japanese.
If you want to know more, there are basic primers on Japanese linguistics in English that can get you a good understanding of the underpinnings of the language, so you can try to understand where dialects came from, rather than just rote learning the differences - such as the だ・や split between Eastern and Western Japanese, both of which the classical copula なり, hence why they're both semantically the same.
Also, I always have my dictionaries (both grammar and vocabulary) handy when translating. Vocabulary always has been my weak point. That and going from English to (written) Japanese.
