Quote:
Originally Posted by robhol
Thanks, but.. kanji flood, and I didn't get all that much from it. Some of those answers sounded a bit vague and unsure, which doesn't really make me confident in them.
And I have to say, I trust people here a lot more than random people on a random website.
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こと is one of the ways to turn a verb into a noun. English doesn't do it exactly parallel to the way Japanese does, but it's like turning "to eat" into "eating."
Other "nominalizers" are の and もの and わけ and ところ.
For example,
ピザをつくることができます。
pizza-OBJECT to-make-NOMINALIZER-SUBJECT able-to.
[i] can make pizza. (or, more literally, "I can do 'making pizza.'")
There are rules for when to use こと、の、もの, but I'll let someone more skilled than I talk about those. There are subtle differences I haven't fully internalized yet.
If words like "cleft" and "nominalizer" and "accusative tense" are your thing, then read:
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/lin/nomz/pdf/...s_Japanese.pdf
It's a linguist's approach to Japanese (and Korean) nominalizers.