| To report hearsay use the following predicates with そうです -
soo desu. |
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In Lesson 13, we discussed the sentence-final expression soo desu which means "seemingly."
Here we will study another sentence-final soo desu,
which presents a "hearsay report."
The two soo desu differ not only in their semantics,
but also in the forms of predicates they are attached to.You can add the
soo desu of report to a sentence
ending in the short form. *1 |
*1 The soo desu of report is robustly invariant.
The only forms commonly used are soo desu and the
more casual soo da.
We do not use the negative soo ja arimasen,
and the past tense version soo deshita . |
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| If you heard someone say: |
| "Our Japanese class is fun.' |
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| You can report it as: |
| I have heard that their Japanese class is fun. |
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| "Our professor is very kind." |
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| I have heard that their professor is very kind. |
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| We did not have a class today. |
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| I've heard that they didn't have a class that day. |
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When we use soo desu, the reported speech retains the
tense and the polarity of the original utterance.
We simply turn the predicates into their short forms.
(Thus desu after a na-adjective or a noun
changes to da,
while desu after an i-adjective is left out.)
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| Compare the paradigms of the two soo desu. |