lucasburns wrote:Ok, sorry for the Osaka-ben.
Can someone help me. I really have no idea what I learnt yesterday in my Japanese lesson.
Can someone explain what the difference is between:
カレンダーに今月のよていが書いてあります
without kanji: カレンダーにこんげつのよていがかいてあります - which is what I learnt yesterday, and:
カレンダーに今月のよいてを書いた。
I don't understand English grammar (!) so if you know the answer, please don't respond in terms of transitive and intransitive verbs without an explanation of those terms in simple english
EXTREMELY easy grammar point that is always very, very poorly explained in texts.
カレンダーに今月の予定が書いてあります。
"This month's plans have been written in the calendar".
カレンダーに今月の予定を書いた。
"[I] wrote this month's plans in the calendar."
Topic of sentence one? Plans.
Topic of sentence two? Me.
So in a way, you can think of it as an alternative to passive voice. Shifting the stress away from the "doer" and onto the "object".
The -te arimasu form is simple. What does "arimasu" mean? "To be". And the -te form can be used to express a means of doing something. So it literally means "to be in such-and-such state", and it's therefore similar to the "-te imasu" form. The difference is that "-te arimasu" implies that "someone or something is responsible".
Check these (famous?) example sentences:
窓が開いています。= "The window is open." (Perhaps the wind blew it open... You don't know. You're merely stating a fact: "The window is open.")
窓が開けてあります。= "The window has been opened [by someone]." or "Someone opened the window." (In this case, you have a reason to believe that someone or something opened the window. It was not the window's own action.)
Note that "-te imasu" takes an intransitive verb and "-te arimasu" takes a transitive verb (in this case).
