(They still pronounce it "de", only the writing is different.)
In a different pattern, mainland China simplified 龍 to 龙 while Japan simplified it to 竜. Despite being a "simplified" form, 竜 is actually the oldest of those three characters.
>> For those who don't know Japanese, only following my rule, can you identify the Japanese characters in the sentence above?
I would technically meet that requirement, but knowledge of Chinese makes the question pretty easy regardless of knowing Japanese. ;)
Found the loophole in my requirements! Haha :) Had a good laugh when you pointed that out, thank you. Showed a quirk in my reasoning.
You also did a wonderful job explaining the simplified/traditional characters and the overlap between them and I learned a bit of trivia!
来週は学校に行きません
If you search for "来週は学校に行きません" on Google this thread is the only result.
I hope you don't find it nonsensical, though, I understood it just fine.
And checking ghits for plain forms shows:
"学校に行く" - 3,680,000
"学校へ行く" - 444,000
so I think the other way is actually the variant!
BTW, I feel like "学校に行く" - where に means "for/into" - has a sense of "going to school to go to class", but "学校へ行く" - where へ means "towards" - has a sense of "going to the school building as a physical place".
Here's a forum thread about it:
来週は学校に行きません
roughly translates as "Next week, I won't go for school."
来週は学校*へ*行きません
Short answer: the sentence is fine as it stands, although your alternative is equally grammatical (if less idiomatic - "学校へ行かない" gets about 1/4 of the ghits of "学校に行かない" by my count, and personally I'd never use へ).
Long answer: Japanese draws a distinction between verbs of A→B movement (e.g. 行く to go; 引っ越す to move house; 移動する to move/change location) and verbs that describe the manner of motion (e.g. 歩く to walk; 走る to run). The A→B verbs can happily take an indirect object complement (a に phrase) as the destination, because there's really no other possible meaning. You can't "go for school", as you put it.
Verbs of motion, on the other hand, are less flexible. These can't take an indirect object complement, and need a more expressly destinatory case (think へ、へと、まで). The reason for this is that a change of location is not implied in the verb, however counterintuitive that might seem to an English speaker.
Interestingly, motion verbs can take a direct object (を), such as in 街を歩く 'to walk around town'. Another indication that they're not strictly destinatory. Also they can take adverbs that further qualify motion, such as ぽつぽつ歩く 'to dawdle/mosey/toddle'(? tough to translate), whereas 行く can't. A→B verbs can however take adverbs that qualify the speed, like ゆっくり行く 'to go unhurriedly' - but this is different from ゆっくり歩く 'to walk in a slow manner'.
This is my first ever comment on HN so I've tried to be as informative as possible... If you have any counterexamples I'd be happy to try to explain them.
Yeah sure, in vernacular construct, which explains more Google results.
You can go quite a long comment chain in Japanese without seeing の. I always tell people "look for lots of simple characters that can be written with only 2 or 3 lines mixed in between a bunch of really complex characters".
For those who don't know Japanese, only following my rule, can you identify the Japanese characters in the sentence above?Except with names, Japanese writing will have a bunch of Chinese characters with many "simple" Japanese characters sprinkled in between. To someone who doesn't read Japanese, both are "unintelligible" but I find people can identify the more complex Kanji from the more simple Kana quite easily and can point them out with pretty good accuracy, even if they can't read any of the kana.
The above example without Japanese characters if you'd like to see if you guessed correctly: