194 CHAPTER 4. PARTICLES
concepts X and Y. Another example to illustrate this:
literally: ”To the extent of doing it, one gets beĴer (at it).”
meaning: ”GeĴing beĴer the more (you) do it.”
Hopefully this makes the following sentence understandable:Before offering the translation, I’ll give you the translation for the
individual words, in the hope that what I end up offering is a translation
that seems obvious: means art, means ’to watch/to look at’ and
means beautiful. Literally this sentence would come down to ”Art,
should one look at it, to the extent of looking at it, it’s beautiful”. The trick
is now of course to turn this literal translation into something that actually
makes sense in English:
”As far as Art goes, the more (often) [you] look at it, the more beau-
tiful it becomes.”
Hopefully at this point you’ll go ”yes, that’s obvious”. If so, then
good. If not, then that’s in line with what many people experience when
they first come across used in this particular sense. The paĴern used
here is quite particular:
with X a verb and Y some statement, ”([X] in + ) [X] [Y]”
translates to ”The more one X’s, the more Y”.Another example using this paĴern is:”The more (you) listen to it, the beĴer (you)’ll understand it.”
The reason it means this, is because the extents of the initial verb
action and the conclusion are linked by.
Just as can be used for a ”the more X, the more Y”, it can be
used to construct a negative ”The more X, the less Y” sentence:
”The cheaper cars are, the uglier they are.”One of the things that tends to trip up people a lot with is the fact
that even though the Japanese paĴern has three verbs, the English transla-
tion has only two. The thing to remember is that [ + +