Verb nominalisation with こと

What is nominalisation and why should I care?

To nominalise a verb means to convert it to a noun, or noun phrase. This has a similar effect to talking about the concept of the verb rather than an instance of the verb.

Describing the rules of how this works in English is surprisingly difficult, as there are, naturally, a bunch of ways to do it that do not follow a clear set of rules.

For a few English examples:

• To arrive - an arrival

• To perform - a performance

• To discuss - a discussion

• To walk - a walk

The method of nominalising in the above examples involves using the suffixes -al, -ance, -tion, or changing nothing at all respectively! Isn't English such a pain... Thank goodness you already know it!

"-ing" in English can generally also be used for nominalisation, for example to walk - walking - I like walking. This is called the gerund and it, like most things ¹, has a wikipedia page ². However, in English, "ing" can also be used to describe continuous actions while remaining a verb (no nominalisation taking place), i.e. he is walking.

If you are aware of the 〜ている form in Japanese ³, you could be tempted to use it for nominalisation as well, due to it translating as "ing" in English. However, it only takes the continuous action element of "ing" and cannot be used to nominalise.

The benefit of all of this nominalisation business being that you can now use verbs in place of a noun, in order to describe "the act of doing something" using adjectives (epic) instead of adverbs (rubbish). If you are particularly minded to think of sentence structure in terms of blocks, think of nominalising as a converter from something else, to a noun.

How do you nominalise?

There are a few ways to nominalise verbs in Japanese, but this article just focuses on こと.

こと (事) just means "thing", and is usually written in kana when used to nominalise.

To nominalise a verb with こと, you just take the dictionary form of the verb (otherwise known as the plain present form, usually ending in る) and add こと as a suffix. I like to think of this as literally translating to "the act of 「verb」".

Trivial!

Some examples:

• 新聞を読むことが好きです。- しんぶんをよむことがすきです。- I like (the act of) reading newspapers.

• 毎日に歩くことが大切です。- まいにちにあるくことがたいせつです。- (the act of) walking everyday is important.

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Further reading:

• Stack overflow: Differences between こと and の as nominalisers