Working on renshuu sentence questions, I run across this one:
豚肉は食べられないんです。
Can someone help me understand what the ん does here? This sentence doesn't seem to use it like んです as defined in the renshuu dictionary, or like ん is defined either. Does it have something to do with the negative potential form of 食べる?
It is in fact the んです / のです grammar, but the thing that の is standing for here is not the “expectation” of anything, but rather the issue at hand.
I would probably translate this sentence as, “The thing is, I don’t eat pork,” or “It’s that I don’t eat pork.”
A lot of English translations tend to ignore this construction, which is probably fine as long as it doesn’t change the interpretation.
Jordan, however, was a stickler for always translating it, and her textbook provides some excellent examples of natural sounding translations in the sample dialogues.
