Kids' stuff

It's not very difficult to get hold of digital versions of Japanese children's books, written in hiragana only. I thought it would be a good idea to go through one of these 'books' (each book consists of no more than a few dozen sentences) and try to translate it as best we can. Doing so can help us grasp the grammar better.

I'd like to try my hand at a story called さるかにがっせん。 This is story #9 in the おはなしシリーズ series, for those of you following along at home. Already, the title is tricky. It turns out that it's three words: さる, meaning monkey, かに, meaning crab, and がっせん, which isn't listed in the dictionary. Some Googling reveals that it's a changed version of かっせん, which means battle. So the title is Monkey Crab Battle.
Lesson learned: words can change their initial sound in context. Compare fun/bun/pun.

On to the first sentence, which reads:

おむすびを　ひろった　かにに　さるが　いいました。

Luckily for us, there are spaces for the little kids, so we can tell the parts of the sentence apart:

• The first part ends in を so it's a direct object.
• The second ends in た so it's a verb in the past tense.
• The third ends in に so it's a prepositional phrase ('to X', 'in Y' or something).
• The fourth ends in が so it's a subject
• The fifth we already know as the polite past tense of いう, to say.

Working our way back from the end, the part before が is the subject, the person saying something, which is さる, which just like in the title, means monkey. So we have 'The monkey said'. The part before に is かに, the crab from the title. So, 'The monkey said to the crab.'
Then before that is a verb, and not a -て form, but a final form (past tense). So it's the past tense of something like ひろる, ひろす, ひろく etc. Searching for ひろ in the dictionary reveals a verb ひろう, meaning to pick up or to find. And finally, the object is おむすび which means rice ball.
So our final word-for-word translation is:
rice ball[obj] find[past] crab[indir obj] monkey[subj] say[polite;past]
It's important to realize that in Japanese, it's very easy to use a sentence as a modifier. That's what's going on here: the only way you can explain the final form find[past] sitting in the middle of a sentence is that it modifies something. In this case, it modifies the next word, かに, and the verb has an object, which is the おむすび or rice ball. So this is not just any crab we're talking about, but a 'found a rice ball' crab. Or as we would phrase it, the crab who found a rice ball.
Lesson learned: A final form in mid-sentence is a modifier.
So the full sentence runs:

The monkey said to the crab, who had found a rice ball:

So what did the monkey say? That is the next sentence, and also a next blog post.