であることに

Hey guys!

Another quote from Steve’s book.

「フランス 人 は 論理 的である こと に 誇り を 持つ 。」

“The French are proud of their logic.” Is this correct?

I’m mainly confused with “論理的であることに”

How is で and に being used here?

Thank you, and sorry for all the questions!

You can break it down like this:

論理的 logical
【論理的】である being [logical]
【論理的である】こと The state of [being logical] (The こと basically just makes the preceding part into a noun.)

【X】に誇りを持つ To be proud of [X]
フランス人は【X】に誇りを持つ The French are proud of [X].

フランス人は【論理的であること】に誇りを持つ。
The French are proud of [being logical].

「フランス人は論理的であることに誇りを持つ。」 is certainly a reasonable translation for “The French are proud of their logic,” and probably flows better than the literal translation would.

Does that help?

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Pres, do you find it easier to read something when there is more Kanji? With my dictionary, when there isn’t kanji and lots of hiragana lots of words seem to have many, many different meanings.

Once you get used to them, definitely. Reading for example a children’s picture book with lots of hiragana and few kanji is actually a lot slower for me than just normal text (assuming I know the kanji used, which in a children’s book I normally do). I have to kind of sound it out in my head then listen to what I just said…

Japanese is really designed to be understood by using the kanji. Even my wife (Japanese) sometimes comments that some dialog on TV, especially from more literary book adaptations, is designed to be read rather than just heard, and that it’s kind of confusing until she sees it in writing.