Drinking directly from the milk cartons . . . when did it change to straws? I don’t remember any school lunches where I drank milk with a straw.
ふ
増える
It’s increasing
せいひん
製品が増える
The product is increasing
- Literally, ‘manufactured good’.
- が follows the subject.
- The が particle points out what is increasing.
- が is used with intransitive verbs (when you are talking about something happening to something), which would make this a passive sentence.
かみ
紙の製品が増える
Paper products are increasing
- The particle の here is used to tell us what kind of product.
- の goes between two nouns or between nouns and adjectives that are kind-of nouns.
パックなど紙の製品が増える
Paper products such as containers are increasing
- パック covers a large range of items so context is important.
- The particle など can only follow nouns.
- など is used when you’re providing an example from an item category, which can be left out.
- If it’s not left out, then there is a の between the example and the category (see rule in the previous section).
- Since there would be two の’s in a row though, the の I’m talking about has been left out for better sentence flow.
ぎゅうにゅう
牛乳のパックなど紙の製品が増える
Paper products such as milk cartons are growing
- !!! So many の’s! Another reason the other one was left out.
- Are you seeing the nesting going on here?
- It makes more sense for ‘containers’ to be ‘cartons’ now with the new info.
の
飲める牛乳のパックなど紙の製品が増える
There are more paper products such as milk cartons from which we can drink
- Whenever you see a plain/casual/dictionary form of a verb in front of a noun, the verb or verb phrase modifies that noun. In other words, it’s giving more details!
- You can think of it as answering the question: what kind of milk carton?
- We were losing the verb so I massaged and moved it.
なくても飲める牛乳のパックなど紙の製品が増える
There are more paper products such as milk cartons from which we can drink even without it
- The grammar point, verb て-form + も, means ‘even though/if’ verb.
- When used with the casual negative of a verb like in this sentence, the last い changes to く. (We’ve seen this rule apply in many different places; remember い-adjectives with なる?)
- The original verb conjugation is ない, the negative of ある, so ‘not be’ or ‘not have’.
ストローがなくても飲める牛乳のパックなど紙の製品が増える
More paper products such as milk cartons we can still drink from without straws
- が marks the subject.
- The が particle is always used with ある / ない when you want to talk about what is there or not there (or what you have or don’t have).
* I could translate this more directly as “Paper products such as milk cartons from which we can drink even without straws grow” but it’s awkward and stiff.