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Ok. The whole sentence is:

Person A bandages Person B's arm.

Person B says: ありがとう。ずいぶん慣れた処置ね？看護婦でもやってたの？

I get what the sentences are saying.

But! For the life of me I can't parse ずいぶん慣れた処置ね？ into that makes any sense to me. All I can come up with is: "You do very accustomed treatments." Which I know barely makes any sense (grammatical or otherwise).

Can someone please break this down for me?

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“I get what the sentences are saying.” Probably not. –  Tsuyoshi Ito Oct 6 '11 at 18:13
The subtitle says that ずいぶん慣れた処置ね？ means: You're very experienced at this, huh? But grammatically getting from the japanese sentence to the english translation is what is giving me problems. –  dotnetN00b Oct 6 '11 at 18:21

3 Answers 3

up vote 4 down vote accepted

ずいぶん 'very' is an adverb and an intensifier modifying 慣れた 'became accustomed'. ずいぶん慣れた is a relative clause modifying 処置 'treatment'. ずいぶん慣れた処置 is a nominal predicate. Here, its subject is omitted. The copula is optionally omitted before certain elements including the sentence-final particle . To reconstruct what is omitted, it would be like this:

'(Your treatment) (is) a very accustomed treatment, isn't it?'

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Ok. I think I got it. How's this: (You are) very experienced with treatment?" –  dotnetN00b Oct 6 '11 at 19:20
What the heck??? –  istrasci Jan 27 '12 at 0:19
What is your motivation for deleting the answer? –  Flaw Jan 27 '12 at 0:39
Please see: meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/603/… –  Questioner Jan 27 '12 at 3:40
@sawa: please refrain from these (recurrent) post-deletion tantrums. If there is an issue to sort out, feel free to contact an admin... –  Dave Jan 27 '12 at 12:40

慣れる can also mean "become skilled at", so it's more like "You've become quite skilled at this treatment. Were you a nurse or something?" More literally, it would be like "This is a treatment at which you've become quite skilled." There is a です that's omitted before ね？; if this wasn't obvious to you, that may be the reason you had trouble with it. So there's no "do" in it as you were thinking. It's an "is".

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Would "experienced with" also be a good/decent translation of nareru? –  dotnetN00b Oct 6 '11 at 18:29
I would say so. –  istrasci Oct 6 '11 at 19:41

I don't have much to add to the already posted answers, except you might be interested in knowing that omitting the だ before ね is mostly female language, and would rarely be used by males.

Of course, this distinction only applies after nouns and na-adjective stems, since verbs and i-adjectives don't have a だ to begin with.

Another sentence ender that this phenomenon occurs for is よ:

好きよ！ I like/love you! (mainly female)

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