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The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

317 points by tav 10y ago

myrandomcomment 10y ago
So I am sitting in Ebisu in Tokyo right now. I spend about 3-4 months a year here and have for about 8 years. My understanding of spoken Japanese is pretty decent. However it is by pure memorization over time. This just sorted a whole bunch of things out in my head as to the why. Very good stuff. Thank you.
- marak830 10y ago
  I have been here for 4 years, the sites down at the moment but I'm hoping it will help me!
- xelxebar 10y ago
  Oh cool. I'm in Koenji. If you would like more of this kind of thing, I highly recommend Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar. It's a lot like OP's article, but much more thorough, organized by topic, and provides auxillary resources so you can dig in as much as you please.
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a_c 10y ago
This article resembles two different ways of designing protocols. In tcp [0], information are encoded in position, e.g. the first 16 bits are for source port and the next 16 bits are for dst ports. While in, say, FIX [1], information are encoding be delimiters and position doesn't matter. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange
- deleted 10y ago
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tempodox 10y ago
I love how precise and detailed this article is written. If only more documentation were like this. It was always my assumption that grammar is the most important thing to learn about a language. Vocabulary accumulates almost automatically over time, with practise (and a dictionary). Interesting to see how that holds in this case.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > It was always my assumption that grammar is the most important thing to learn about a language I think it depends on what your goals are. If you just want to communicate, vocabulary is the most important thing to get started, since even with poor grammar people can infer what you mean (gestures help too!). I've seen too many people here in Japan who have crammed English grammar all their school years but are paralyzed when trying to communicate because they're just focused on getting the grammar right.
  - iamnotlarry 10y ago
    I think you should learn a handful of grammar rules right up front. Obviously, * Desu/deshita/de arimasen/de arimasen deshita * Masu/masen/mashita/masen deshita Then add a few more * if * while * want to <verb> * passive * honorific * etc. You can learn one a week or one a month. There aren't very many to learn. But having just four or five up your sleeve (in addition to verb conjugation) can really improve your comfort.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      Absolutely! You're not going to get anywhere in any language with only either grammar or vocabulary.
- xelxebar 10y ago
  Just to play the Negative Nelly role a bit, while the main thesis is on point, the example sentences I find to be somewhat unrealistic and misleading. I have ideas for how to improve things and wouldn't mind brainstorming things together with the author of that's something they're interested in.
iamnotlarry 10y ago
I learned Japanese very much the same way I learn programming languages and found it to be very easy to learn spoken Japanese. As far as languages go, Japanese is structured a lot like a programming language. If you learn five or six "bunpo" or grammar rules, you can go a very long ways. Then, to improve, just add rules to your mastery. When I first learn any programming language I start with basics: variable binding/assignment, types, conditionals, looping, etc. Japanese fits very nicely into the same learning method. Does a language have if/then? is it 'if (<expression>) { expression }'? Or 'if <expression> then <expression> end if'? Is there an 'unless' form? What about 'else'? For Japanese, it's <expression> naraba <expression>. That's it. Unless? <expression> nakeriba <expression>. How about while? <expression> nagara <expression> For people who can learn the gist of a programming language in a week, you could learn the gist of Japanese in a week or two. That doesn't mean you would be fluent. You'd still need to learn thousands of vocabulary words. But the basic mechanics can be mastered in days or weeks. More mechanics can be layered as needed.
- greenhatman 10y ago
  I like that you can add 'sen' at the end of a sentence to make it negative, or 'ka' to make it a question.
  - klodolph 10y ago
    "Ka" at the end turns a sentence into a question, yes. You get a yes/no question, or you can swap in an interrogative pronoun if you like. This is ignoring pragmatics. "Sen"... no. The closest is that present-tense polite (teineigo) forms of verbs change from -masu to -masen to make them negative. However, that's basically the only case that rule works. You also often end up changing the rest of the sentence, just like in English or other languages. For example, in English, indefinite pronouns will generally change when you negate, as the negative of "somebody is here" is "nobody is here", not "somebody is not here". And of course, being a natural language, it's full of exceptions (like how "everyone" doesn't follow the pattern of "everything", "every time", etc.)
- unscaled 10y ago
dasfasf 10y ago
A interesting property of Japanese is that a sentence is also a subordinate clause. For example Tarou wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko at the library.) Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko.) Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita toshokan (The library where Tarou saw Noriko) Generally "<sentence> <noun>" means "the <noun> such that <noun> <particle> <sentence> is true for some choice of <particle>".
- shiro 10y ago
  Your third example isn't valid. It needs a bit of tweak. Tarou ga Noriko wo mita toshokan The particle "ga" and "wa" both introduce a topic. But in a phrase to explain a noun, we use "ga" exclusively. Your main point still holds, in a sense that "Tarou ga Noriko wo mita" is a valid sentence. But to be precise, "mita" in those two sentences are different conjugated forms; it just happens that two conjugated forms are the same in the verb "miru" (to see).
  - blipmusic 10y ago
    > The particle "ga" and "wa" both introduce a topic Forgive me for saying this, since you seem to be a native speaker, but don't you mean that they both introduce the subject, not topic (using 'topic' as a linguistic term)? "Wa" would be the topicalising subject marker, denoting known information: Tanaka wa nihon ni itta. Tanaka went to Japan. -> As for Tanaka, he went to Japan. Tanaka = known information (i.e. Tanaka is familiar to the listener) "Ga", while also a subject marker could denote/introduce new information: Tanaka ga nihon ni itta. Tanaka went to Japan. -> e.g. It was Tanaka who went to Japan. Tanaka = new information (e.g. the listener is did not not Tanaka was the one going to Japan.) (Note: I realise there are other constructions for my interpretation of the ga-sentence)
    - gizmo686 10y ago
      Not a native speaker, but have studied Japanese linguisticly (as well as as a second language). Wa is a bit of a complicated topic. The prevailing thinking is (roughly) that it has two distinctive meanings: topic marking, and contrastive. As a topic marker, wa does not introduce the subject (although in many cases, there is a null anaphora referring to the topic). In anycase, the common linguistic explanation for shiro's correction is that the subject of subordinate clauses resists topicalization.
iamnotlarry 10y ago
Remember those English diagramming classes everyone hated? I'm not very familiar with the education system in Japan, but I doubt they have diagramming classes. In Japanese, the diagramming is built into the language. You tag the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, etc. Everything gets markup. Which part of the sentence is the direct object? Uh... the part with the direct object tag hanging off it? Correct! Have you ever heard a programming language described as "designed for teaching"? Japanese is a language designed to be as simple as possible to learn. Coming from English, the idea that a natural language could actually be designed was a shock to me. I thought they just evolved sloppily and haphazardly. Well, Japanese is proof that it doesn't have to be that way. Clear rules and not too many of them. No exceptions. Rigidly consistent. It's like a language created in a lab that never got dirtied up by real world usage. Except, oh wait, it's a real language used by millions of people every day.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  The grammar perhaps, but then you get to the writing system :) Meanwhile over in Korean, the writing system was designed from scratch to be very simple (I'm led to believe - I don't know any Korean)
  - iamnotlarry 10y ago
    I really like the Korean writing system. It's very cool. Take the 1-4 sounds that make up a syllable, arrange them into the syllable template, and you have a single character that represents that syllable. It's pretty slick, space-efficient, phonetic, and full of yummy goodness. Then, just to mess with people, optionally throw in thousands of Chinese characters.
- unscaled 10y ago
  I never had the pleasure of taking them myself, butI'm pretty sure Japanese grammar classes are not so fun as you imagine. Putting aside that the norm in Japanese school is rote memorization and pedantic attention to details (e.g. you'd memorize dates of historical events), the Japanese grammar that is taught in class is traditional Japanese grammar. It's pretty streamlined compared to the abomination that is medieval Latin grammar (which remains the basis for English grammar taught in class), but it still targets Classical Japanese and uses rather obscure terms where clear diagrams would suffice. I'll have to ask, but I think that instead of diagrams, Japanese students mainly need to memorize the difference between Izenkei, Mizenkei, Renyoukei, Rentaikei and Shuushikei, even though the last one is irrelevant for modern Japanese. And of course Japanese wasn't "designed" any more than English was. There are dialects with widely varying grammar and vocabulary, and there some aspects which are very hard to learn even if you ignore the writing system (e.g. the proper use of Wa vs Ga, the proper use of emphatic sentence endings like no/n'da or yo). Inflection is way more regular than English, and syntax is pretty streamlined, which is a boon.
panorama 10y ago
Beginner question: In casual, spoken Japanese, I've been taught that I can drop the particles (including pronouns). Hence "watashi wa tabemasu" can be colloquially shortened to "tabemasu". Thanks to this article, I've come to understand particles much better and why they're important, but does it change in casual spoken Japanese? Are some particles okay to drop whereas others are kept? Thanks in advance.
- teraflop 10y ago
  Well, to be clear, particles and pronouns are very different things. (In fact, Japanese pronouns basically just act like nouns, from a grammatical perspective.) Japanese is a so-called "pro-drop" language, which means it's normal to omit pronouns completely when they can be inferred. "Watashi wa tabemasu" would only be used for specific emphasis, as in: "I specifically (as opposed to somebody else you were just talking about) am eating." In any other context, it sounds unnatural, and you would just say "tabemasu" even in formal situations. Separately, you can omit particles in colloquial speech when they're obvious. So for instance, in a polite setting you might ask "ashita wa, nani wo shimasu ka?" (meaning "what are you doing tomorrow?") But in a casual environment, you could say "ashita, nani suru?" and still be understood perfectly.
- DrPhish 10y ago
  In general, you can drop everything except the jitsugo (verb or adjective most usually) if the other bits can be inferred. eg: Taberu (eat) or Hayai (fast) It sounds like cavemen talk if you translate it literally, but it is perfectly valid japanese
  - klodolph 10y ago
    Syntactically we might call "hayai" a verb, which would then be translated as "is fast" rather than just "fast". Semantically, it is an adjective.
- joshka 10y ago
  There's another article on the site [1] that explains this in detail. It seems that you can drop the "watashi wa" only when the context of the statement or answer is obvious from previous parts of the conversation. [1]: https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/#comparison https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/#comparison
ehsquared 10y ago
Filipino is really similar in terms of the use of particles/markers! For example, to say: "The cat is eating the fish", we say: "Kumakain ng isda ang pusa". The verb (is eating, kumakain) always comes first. The subject (cat, pusa) is identified by the "ang" marker, while the object (fish, isda) is identified by the "ng" marker. We could also say "Kumakain ang pusa ng isda", although that's rarely used. The "-um-" affix in "kumakain" makes the verb active ("is eating"). If we instead used the "-in-" affix (as in "kinakain"), it would make the verb passive ("is being eaten by"). So we could alternatively say: "Kinakain ng pusa ang isda" to mean: "The fish is being eaten by the cat".
whym 10y ago
This article does a great job at presenting a gist of the Japanese sentence structure. Nevertheless, it makes me want to point out that it's not the whole story. If you take into account topics such as modality and conjugation, some of the information you add to a verb is placed after the verb and cannot be freely reordered. Japanese verbs are "greater" than English verbs in the sense that you conjugate/suffixate a verb to express negation, conjunctions, conditional forms etc, making it longer and longer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation In contrast, English has a relatively simple set of inflections of verbs. Many of those Japanese verb forms and suffixated long verbs are translated into multi-word phrases. Compare: Anata wa kyou nemuru. (You sleep today.) -- verb is in normal form ("nemuru") Anata wa kinou nemurenakatta. (You were not able to sleep yesterday.) -- verb is in continuative form ("nemuru"→"nemu") + possibility suffix ("reru"→"re") + negation suffix ("nai"→"naka") + past suffix ("ta"→"tta")
- iamnotlarry 10y ago
  For Japanese, you learn a handful of rules to conjugate a verb. Then those rules always apply with no exceptions. In English, there are not set rules. Every case is special. What is the past tense form of 'shake'? 'see'? 'walk'? 'sleep'? 'eat'? 'speak'? 'sit'? 'seek'? 'work'? There are no rules. You basically have to memorize every word and all the possible ways it can morph. English possessive: 's or s' or ' or s, depending. Japanese possessive: no English plural: different for every word. Japanese plural: same as singular, or throw on a -tachi English past tense: different for every word. Japanese past tense: -mashita for verbs, deshita for adverbs/adjectives In English, nothing is simple. In Japanese, a multi-word phrase may have more syllables, but at least it will always be the same rule.
  - chc 10y ago
    I think this is overstating the regularity of Japanese a bit. For example, what is the past tense of "kuru"? What is the present tense of "datta"?
    - iamnotlarry 10y ago
Grue3 10y ago
Yeah it's "logical", except in casual language the rules are broken all the time. A lot of things can follow the verb. The article doesn't mention subclauses at all, but it's where things become hairy. There's particle "ga" which is similar to "wa" except it works as a subject of subclause, except sometimes it means "but". There are dozens of ways to incorporate subclauses into main sentence, using different particles. It's very common for the entire sentence to be a subclause ([something] no/n desu).
unscaled 10y ago
I have to enter a caveat here though. Spoken Japanese is a little bit different, and in some cases, arguments will follow the verb. It's pretty rare, but I did hear things like "Dou sureba ii ore" or "nani yatteru omae"? This is VERY rough and informal though, and not Japan being very polite, it's not something that I'd hear everyday. Maybe on TV or from really close friends, and even then I'm not sure if everyone would say that. But it just goes to show that natural languages are very complex creatures, and even the tidiest rules have exceptions sometimes.
- laurieg 10y ago
  I wouldn't describe that pattern as incredibly rough or even particularly informal. It's common to at the subject after the sentence when speaking quickly. You use it when you think the listener may have to quite picked up what you were saying etc.
akssri 10y ago
Interestingly, many Indic [2] languages follow similar verb-centric grammars. In the canonical Vyakarana tradition (of Panini), sentences are seen as revolving around the verb [1]. The "noun-cases" or कारक (karaka) are generally equivalent to the "particles" in Japanese. The genitive (eqv. の) is not a karaka, since it has no relation to the verb. Of course, since there is technically no syntactic difference between adjectives and nouns in Sanskrit, the semantics of the genitive in particular can be very undeterministic. This is not the case in others though. I wish there were more studies on how Indic traditions affected East/SE Asia [3]. Sadly, most academics/people here don't believe there exists a world outside N. America & W.Europe (often no India either!). [1] There is a competing tradition of semantics called "Nyaya" where sentences are seen to be Noun-centric. These discourses are generally not easily accessible. [2] Dividing the languages based on presence/absence of noun inflections would appear not to have much discriminative power to claim anything about historical origins. Historical Linguistics, I believe, is mostly a politicized pseudoscience. [3] This documentary highlights the kind of things I mean. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk It is also fascinating to look at the Thai/Khmer scripts and realize these are related to current day Telugu/Kannada scripts.
- monster_group 10y ago
  Since you brought up Sanskrit and topic of discussion is sentence structure I will provide one more data point. Because Sanskrit is a highly inflected language there is a lot of flexibility in sentence structure in Sanskrit. In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. This flexibility comes at a very high price though - there are tens of ways in which a noun can transform and theoretically thousands of ways in which a verb can transform. The good thing though is that Panini and later grammarians gave us rules to go by so it is not as bad as it sounds.
  - tom_mellior 10y ago
    > In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual meanings expressed by the variants are so different that Hungarian speakers wouldn't consider them "the same sentence expressed a bit differently". Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis In contrast, I believe Latin is really liberal in its sentence structure, especially in poetry.
fenomas 10y ago
Cached link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R3iCWiY9nHgJ:https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R3iCWi...
glandium 10y ago
Something I like about the whole "verb at the end of the sentence" thing is that you can totally flip over the meaning of what you're saying, right at the end. In English, you can achieve the same effect with awkward forms (like "not" at the end of the sentence), but in Japanese, it's just the natural form. Try to imagine the kind of snarks you could do if you could put things like "I don't reckon" on hold until the end of the sentence. Sadly (ironically?), that tends not to be the kind of language subtlety/humor the Japanese go for.
- Razengan 10y ago
  > Try to imagine the kind of snarks you could do if you could put things like "I don't reckon" on hold until the end of the sentence. Sadly (ironically?), that tends not to be the kind of language subtlety/humor the Japanese go for. If that's true, I think it might be more that such kind of humor is seen as too basic, or childish, and not particularly subtle for adults. Akin to simple puns or "ghost jokes" and the like in English (What do ghosts like for dessert? I Scream!) that kids — or foreigners — may enjoy, but native speakers don't really count as witty. You can still see what you're talking about in some of their comedy skits, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nW4jhqPbd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nW4jhqPbd0
  - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
    As much as people claim to despise puns, the major English authors show very little reluctance to use them: they are everywhere in Shakespeare, for example, and you can also find them in more recent authors like TS Eliot (for example, in Ash Wednesday, he puns on dissembled/disassembled)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- yawaramin 10y ago
  I was just thinking about negation by adding the suffix. We have it in Bangla too. In fact, we share the same word, 'nai', for 'is not there'.
creamyhorror 10y ago
I quite like the headlining diagram. It's a simplified view that shows the schematic approach of the languages - Japanese relies on case particles rather than ordering (unlike English). Of course, there's a lot of complexity that goes on under the hood when you start to figure out the appropriate verb conjugations to use (which aren't shown in the figure). Small side comment, if anyone's learning Japanese and wants to ask or answer questions about it, you're welcome to join a little Discord chat group (including native speakers and advanced learners) at https://discord.gg/6sjr3UY https://discord.gg/6sjr3UY
ThinkingGuy 10y ago
One minor quibble with the author's example sentences: They use "watashi wa hito desu" to mean "I am a person." I'm not a native Japanese speaker, but I'm pretty sure that "hito" is only used to refer to other people, never to oneself (source: the excellent "Nihongo Notes" series by the Mizutanis). Maybe watashi ha ningen desu 私は人間です (I am a human) would be a better example that still illustrates the grammar pattern.
RayVR 10y ago
Anyone that would benefit from this style of learning (rapid, focused on structure and rules) may actually be hurt by the rush to cover many topics without treating any precisely. I'm by no means an expert but here are some issues in just the first section. * example that glosses over the difference between a topic and a subject is frustrating because, in fact, the similarity is fairly superficial. * there is no "a", "an", or "the" in Japanese, however to specify "this is the car" (implying that it is in answer to some question about which car) one would say これが車です。Using the が particle instead of は. I'm always on the lookout for useful resources. So far, Tae Kim's guide [1] has been the best I've found. Kim doesn't assume much about the reader's pre-existing knowledge yet he is able to remain succinct. [1] http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar
kazinator 10y ago
Hey all, on a topic related to this: here is another way to get some feeling for the different sentence structure. I recently finished making English subs for a 45 minute Japanese rock concert video from the 1980's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No Here I introduce a concept in subtitling whereby a subtitle template with dashed ("------") blanks appears for an entire English sentence, and the blanks convert to words and phrases as the corresponding concepts appear in the Japanese audio, in that order. The viewer has a better idea of what is being sung at the moment it is sung, and which words are receiving the emotional emphasis in the song. Also, the revelation of meaning is delayed for the English viewer in the same way. The "kicker" phrase at the end of a verse or a meaning-altering particle (such as an entire sentence negation) isn't prematurely revealed in the translation.
- Panoramix 10y ago
  That's pretty cool, I've been looking for something like this.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Wow, that's a great way of presenting the lyrics in a different language I've watched it a bit and it seems very nicely done
- glandium 10y ago
  "This video contains content from UMG, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." :(
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Somewhat ironically, this problem hinges on an excerpt of a studio album song which plays over the ending credits for less than a minute. Not around the actual video album itself. That's what the content ID system latched on to.
scarygliders 10y ago
I'm wondering if the main factor is one's ability to learn a new language - itself affected by many factors such as age, for example? I've been married to a native Japanese for going on 19 years now. I have tried to learn the language. I have lived in Japan for 6 years, hoping that full immersion would help. I even embarked in the Kumon Japanese course whilst in Japan, from beginner level to more advanced. I have piles and piles of the work books cluttering my home. I ended up being able to read katakana, hiragana, and learned some 250 Kanji. What I didn't end up managing was being able to have decent conversation in Japanese. Sure, I could ask for a beer, directions, talk about the weather, but that was about it. I had reached some plateau and could go no further. In the end I gave up. It was basically something I couldn't do. I tried many different ways of learning, found none which could not prevent my sheer frustration at not being able to take the knowledge in. Are some people simply 'wired' to learn language more than others? Is there an age limit, for example? Was it my low tolerance for frustration? Was it my perfectionist tendencies? Probably a 'yes' to most of those. But I stopped after more than a decade of trying.
migueloller 10y ago
The article says: > What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, 「これは車です」. There is no differentiation. This is not always true. The latter could be 「これが車です」. The は and が particles are very similar but are still different. Fully grasping this small difference is one of the biggest problems Japanese learners encounter when studying grammar. Closer to the beginning, the article also mentions: > The topic of a Japanese sentence is very similar to what other languages refer to as the subject. The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that does the action described by the main verb in the sentence. These are, in fact, slightly different concepts, but for now, we will treat them as being the same so as to keep things simple. It turns out that は marks the topic and が marks the subject. I feel that many times the confusion between は and が in Japanese learners happens because the learning material tries to make this simplification in the beginning. When it's time to learn が, it's hard to retrain the brain.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  This isn't quite true. は has two distinct usages. One is to mark the topic of the sentence. The other is to mark the subject of the sentence with a contrastive connotation.
  - strongai 10y ago
    And what does 'contrastive connotation' mean?
    - glandium 10y ago
      See the examples on http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php?tagE=ha-2 http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php?tagE=ha-2
  - glandium 10y ago
    It also has a use for emphasis. And a few others uses.
stephengillie 10y ago
Using particles in this way almost sounds like using flags to specify parameters when calling a function. This allows them to be placed in any order. A Powershell-like example: Construct-Sentence -subject Taro -object Noriko -verb to_see -time Past > "Taro saw Noriko." Construct-Sentence -object Noriko -time Past -verb to_see -subject Taro > "Taro saw Noriko." The original sentence is "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." And "masu" appears to be the root verb "to see". Construct-Sentence -wa Taro -wo Noriko -verb masu -time Past > "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." Something more Bash-like: csent wa:Taro wo:Noriko masu -past_affirmative # "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." Meanwhile, subject-object-verb (SVO) and similar patterns depend on the order of inputs: Construct-Sentence Taro Norkio to_see Past > "Taro saw Noriko" Construct-Sentence Norkio Taro to_see Past > "Noriko saw Taro" This allows for invalid outputs: Construct-Sentence Taro to_see Norkio Past > "Taro Noriko'ed see"
- mcaruso 10y ago
  I've made the analogy of function calls before, it's a pretty cool way to think about it. But I think your example is slightly off. The verb is the head of the phrase, and would thus be the function (or command) itself: miru --topic=Taro --object=Noriko # Taro sees Noriko This uses "miru", the plain non-past form of "to see". Conjugating the verb is a little trickier to translate, but I think it would be analogous to higher-order functions, functions that modify the verb to create a new verb. Using a Python-like syntax: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object="Noriko") # Taro wa Noriko wo mimashita I'm trying to think of a way to include relative clauses in this analogy, but it's a little harder. A relative clause is of the form "[verb-phrase] [noun]", e.g. "doresu wo kiru Noriko" (Noriko who wears a dress). Maybe we could use positional arguments for this: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu", "Noriko")) # Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita ?? EDIT: or maybe currying would be a nice way to solve this. So each verb would be a function that takes arguments, and returns a new function that takes a noun to apply that verb to: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu")("Noriko")) # Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita
  - stephengillie 10y ago
lisper 10y ago
Japanese structure is very reminiscent of Forth.
- vram22 10y ago
  so ? How
  - lisper 10y ago
    Subject, object, etc -- all of the "arguments" -- come before the verb.
    - vram22 10y ago
      Hey, it was a joke - though maybe not a good one, Forth-syntax-wise. Just something I quickly came up with. I actually know Forth a bit. Had played around with it some earlier.
      - lisper 10y ago
        Oh, I see. Sorry. Dense very I was being. :-)
        vram22 10y ago
        :-)
        vram22 10y ago
        Anyway, good joke or not, I'm glad I made it, because it made me look at your profile and then your blog. Checking out a few of the articles, like Why Lisp? and Lisping at JPL, looks interesting ...
dbshapco 10y ago
Anyone actually recommend the book from which the article is taken? I also tried to read the wa v. ga blog post on the site to get a further sense of the author's approach, but the server returns an out of memory error (from a blog post?!). I've been in Tokyo now 18 months, took private lessons twice costing about $2,000, and feel I learned 10 words. That's $200/word. I joke with people I stopped taking lessons because learning Kanji would bankrupt me. Japanese just doesn't stick in my older and very Western brain. It doesn't help that my office does business in English and one can get by in Tokyo with minimal Japanese and a lot of pointing and gesturing. The glacial progress becomes discouraging. I tried Rosetta Stone. It takes the same phrasebook approach as the first textbook I was given, Nihongo Fun & Easy, which was neither. The textbook at least had short sidebar discussions of grammar and somewhat useful phrases. I had no idea where I'd get to use the phrase "The children are swimming," that Rosetta offers. The 8020 article was the first discussion of particles that actually made sense. When I'd asked teachers about particles before the answer was usually something like "Don't worry about that yet, just memorize the phrases." If the remainder of the book is in the same vein I'd pay twice the asking price. I flipped through parts of Nihongo Fun & Easy after reading this article and it suddenly made much more sense. I wasn't staring at a list of phrases I was supposed to memorize and slowly reverse engineer the language, but could deconstruct the basic sentences. It's much easier for me to learn construction, and use the break down of other sentences to construct my own, even if the rules fail sometimes and lead me to construct sentences no native speaker would utter. That's the other 80% of language idiosyncrasies that takes time. I don't expect to be fluent in Japanese any time soon, however moving past "sumimasen kore onegeihshimasu" while pointing at a menu item would be awesome.
- marxama 10y ago
  I really recommend the Japanese For Busy People books, I learned tons from them quickly. They start off very basic (obviously), but they explain the grammar in a really good way, and progress into more advanced topics as you go along. Make sure to get the kana versions, not romaji! For learning Kanji, the most efficient option I've found is Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig. It's a bit of a long-term investment, in that it takes a while for them to really pay off (you don't learn the readings/sounds until book two, the first one is completely focused on the meaning and writing of the characters), but in the long run I think it's a much better option than for example the books trying to teach you the characters by showing you their similarity to the things the represent.
rootsudo 10y ago
I feel like this is being shilled too much. I see it everywhere on facebook, reddit japan topics and general. Of course, generally speaking I am learning Japanese.
randomgyatwork 10y ago
Learning Japanese, it's been hard to realize that the most important part of a sentence is always at the end.
CinnamonStick 9y ago
For anyone interested in learning the logical rules that dictate the more confusing parts of Japanese grammar (which were, as others have pointed out, dramatically over-simplified in this article), this is a decent starting point: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/ I've personally been happy with the following books as well: Bungo Manual: Selected Reference Materials for Students of Classical Japanese Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary Classical Japanese: A Grammar Many of the confusing rules we have today (i-adjectives vs na-adjectives, different verb conjugation classes, etc.) are subsets of much larger rule-sets from early in the language's written history. Bound particles are probably the most confusing of these rules, which were too convoluted to survive over time, but still inform common usage patterns today. The Japanese language (particularly its written form) is very young, so it's actually feasible to gain an in-depth understanding of the language's entire history without spending a decade on a doctorate.

317 points by tav 10y ago

So I am sitting in Ebisu in Tokyo right now. I spend about 3-4 months a year here and have for about 8 years. My understanding of spoken Japanese is pretty decent. However it is by pure memorization over time. This just sorted a whole bunch of things out in my head as to the why. Very good stuff. Thank you.

marak830 10y ago
I have been here for 4 years, the sites down at the moment but I'm hoping it will help me!
xelxebar 10y ago
Oh cool. I'm in Koenji. If you would like more of this kind of thing, I highly recommend Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar. It's a lot like OP's article, but much more thorough, organized by topic, and provides auxillary resources so you can dig in as much as you please.

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a_c 10y ago

This article resembles two different ways of designing protocols. In tcp [0], information are encoded in position, e.g. the first 16 bits are for source port and the next 16 bits are for dst ports. While in, say, FIX [1], information are encoding be delimiters and position doesn't matter. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange

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tempodox 10y ago

I love how precise and detailed this article is written. If only more documentation were like this. It was always my assumption that grammar is the most important thing to learn about a language. Vocabulary accumulates almost automatically over time, with practise (and a dictionary). Interesting to see how that holds in this case.

kalleboo 10y ago
> It was always my assumption that grammar is the most important thing to learn about a language I think it depends on what your goals are. If you just want to communicate, vocabulary is the most important thing to get started, since even with poor grammar people can infer what you mean (gestures help too!). I've seen too many people here in Japan who have crammed English grammar all their school years but are paralyzed when trying to communicate because they're just focused on getting the grammar right.
- iamnotlarry 10y ago
  I think you should learn a handful of grammar rules right up front. Obviously, * Desu/deshita/de arimasen/de arimasen deshita * Masu/masen/mashita/masen deshita Then add a few more * if * while * want to <verb> * passive * honorific * etc. You can learn one a week or one a month. There aren't very many to learn. But having just four or five up your sleeve (in addition to verb conjugation) can really improve your comfort.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    Absolutely! You're not going to get anywhere in any language with only either grammar or vocabulary.
xelxebar 10y ago
Just to play the Negative Nelly role a bit, while the main thesis is on point, the example sentences I find to be somewhat unrealistic and misleading. I have ideas for how to improve things and wouldn't mind brainstorming things together with the author of that's something they're interested in.

iamnotlarry 10y ago

I learned Japanese very much the same way I learn programming languages and found it to be very easy to learn spoken Japanese. As far as languages go, Japanese is structured a lot like a programming language. If you learn five or six "bunpo" or grammar rules, you can go a very long ways. Then, to improve, just add rules to your mastery. When I first learn any programming language I start with basics: variable binding/assignment, types, conditionals, looping, etc. Japanese fits very nicely into the same learning method. Does a language have if/then? is it 'if (<expression>) { expression }'? Or 'if <expression> then <expression> end if'? Is there an 'unless' form? What about 'else'? For Japanese, it's <expression> naraba <expression>. That's it. Unless? <expression> nakeriba <expression>. How about while? <expression> nagara <expression> For people who can learn the gist of a programming language in a week, you could learn the gist of Japanese in a week or two. That doesn't mean you would be fluent. You'd still need to learn thousands of vocabulary words. But the basic mechanics can be mastered in days or weeks. More mechanics can be layered as needed.

greenhatman 10y ago
I like that you can add 'sen' at the end of a sentence to make it negative, or 'ka' to make it a question.
- klodolph 10y ago
  "Ka" at the end turns a sentence into a question, yes. You get a yes/no question, or you can swap in an interrogative pronoun if you like. This is ignoring pragmatics. "Sen"... no. The closest is that present-tense polite (teineigo) forms of verbs change from -masu to -masen to make them negative. However, that's basically the only case that rule works. You also often end up changing the rest of the sentence, just like in English or other languages. For example, in English, indefinite pronouns will generally change when you negate, as the negative of "somebody is here" is "nobody is here", not "somebody is not here". And of course, being a natural language, it's full of exceptions (like how "everyone" doesn't follow the pattern of "everything", "every time", etc.)
unscaled 10y ago

dasfasf 10y ago

A interesting property of Japanese is that a sentence is also a subordinate clause. For example Tarou wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko at the library.) Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko.) Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita toshokan (The library where Tarou saw Noriko) Generally "<sentence> <noun>" means "the <noun> such that <noun> <particle> <sentence> is true for some choice of <particle>".

shiro 10y ago
Your third example isn't valid. It needs a bit of tweak. Tarou ga Noriko wo mita toshokan The particle "ga" and "wa" both introduce a topic. But in a phrase to explain a noun, we use "ga" exclusively. Your main point still holds, in a sense that "Tarou ga Noriko wo mita" is a valid sentence. But to be precise, "mita" in those two sentences are different conjugated forms; it just happens that two conjugated forms are the same in the verb "miru" (to see).
- blipmusic 10y ago
  > The particle "ga" and "wa" both introduce a topic Forgive me for saying this, since you seem to be a native speaker, but don't you mean that they both introduce the subject, not topic (using 'topic' as a linguistic term)? "Wa" would be the topicalising subject marker, denoting known information: Tanaka wa nihon ni itta. Tanaka went to Japan. -> As for Tanaka, he went to Japan. Tanaka = known information (i.e. Tanaka is familiar to the listener) "Ga", while also a subject marker could denote/introduce new information: Tanaka ga nihon ni itta. Tanaka went to Japan. -> e.g. It was Tanaka who went to Japan. Tanaka = new information (e.g. the listener is did not not Tanaka was the one going to Japan.) (Note: I realise there are other constructions for my interpretation of the ga-sentence)
  - gizmo686 10y ago
    Not a native speaker, but have studied Japanese linguisticly (as well as as a second language). Wa is a bit of a complicated topic. The prevailing thinking is (roughly) that it has two distinctive meanings: topic marking, and contrastive. As a topic marker, wa does not introduce the subject (although in many cases, there is a null anaphora referring to the topic). In anycase, the common linguistic explanation for shiro's correction is that the subject of subordinate clauses resists topicalization.

iamnotlarry 10y ago

Remember those English diagramming classes everyone hated? I'm not very familiar with the education system in Japan, but I doubt they have diagramming classes. In Japanese, the diagramming is built into the language. You tag the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, etc. Everything gets markup. Which part of the sentence is the direct object? Uh... the part with the direct object tag hanging off it? Correct! Have you ever heard a programming language described as "designed for teaching"? Japanese is a language designed to be as simple as possible to learn. Coming from English, the idea that a natural language could actually be designed was a shock to me. I thought they just evolved sloppily and haphazardly. Well, Japanese is proof that it doesn't have to be that way. Clear rules and not too many of them. No exceptions. Rigidly consistent. It's like a language created in a lab that never got dirtied up by real world usage. Except, oh wait, it's a real language used by millions of people every day.

kalleboo 10y ago
The grammar perhaps, but then you get to the writing system :) Meanwhile over in Korean, the writing system was designed from scratch to be very simple (I'm led to believe - I don't know any Korean)
- iamnotlarry 10y ago
  I really like the Korean writing system. It's very cool. Take the 1-4 sounds that make up a syllable, arrange them into the syllable template, and you have a single character that represents that syllable. It's pretty slick, space-efficient, phonetic, and full of yummy goodness. Then, just to mess with people, optionally throw in thousands of Chinese characters.
unscaled 10y ago
I never had the pleasure of taking them myself, butI'm pretty sure Japanese grammar classes are not so fun as you imagine. Putting aside that the norm in Japanese school is rote memorization and pedantic attention to details (e.g. you'd memorize dates of historical events), the Japanese grammar that is taught in class is traditional Japanese grammar. It's pretty streamlined compared to the abomination that is medieval Latin grammar (which remains the basis for English grammar taught in class), but it still targets Classical Japanese and uses rather obscure terms where clear diagrams would suffice. I'll have to ask, but I think that instead of diagrams, Japanese students mainly need to memorize the difference between Izenkei, Mizenkei, Renyoukei, Rentaikei and Shuushikei, even though the last one is irrelevant for modern Japanese. And of course Japanese wasn't "designed" any more than English was. There are dialects with widely varying grammar and vocabulary, and there some aspects which are very hard to learn even if you ignore the writing system (e.g. the proper use of Wa vs Ga, the proper use of emphatic sentence endings like no/n'da or yo). Inflection is way more regular than English, and syntax is pretty streamlined, which is a boon.

panorama 10y ago

Beginner question: In casual, spoken Japanese, I've been taught that I can drop the particles (including pronouns). Hence "watashi wa tabemasu" can be colloquially shortened to "tabemasu". Thanks to this article, I've come to understand particles much better and why they're important, but does it change in casual spoken Japanese? Are some particles okay to drop whereas others are kept? Thanks in advance.

teraflop 10y ago
Well, to be clear, particles and pronouns are very different things. (In fact, Japanese pronouns basically just act like nouns, from a grammatical perspective.) Japanese is a so-called "pro-drop" language, which means it's normal to omit pronouns completely when they can be inferred. "Watashi wa tabemasu" would only be used for specific emphasis, as in: "I specifically (as opposed to somebody else you were just talking about) am eating." In any other context, it sounds unnatural, and you would just say "tabemasu" even in formal situations. Separately, you can omit particles in colloquial speech when they're obvious. So for instance, in a polite setting you might ask "ashita wa, nani wo shimasu ka?" (meaning "what are you doing tomorrow?") But in a casual environment, you could say "ashita, nani suru?" and still be understood perfectly.
DrPhish 10y ago
In general, you can drop everything except the jitsugo (verb or adjective most usually) if the other bits can be inferred. eg: Taberu (eat) or Hayai (fast) It sounds like cavemen talk if you translate it literally, but it is perfectly valid japanese
- klodolph 10y ago
  Syntactically we might call "hayai" a verb, which would then be translated as "is fast" rather than just "fast". Semantically, it is an adjective.
joshka 10y ago
There's another article on the site [1] that explains this in detail. It seems that you can drop the "watashi wa" only when the context of the statement or answer is obvious from previous parts of the conversation. [1]: https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/#comparison https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/#comparison

ehsquared 10y ago

Filipino is really similar in terms of the use of particles/markers! For example, to say: "The cat is eating the fish", we say: "Kumakain ng isda ang pusa". The verb (is eating, kumakain) always comes first. The subject (cat, pusa) is identified by the "ang" marker, while the object (fish, isda) is identified by the "ng" marker. We could also say "Kumakain ang pusa ng isda", although that's rarely used. The "-um-" affix in "kumakain" makes the verb active ("is eating"). If we instead used the "-in-" affix (as in "kinakain"), it would make the verb passive ("is being eaten by"). So we could alternatively say: "Kinakain ng pusa ang isda" to mean: "The fish is being eaten by the cat".

whym 10y ago

This article does a great job at presenting a gist of the Japanese sentence structure. Nevertheless, it makes me want to point out that it's not the whole story. If you take into account topics such as modality and conjugation, some of the information you add to a verb is placed after the verb and cannot be freely reordered. Japanese verbs are "greater" than English verbs in the sense that you conjugate/suffixate a verb to express negation, conjunctions, conditional forms etc, making it longer and longer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation In contrast, English has a relatively simple set of inflections of verbs. Many of those Japanese verb forms and suffixated long verbs are translated into multi-word phrases. Compare: Anata wa kyou nemuru. (You sleep today.) -- verb is in normal form ("nemuru") Anata wa kinou nemurenakatta. (You were not able to sleep yesterday.) -- verb is in continuative form ("nemuru"→"nemu") + possibility suffix ("reru"→"re") + negation suffix ("nai"→"naka") + past suffix ("ta"→"tta")

iamnotlarry 10y ago
For Japanese, you learn a handful of rules to conjugate a verb. Then those rules always apply with no exceptions. In English, there are not set rules. Every case is special. What is the past tense form of 'shake'? 'see'? 'walk'? 'sleep'? 'eat'? 'speak'? 'sit'? 'seek'? 'work'? There are no rules. You basically have to memorize every word and all the possible ways it can morph. English possessive: 's or s' or ' or s, depending. Japanese possessive: no English plural: different for every word. Japanese plural: same as singular, or throw on a -tachi English past tense: different for every word. Japanese past tense: -mashita for verbs, deshita for adverbs/adjectives In English, nothing is simple. In Japanese, a multi-word phrase may have more syllables, but at least it will always be the same rule.
- chc 10y ago
  I think this is overstating the regularity of Japanese a bit. For example, what is the past tense of "kuru"? What is the present tense of "datta"?
  - iamnotlarry 10y ago

Grue3 10y ago

Yeah it's "logical", except in casual language the rules are broken all the time. A lot of things can follow the verb. The article doesn't mention subclauses at all, but it's where things become hairy. There's particle "ga" which is similar to "wa" except it works as a subject of subclause, except sometimes it means "but". There are dozens of ways to incorporate subclauses into main sentence, using different particles. It's very common for the entire sentence to be a subclause ([something] no/n desu).

unscaled 10y ago

I have to enter a caveat here though. Spoken Japanese is a little bit different, and in some cases, arguments will follow the verb. It's pretty rare, but I did hear things like "Dou sureba ii ore" or "nani yatteru omae"? This is VERY rough and informal though, and not Japan being very polite, it's not something that I'd hear everyday. Maybe on TV or from really close friends, and even then I'm not sure if everyone would say that. But it just goes to show that natural languages are very complex creatures, and even the tidiest rules have exceptions sometimes.

laurieg 10y ago
I wouldn't describe that pattern as incredibly rough or even particularly informal. It's common to at the subject after the sentence when speaking quickly. You use it when you think the listener may have to quite picked up what you were saying etc.

akssri 10y ago

Interestingly, many Indic [2] languages follow similar verb-centric grammars. In the canonical Vyakarana tradition (of Panini), sentences are seen as revolving around the verb [1]. The "noun-cases" or कारक (karaka) are generally equivalent to the "particles" in Japanese. The genitive (eqv. の) is not a karaka, since it has no relation to the verb. Of course, since there is technically no syntactic difference between adjectives and nouns in Sanskrit, the semantics of the genitive in particular can be very undeterministic. This is not the case in others though. I wish there were more studies on how Indic traditions affected East/SE Asia [3]. Sadly, most academics/people here don't believe there exists a world outside N. America & W.Europe (often no India either!). [1] There is a competing tradition of semantics called "Nyaya" where sentences are seen to be Noun-centric. These discourses are generally not easily accessible. [2] Dividing the languages based on presence/absence of noun inflections would appear not to have much discriminative power to claim anything about historical origins. Historical Linguistics, I believe, is mostly a politicized pseudoscience. [3] This documentary highlights the kind of things I mean. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk It is also fascinating to look at the Thai/Khmer scripts and realize these are related to current day Telugu/Kannada scripts.

monster_group 10y ago
Since you brought up Sanskrit and topic of discussion is sentence structure I will provide one more data point. Because Sanskrit is a highly inflected language there is a lot of flexibility in sentence structure in Sanskrit. In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. This flexibility comes at a very high price though - there are tens of ways in which a noun can transform and theoretically thousands of ways in which a verb can transform. The good thing though is that Panini and later grammarians gave us rules to go by so it is not as bad as it sounds.
- tom_mellior 10y ago
  > In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual meanings expressed by the variants are so different that Hungarian speakers wouldn't consider them "the same sentence expressed a bit differently". Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis In contrast, I believe Latin is really liberal in its sentence structure, especially in poetry.

fenomas 10y ago

Cached link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R3iCWiY9nHgJ:https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R3iCWi...

glandium 10y ago

Something I like about the whole "verb at the end of the sentence" thing is that you can totally flip over the meaning of what you're saying, right at the end. In English, you can achieve the same effect with awkward forms (like "not" at the end of the sentence), but in Japanese, it's just the natural form. Try to imagine the kind of snarks you could do if you could put things like "I don't reckon" on hold until the end of the sentence. Sadly (ironically?), that tends not to be the kind of language subtlety/humor the Japanese go for.

Razengan 10y ago
> Try to imagine the kind of snarks you could do if you could put things like "I don't reckon" on hold until the end of the sentence. Sadly (ironically?), that tends not to be the kind of language subtlety/humor the Japanese go for. If that's true, I think it might be more that such kind of humor is seen as too basic, or childish, and not particularly subtle for adults. Akin to simple puns or "ghost jokes" and the like in English (What do ghosts like for dessert? I Scream!) that kids — or foreigners — may enjoy, but native speakers don't really count as witty. You can still see what you're talking about in some of their comedy skits, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nW4jhqPbd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nW4jhqPbd0
- fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
  As much as people claim to despise puns, the major English authors show very little reluctance to use them: they are everywhere in Shakespeare, for example, and you can also find them in more recent authors like TS Eliot (for example, in Ash Wednesday, he puns on dissembled/disassembled)
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yawaramin 10y ago
I was just thinking about negation by adding the suffix. We have it in Bangla too. In fact, we share the same word, 'nai', for 'is not there'.

creamyhorror 10y ago

I quite like the headlining diagram. It's a simplified view that shows the schematic approach of the languages - Japanese relies on case particles rather than ordering (unlike English). Of course, there's a lot of complexity that goes on under the hood when you start to figure out the appropriate verb conjugations to use (which aren't shown in the figure). Small side comment, if anyone's learning Japanese and wants to ask or answer questions about it, you're welcome to join a little Discord chat group (including native speakers and advanced learners) at https://discord.gg/6sjr3UY https://discord.gg/6sjr3UY

ThinkingGuy 10y ago

One minor quibble with the author's example sentences: They use "watashi wa hito desu" to mean "I am a person." I'm not a native Japanese speaker, but I'm pretty sure that "hito" is only used to refer to other people, never to oneself (source: the excellent "Nihongo Notes" series by the Mizutanis). Maybe watashi ha ningen desu 私は人間です (I am a human) would be a better example that still illustrates the grammar pattern.

RayVR 10y ago

Anyone that would benefit from this style of learning (rapid, focused on structure and rules) may actually be hurt by the rush to cover many topics without treating any precisely. I'm by no means an expert but here are some issues in just the first section. * example that glosses over the difference between a topic and a subject is frustrating because, in fact, the similarity is fairly superficial. * there is no "a", "an", or "the" in Japanese, however to specify "this is the car" (implying that it is in answer to some question about which car) one would say これが車です。Using the が particle instead of は. I'm always on the lookout for useful resources. So far, Tae Kim's guide [1] has been the best I've found. Kim doesn't assume much about the reader's pre-existing knowledge yet he is able to remain succinct. [1] http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

kazinator 10y ago

Hey all, on a topic related to this: here is another way to get some feeling for the different sentence structure. I recently finished making English subs for a 45 minute Japanese rock concert video from the 1980's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No Here I introduce a concept in subtitling whereby a subtitle template with dashed ("------") blanks appears for an entire English sentence, and the blanks convert to words and phrases as the corresponding concepts appear in the Japanese audio, in that order. The viewer has a better idea of what is being sung at the moment it is sung, and which words are receiving the emotional emphasis in the song. Also, the revelation of meaning is delayed for the English viewer in the same way. The "kicker" phrase at the end of a verse or a meaning-altering particle (such as an entire sentence negation) isn't prematurely revealed in the translation.

Panoramix 10y ago
That's pretty cool, I've been looking for something like this.
raverbashing 10y ago
Wow, that's a great way of presenting the lyrics in a different language I've watched it a bit and it seems very nicely done
glandium 10y ago
"This video contains content from UMG, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." :(
- kazinator 10y ago
  Somewhat ironically, this problem hinges on an excerpt of a studio album song which plays over the ending credits for less than a minute. Not around the actual video album itself. That's what the content ID system latched on to.

scarygliders 10y ago

I'm wondering if the main factor is one's ability to learn a new language - itself affected by many factors such as age, for example? I've been married to a native Japanese for going on 19 years now. I have tried to learn the language. I have lived in Japan for 6 years, hoping that full immersion would help. I even embarked in the Kumon Japanese course whilst in Japan, from beginner level to more advanced. I have piles and piles of the work books cluttering my home. I ended up being able to read katakana, hiragana, and learned some 250 Kanji. What I didn't end up managing was being able to have decent conversation in Japanese. Sure, I could ask for a beer, directions, talk about the weather, but that was about it. I had reached some plateau and could go no further. In the end I gave up. It was basically something I couldn't do. I tried many different ways of learning, found none which could not prevent my sheer frustration at not being able to take the knowledge in. Are some people simply 'wired' to learn language more than others? Is there an age limit, for example? Was it my low tolerance for frustration? Was it my perfectionist tendencies? Probably a 'yes' to most of those. But I stopped after more than a decade of trying.

migueloller 10y ago

The article says: > What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, 「これは車です」. There is no differentiation. This is not always true. The latter could be 「これが車です」. The は and が particles are very similar but are still different. Fully grasping this small difference is one of the biggest problems Japanese learners encounter when studying grammar. Closer to the beginning, the article also mentions: > The topic of a Japanese sentence is very similar to what other languages refer to as the subject. The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that does the action described by the main verb in the sentence. These are, in fact, slightly different concepts, but for now, we will treat them as being the same so as to keep things simple. It turns out that は marks the topic and が marks the subject. I feel that many times the confusion between は and が in Japanese learners happens because the learning material tries to make this simplification in the beginning. When it's time to learn が, it's hard to retrain the brain.

gizmo686 10y ago
This isn't quite true. は has two distinct usages. One is to mark the topic of the sentence. The other is to mark the subject of the sentence with a contrastive connotation.
- strongai 10y ago
  And what does 'contrastive connotation' mean?
  - glandium 10y ago
    See the examples on http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php?tagE=ha-2 http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php?tagE=ha-2
- glandium 10y ago
  It also has a use for emphasis. And a few others uses.

stephengillie 10y ago

Using particles in this way almost sounds like using flags to specify parameters when calling a function. This allows them to be placed in any order. A Powershell-like example: Construct-Sentence -subject Taro -object Noriko -verb to_see -time Past > "Taro saw Noriko." Construct-Sentence -object Noriko -time Past -verb to_see -subject Taro > "Taro saw Noriko." The original sentence is "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." And "masu" appears to be the root verb "to see". Construct-Sentence -wa Taro -wo Noriko -verb masu -time Past > "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." Something more Bash-like: csent wa:Taro wo:Noriko masu -past_affirmative # "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." Meanwhile, subject-object-verb (SVO) and similar patterns depend on the order of inputs: Construct-Sentence Taro Norkio to_see Past > "Taro saw Noriko" Construct-Sentence Norkio Taro to_see Past > "Noriko saw Taro" This allows for invalid outputs: Construct-Sentence Taro to_see Norkio Past > "Taro Noriko'ed see"

mcaruso 10y ago
I've made the analogy of function calls before, it's a pretty cool way to think about it. But I think your example is slightly off. The verb is the head of the phrase, and would thus be the function (or command) itself: miru --topic=Taro --object=Noriko # Taro sees Noriko This uses "miru", the plain non-past form of "to see". Conjugating the verb is a little trickier to translate, but I think it would be analogous to higher-order functions, functions that modify the verb to create a new verb. Using a Python-like syntax: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object="Noriko") # Taro wa Noriko wo mimashita I'm trying to think of a way to include relative clauses in this analogy, but it's a little harder. A relative clause is of the form "[verb-phrase] [noun]", e.g. "doresu wo kiru Noriko" (Noriko who wears a dress). Maybe we could use positional arguments for this: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu", "Noriko")) # Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita ?? EDIT: or maybe currying would be a nice way to solve this. So each verb would be a function that takes arguments, and returns a new function that takes a noun to apply that verb to: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu")("Noriko")) # Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita
- stephengillie 10y ago

lisper 10y ago

Japanese structure is very reminiscent of Forth.

vram22 10y ago
so ? How
- lisper 10y ago
  Subject, object, etc -- all of the "arguments" -- come before the verb.
  - vram22 10y ago
    Hey, it was a joke - though maybe not a good one, Forth-syntax-wise. Just something I quickly came up with. I actually know Forth a bit. Had played around with it some earlier.
    - lisper 10y ago
      Oh, I see. Sorry. Dense very I was being. :-)
      - vram22 10y ago
        :-)
      - vram22 10y ago
        Anyway, good joke or not, I'm glad I made it, because it made me look at your profile and then your blog. Checking out a few of the articles, like Why Lisp? and Lisping at JPL, looks interesting ...

dbshapco 10y ago

Anyone actually recommend the book from which the article is taken? I also tried to read the wa v. ga blog post on the site to get a further sense of the author's approach, but the server returns an out of memory error (from a blog post?!). I've been in Tokyo now 18 months, took private lessons twice costing about $2,000, and feel I learned 10 words. That's $200/word. I joke with people I stopped taking lessons because learning Kanji would bankrupt me. Japanese just doesn't stick in my older and very Western brain. It doesn't help that my office does business in English and one can get by in Tokyo with minimal Japanese and a lot of pointing and gesturing. The glacial progress becomes discouraging. I tried Rosetta Stone. It takes the same phrasebook approach as the first textbook I was given, Nihongo Fun & Easy, which was neither. The textbook at least had short sidebar discussions of grammar and somewhat useful phrases. I had no idea where I'd get to use the phrase "The children are swimming," that Rosetta offers. The 8020 article was the first discussion of particles that actually made sense. When I'd asked teachers about particles before the answer was usually something like "Don't worry about that yet, just memorize the phrases." If the remainder of the book is in the same vein I'd pay twice the asking price. I flipped through parts of Nihongo Fun & Easy after reading this article and it suddenly made much more sense. I wasn't staring at a list of phrases I was supposed to memorize and slowly reverse engineer the language, but could deconstruct the basic sentences. It's much easier for me to learn construction, and use the break down of other sentences to construct my own, even if the rules fail sometimes and lead me to construct sentences no native speaker would utter. That's the other 80% of language idiosyncrasies that takes time. I don't expect to be fluent in Japanese any time soon, however moving past "sumimasen kore onegeihshimasu" while pointing at a menu item would be awesome.

marxama 10y ago
I really recommend the Japanese For Busy People books, I learned tons from them quickly. They start off very basic (obviously), but they explain the grammar in a really good way, and progress into more advanced topics as you go along. Make sure to get the kana versions, not romaji! For learning Kanji, the most efficient option I've found is Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig. It's a bit of a long-term investment, in that it takes a while for them to really pay off (you don't learn the readings/sounds until book two, the first one is completely focused on the meaning and writing of the characters), but in the long run I think it's a much better option than for example the books trying to teach you the characters by showing you their similarity to the things the represent.

rootsudo 10y ago

I feel like this is being shilled too much. I see it everywhere on facebook, reddit japan topics and general. Of course, generally speaking I am learning Japanese.

randomgyatwork 10y ago

Learning Japanese, it's been hard to realize that the most important part of a sentence is always at the end.

CinnamonStick 9y ago

For anyone interested in learning the logical rules that dictate the more confusing parts of Japanese grammar (which were, as others have pointed out, dramatically over-simplified in this article), this is a decent starting point: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/ I've personally been happy with the following books as well: Bungo Manual: Selected Reference Materials for Students of Classical Japanese Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary Classical Japanese: A Grammar Many of the confusing rules we have today (i-adjectives vs na-adjectives, different verb conjugation classes, etc.) are subsets of much larger rule-sets from early in the language's written history. Bound particles are probably the most confusing of these rules, which were too convoluted to survive over time, but still inform common usage patterns today. The Japanese language (particularly its written form) is very young, so it's actually feasible to gain an in-depth understanding of the language's entire history without spending a decade on a doctorate.