Hey all, on a topic related to this: here is another way to get some feeling for the different sentence structure.<p>I recently finished making English subs for a 45 minute Japanese rock concert video from the 1980's.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No</a><p>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.<p>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.
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 <i>after</i> the verb and <i>cannot</i> be freely reordered.<p>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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation</a><p>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:<p>Anata wa kyou <i>nemuru</i>. (You <i>sleep</i> today.) -- verb is in normal form ("nemuru")<p>Anata wa kinou <i>nemurenakatta</i>. (You <i>were not able to sleep</i> yesterday.) -- verb is in continuative form ("nemuru"→"nemu") + possibility suffix ("reru"→"re") + negation suffix ("nai"→"naka") + past suffix ("ta"→"tta")
I learned Japanese very much the same way I learn programming languages and found it to be very easy to learn spoken Japanese.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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'?<p>For Japanese, it's <expression> naraba <expression>. That's it. Unless? <expression> nakeriba <expression>.<p>How about while? <expression> nagara <expression><p>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.
One minor quibble with the author's example sentences: They use "watashi wa hito desu" to mean "I am a person."<p>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).<p>Maybe <i>watashi ha ningen desu</i> 私は人間です (I am a human) would be a better example that still illustrates the grammar pattern.
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:<p><pre><code> 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."
</code></pre>
The original sentence is "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." And "masu" appears to be the root verb "to see".<p><pre><code> Construct-Sentence -wa Taro -wo Noriko -verb masu -time Past
> "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita."
</code></pre>
Something more Bash-like:<p><pre><code> csent wa:Taro wo:Noriko masu -past_affirmative
# "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita."
</code></pre>
Meanwhile, subject-object-verb (SVO) and similar patterns depend on the order of inputs:<p><pre><code> Construct-Sentence Taro Norkio to_see Past
> "Taro saw Noriko"
Construct-Sentence Norkio Taro to_see Past
> "Noriko saw Taro"
</code></pre>
This allows for invalid outputs:<p><pre><code> Construct-Sentence Taro to_see Norkio Past
> "Taro Noriko'ed see"</code></pre>
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.
I love how precise and detailed this article is written. If only more documentation were like this.<p>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.
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?!).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange</a>
Yeah it's "logical", except in casual language the rules are broken all the time. A lot of things can follow the verb.<p>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).
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: <a href="https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kobun-reading-introduction/</a><p>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<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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".
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).<p>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 <a href="https://discord.gg/6sjr3UY" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/6sjr3UY</a>
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"?<p>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.<p>But it just goes to show that natural languages are very complex creatures, and even the tidiest rules have exceptions sometimes.
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].<p>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.<p>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!).<p>[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.<p>[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.<p>[3] This documentary highlights the kind of things I mean.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk</a><p>It is also fascinating to look at the Thai/Khmer scripts and realize these are related to current day Telugu/Kannada scripts.
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?<p>I've been married to a native Japanese for going on 19 years now.<p>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.<p>I ended up being able to read katakana, hiragana, and learned some 250 Kanji.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But I stopped after more than a decade of trying.
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.<p>Which part of the sentence is the direct object? Uh... the part with the direct object tag hanging off it? Correct!<p>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.<p>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.
The article says:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>Closer to the beginning, the article also mentions:<p>> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>* example that glosses over the difference between a topic and a subject is frustrating because, in fact, the similarity is fairly superficial.<p>* 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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar" rel="nofollow">http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Sadly (ironically?), that tends not to be the kind of language subtlety/humor the Japanese go for.
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".<p>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.
A interesting property of Japanese is that a sentence is also a subordinate clause. For example<p>Tarou wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko at the library.)<p>Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko.)<p>Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita toshokan (The library where Tarou saw Noriko)<p>Generally "<sentence> <noun>" means "the <noun> such that <noun> <particle> <sentence> is true for some choice of <particle>".
I feel like this is being shilled too much. I see it everywhere on facebook, reddit japan topics and general.<p>Of course, generally speaking I am learning Japanese.