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Comment by krackers | Hacker News Reader

Another one of your posts I remember learning a lot from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13906535

Do you have any recommendations for material that teaches Japanese in this manner? I've found few resources that actually go into etymology like you have shown.

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Although not taught in this manner, I learned all of my basic grammar from http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar (Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar). I've seen a lot of text books, but for me this was by far the best. There is a famouse Japanese grammar book that's written in Japanese and starts out writing with simple grammar to kind of bootstrap you, but I can't remember what it's called.

However,most of the stuff like the above that I learned actually comes from an NHK programme, "Kotoba man". It went into the history of vocabulary and grammar and after I watched as many episodes as I could find, the structure of the language really started to make sense to me.

I think part of the problem is that most prescriptive grammars for language are subtly incorrect. For example, what part of language is blue in "I am blue"? What part of the language is it when in "Blue is my favorite colour"? If they are different parts of language, what is the difference in meaning between the two? What if you said, "I am painting"? Or if you said "Painting is my favourite hobby"? What is the difference in meaning between the 2 uses (if any)? Is there a difference in the meaning of "am" between "I am blue" and "I am painting"? I think if you follow the prescriptive grammar of English, it will force you to answer the questions in different ways than your intuitive (internal) ideas. Or at least it did for me. Studying that sort of sentence in English helped me to study similar sentences in Japanese and puzzle out similar insights (or at least as imagined by me). YMMV ;-)

>Kotoba man

My google-fu isn't turning up anything with this title. Do you happen to have a link to the page?

Sorry. It's an old NHK TV programme (I should have been more clear). It was 5 or 10 minutes long and explored obscure Japanese vocabulary and grammar that even most Japanese people don't know.

BTW, the NHK web site has some interesting Japanese language resources. https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/index.html

Not GP, but I was in that thread. The most extensive non-Japanese book I know of is Grammaire japonaise systématique by Reiko Shimamori. As you may guess from the title, it's in French.

>As you may guess from the title, it's in French.

Unfortunately that would leave me with the issue of now learning 2 languages.

Interestingly enough the best (and only) resource I've been able to find for content like GP is https://www.japanesewithanime.com/ which – far from what I originally imagined given the domain name – actually has in-depth explanations of both grammar and etymology (see: [1], [2]) replete with references to research articles in JP linguistics.

[1] https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2019/12/rentaikei.html

[2] https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2019/12/kanou-doushi.html#...

Not the OP, but my own experience was that I finally started learning Japanese for real when I stumbled upon AJATT and started using some of the techniques he recommends. In short: learning a language is more like learning a martial art than learning mathematics. Repetition, mimicry and passive exposure are keys to mastery. Textbooks and pedagogical methods can provide interesting cognitive exercise but are very inefficient and ineffective at developing native-level language skill.

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