Reverse Engineering the Japanese Sentence

Theorycrafting is only helpful when it simplifies the scenario. This breakdown of only nouns and verbs comes from many conversations with a leading Japanese professor at the University College London and are meant to help simplify the complexity in acquiring an understanding of Japanese and how words may fit together. It is not an exercise in some arcane method, but is the result of many years of deciphering. Granted, once you know the elements, it is imperative to put them into practice and actually get exposure in the language. The main obstacle is that one can not simply drop in to Japan and acquire the language by ear, the structure is not amenable to absorption this way, unless your native grammar is Korean or Turkish, in which case there are many similarities with post-positional particles that describe the grammatical import of each element. Whatever method gets one to fluency is clearly the best, but this is a new way to view Japanese that has not been presented before to the knowledge of the author.

But it's still good for a step, no? I definitely agree that one cannot learn a language to the point of fluency from just studying rules like this, but the material is helpful I believe.

I read that Japanese sentence structure is different and always wanted to learn more about that. German is also interesting in how it makes large constructions that resolve at the end. I finally discovered that Japanese and Korean have similar sentence structures and having learned Korean as a child can understand and speak it at a basic level without any comprehension of its structure.

> Yes, there are rules, and if you learn enough of them you can construct valid sentences by translating words from your native language and adding in the necessary syntactic filler, but you will not actually learn that language

You will learn the language's grammar, which can be very helpful in understanding sentences as well as creating sentences which are grammatically correct.

Once you learn adequate vocabulary as well as correct grammar and correct usage, you can make some pretty respectable sentences.

I don't follow this complaint at all. Sure, talking with native speakers is important, but what good will it do if you haven't first learned the basics of how verbs and particles work?

I definitely agree... but it's funny you say that.

I helped tutor a Japanese couple (grad students) when I was an undergrad. They both spoke very passable english, but wanted to improve, and I was happy to cover the many cultural, pronunciation, and listening challenges that Japanese face. When I started to discuss the difference between Urban and Rural America... they at first refused to believe that Rural was a word. I learned some Japanese history/culture (one of the only times I've ever been invited into a Japanese couple's home!), how to pronounce a few phrases, and tried Japanese food (natto and nankotsu) that I wouldn't have otherwise.

However, after about 6 months the wife (who had studied English literature) asked me for help with a test she was (re)taking on English grammar. It was multiple choice English and about half the problems she asked for help on were impossible for me. Often, all of the choices seemed wrong, but I knew at least one must be right!

In the end I apologized humbly, and said that there were many things that were correct by the rules, but native speakers would find them so strange that they would likely be misunderstood. Also, something which apparently was not being taught (and needed to be) was ordering of adjectives in a description (e.g. fat bald white guy), which I made up on the fly (increasing order of permanence). Changing the order implies emphasis... but I had never noticed it as part of the language before, and neither had they.

This kind of thinking bothers me to no end.

Not because it's necessarily incorrect but because it makes a huge assumption that all people learn in the same way.

I am fluent in 3 languages, have a decent grasp of another 2 (although cannot really speak much of either for lack of practice), and have picked up basic grasp of a couple others.

Most things I learn through extensive practice using theory on top to help me understand my practical results. Programming, engineering, robotics, electronics, physics, etc. Even much of mathematics!

With languages, the only way I start to truly grasp them is by analysing grammar, syntax and etymology, then starting to match those to pronounciation, and then I can go from there.

The idea that everybody should learn a language in way you deem better has hindered my ability to learn many, and has slowed me down a lot. I wonder how many other people learn like me and are currently out of options when it comes to language courses because of this kind of one-size-fits-all approach to teaching.

> Learning a language is _not_ like learning math.

I disagree. As a mathematician, looking at the language learning problem from a very "structural" perspective helped me a lot to grasp languages much better. Unluckily, most language learning textbooks are written by people who are not very "mathematically-minded", thus making their method of teaching overly complicated for me.

PhD students in mathematics told me that my explanations of languages make so much more sense than how the foreign language is taught at the language course at the university. On the other hand, from people who are more "humanities-minded", I often get reactions that my way of explaining languages is deeply confusing and has no value.

I think it's a good first intuition that words are either noun-like, which do not conjugate and combine using particles, or verb-like, which do conjugate and combine by juxtaposition.

> This site seems to make a big deal about not following standard terms for Japanese grammar, eg. calling 形容詞 "na-nouns" instead of "na-adjectives" and 形容動詞 "i-verbs" instead of "i-adjectives".

The site is wrong. 形容詞 are the "i-adjectives" and 形容動詞 are the "na-adjectives". [0]

It's not a good indicator of quality that the authors mixed up the traditional grammatical terms on a site promoting an alternative grammar for Japanese learners.

[0] See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_(Japanese)

Classifying the 形容動詞 stem as a noun is kind of nice for ... not getting a very confused intuition on what they do and how they work, because they really are more like 名詞 and/or nouns in most senses†. Choosing to classify 形容詞 as a kind of verb is a bit of an odder, best-kind-of-correct sort of take, since their conjugation paradigm is a bit removed from the usual "verb" paradigms, and it makes me kind of wonder whether they'd call the stems of サ変 compounds "su(ru)-nouns". But it's kind of a logical step to jump to if you're going to call 形容動詞 "na-nouns", I guess.

(The page gets 形容動詞 and 形容詞 mixed up, though, which isn't a great sign.)

As for why you'd want to avoid calling them adjectives, basically, calling both "adjectives" would make it sound like these two groups kinds of lemmas make up a coherent lexical category. At least for anglophones, "adjective" is a word that only comes when discussing "grammar", and that carries the implication that the "adjective" classification has something to do with "grammar".

It's not. There is no morphological similarity between 形容詞 and 形容動詞; the similarity between them is purely semantic (and rather tenuous at that). The similarity between them and adjectives is likewise semantic, not morphological: they happen to be groupings of mostly descriptive words. And adjectives, likewise, happen to be a grouping of mostly descriptive words. But the word "adjective" reaches at a different characterizing property that makes bad abstraction: "adjectives" are actually almost a coherent word class.

Frankly, seeing the contortions people hallucinate up when they bring preconceived notions about how "adjectives" work, I can kind of sympathize with an attempt to drill in the point that 形容動詞 stems are basically nouns, 形容詞 are basically verbs, and avoid all the nonsense around the concept of "adjectives".

†There are a few features where nouns that refer to descriptive traits often differ from nouns that describe concrete objects (not to mention all the grammatical nouns—to wit, every single loanword—that are harder to classify as "things"), but the ability to form a 連体形 with -な certainly doesn't make a clean cut of them. There are at least fair few that prefer to take -の while being semantically descriptive, for one, and a handful of more exotic types.

It's always fun in Japanese when people flip conjugations by tacking nakunai on the end like you make a statement "akakunai" "it's not red" and they, disagreeing with you in disbelief, fire back "akakunakunai?" Like "it ain't not red!" but it's phrased as a question intonation-wise.

Japanese is a lot of fun.

Yes they are verbs in the sense that the object is not "red" but "actively red'ing" -- if one looks at the onomatopoetic language of Japanese it becomes clear that many things are memetic and more similar to the "live photo" transient glimpse of motion than a static trait.

> Are the first lines hiragana, then the second ones kanji?

Yes.

> Are they always pronounced the same?

The hiragana show how the kanji is read in this particular sentence, but most common kanji have at least two readings (kunyomi/Japanese and on'yomi/Chinese) and there can be 30+ for pathological cases like 生.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Japanese

While Romaji is convenient for casual learners who have little interest in actually learning Japanese, learning the kana is easy to do and much more natural for parsing Japanese - I think that if this material is for a serious learner then they should not include the Romaji.

Does Hindi have similar grammar structure in some ways?