Complete Introduction to Particles in Japanese | Hacker News Reader

Complete Introduction to Particles in Japanese

gokugoku.app

126 pointslassmaglio120 comments

It's interesting that this sort of thing is not something native speakers actually learn in a classroom or textbook sense; they just learn it by natural language acquisition. But foreign language speakers have no choice. Quick, native English speakers: How do you define the word "the?" Or "a?" How do you explain when to use "the" and when to use "a?" This is not something we can really put into words easily since we never intentionally learned it themselves; just acquired it. Same with native Japanese speakers and all the little words here.

It's really the more natural way to learn in the end. In all my studies I feel like I never really retained the differences between へ and に for very long, and the same with は and が, but I managed to get to a point where I could use the right one far more often than not based on what just felt right. So don't sweat it too much if you can't remember all these particles; just keep practicing and it should fall into place eventually.

I'm on ell.stackexchange.com and actually the question about articles comes up often - especially since languages like Russian and Chinese don't have them.

The thing is, English really wants all singular nouns tagged with a determiner - that can be an article, possessive such as "my, your," etc., demonstrative such as "this, that,", or other determiners such as "any, all, one, some," etc.

Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract (think type of X instead of instance of X).

So, "the X" means the speaker has a particular X in mind and is expecting you to know which X he/she is talking about it - either from previous conversation, assumed shared experience/culture, or rarely the speaker intentionally wants you to feel like you're missing out on something. "A/an X" means the listener isn't expected to have been tracking X.

IMHO more difficult than articles is explaining the perfect aspect of verbs - e.g. difference between "I X'ed" and "I have X'ed".

English has something like particles too - often called phrasal verbs. E.g. knock and knock out mean two completely different things.

> Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract

You need an article here.

If there's only one exception, it should be, "The exception is when...", and if there are multiple exceptions, say, "An exception is when..."

In this case, it's grammatical, just for a different reason. You can sometimes drop the leading article or pronoun of a clause -- don't know why, just happens sometimes.

("I" don't know why, "it" just happens sometimes.)

Or for instance, if you're viewing a house on the market: "Kitchen is to the left, sitting room to the right; office is upstairs." It's certainly a casual register, but it's no less grammatical than including the articles explicitly.

In the ancestor comment's "Exception is when ...", the article is implied but elided, in the same way. (I inferred "the".) You could argue whether it's effective to drop the article there, because it's ambiguous in the way you noted, but it's still grammatically valid. (Chomsky's "colorless green ideas" is the usual example where semantic sense diverges from grammatical validity.)

This is a good defense of it, but as a native English speaker I still found the sentence jarring.

It’s possible that my sensitivity to this kind of error (or causal register, if you prefer) is due to experience learning other languages that don’t have articles like those in English. I doubt it, though. Many others probably also find sentences stripped of articles as jarring, and that’s useful for anyone learning English to know.

As I learner, I generally want it to be understood by speakers of the language as easily and with as little friction as possible.

Yeah, you can't always drop articles -- like I said, it usually happens at the very start of a clause, and not at all interior to one. And whether it's advisable to do this is up for debate; you make a good point about accessibility, and it's not always even natural. But it does happen, so it's worth cataloguing the existence of this phenomenon at least :)

My favourite example of this in English is adjective order.

Native speakers learn that it should be "big red bus" rather than "red big bus", however most couldn't list the ~7 adjective types and order they should be used in, yet will know straight away when they're wrong.

The idea that there are "adjective types and order" is a bit misleading; the underlying order is primarily semantic/pragmatic. The order is, roughly, extrinsic to intrinsic, situational to innate, contrastive to contextual; how closely attached a descriptor is to the head noun generally implies how "essential" a property it describes. This isn't really an English thing, either—English just happens to be the language most frequently taught to non-native speakers—but adjective order actually correlates pretty well across languages.

The oft-repeated opinion-to-purpose order of adjectives has decent descriptive power, but is easily oversold; the classes described do not have consistent ordering across contexts. The same woman may be an "old American woman" when interviewed for his opinions on global politics, or an "American old woman" in the context of comparing healthcare for the elderly across countries.

The "big bad wolf" is a fairy-tale villain; a "bad big wolf" is a failure at being a big wolf.

> adjective order actually correlates pretty well across languages.

Maybe a certain extended family of languages, but not, as far as I'm aware, the language being discussed in this thread, which has no particular preference for adjective order.

Can I call it a green whittling rectangular little silver French old lovely knife? This makes no sense.

Clearly it's the lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Any minor reordering of these adjectives just sounds innately wrong.

What's interesting to me is that I'm not a native, I don't know the exact rules for these things, and yet, the first one somehow sounds wrong to me.

"Innately"? If that were true all languages would be the same.

Whatever you do, never flash your lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife in front of Crocodile Dundee. He'll give you a sharp rejoinder.

> just keep practicing and it should fall into place eventually.

You just have to train your skull-housed neural network with lots of examples.

>This is not something we can really put into words easily since we never intentionally learned it themselves; just acquired it.

I'm from America and this was taught in primary school. At school you learn a lot about English grammar. I'm sure it's similar in Japan with Japanese grammar.

The grammar I was taught in school was basically linguistic phlogiston theory. The 20th century might as well not have happened.

Well, you get told it in primary school.

In practice, we don’t get tested on identifying the proper grammar structure much, and so probably the vast majority of people forget how to classify it as adults. I know I have.

I think any English speaker could tell you the difference between “the” and “a”. Even if it’s not in their immediate knowledge bank as a fact, they could think of a tiny set of examples and work it out immediately.

I've been teaching the vs. a vs. no particle at all (e.g. 'I go to church') and it's a lot more complicated than you think. There are many edge cases. Native speakers know exactly which one is correct, but cannot always explain why.

I think a really good example of this is adjective precedence. For example, any native speaker immediately knows "wooden nice green big house" is wrong, and they also immediately know that "nice big green wooden house" is the correct ordering. Good luck explaining why.

Here's my own theory on this. The English adjective order does have some logic to it.

   opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose

The adjective closer to noun tends to describe something more like an 'essence' of the noun. Changing the purpose adjective, eg 'savings account' to 'checking account', is more fundamental than changing other kinds of adjectives. The opinion adjectives are the most superficial and most fickle among them.

I haven't tested this extensively enough. Your thoughts and counterexamples welcomed!

Wow, that’s a really good one! I’ve never thought about that.

A Dutch friend of mine, who speaks great English, tried to impress me by mentioning her musician friend studied at "the conservatory."

She was baffled when I replied that I hadn't heard of The Conservatory before.

It took us minutes to understand she meant a conservatory: they studied at a music school. I agree that it's more complex than native speakers realize.

"The conservatory" is fine in English if the speaker has good reason to assume the listener would know which conservatory was being talked about, no different to any other educational institution. OTOH legal scholars only ever aspire to "the bar" (it's a metonym) and it's only ever "the school of hard knocks". Of course "school" on its own (or if only qualified by an adjective like "high" or "night" or "law") is unusual because it often sounds unnatural to use an article before it when describing your attendance there.

> if the speaker has good reason to assume the listener would know which conservatory was being talked about

Right - and as I didn’t, I assumed she was using a proper noun. It’s fine English either way! Language is fun.

Eh ... I don't see how that's an different from the common English idiom of saying you went to "the store", which actually always irks me too, since people say it even when it lacks context that would make it definite. If anything, the problem is that she's doing that same thing there.

It's because the alternative is "I went to a store" which only invites unnecessary questions and isn't relevant to the conversation or will become clear so the indicates that, much like ある人 in Japanese means "someone in particular but I'm not going to mention the name because it's pointless to what I'm telling you and it'll just bog us down if I bring it up but it was someone definite", much like the store.

So then what's the difference between that and saying "the conservatory", as in the original comment, for the same reason?

Because if I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work, no further introduction needed. It doesn't if we don't, it becomes special and therefore needs explanation to introduce to the conversation and take on "the".

> Because if I say "I went to the store" … it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing,

No, it isn’t. I frequently see native speakers refer to “the store” when that doesn’t hold — hence why it feels like a special case or break from the usual rules.

You know native speakers that don’t go shopping?

That’s not the standard your original comment was using (or you’re intentionally moving the goal posts here and abandoned good-faith). Again, to quote with more context:

> I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work,

Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean, or b) I go there myself or will in the future. ie, the standard you use for deciding whether “the” would work in the conservatory example.

Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.

Finally, in case it matters: yes, I have had native speakers (my parents) say “the store” even when I (also a native speaker) didn’t go shopping at all, being too young to do it. (This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)

> (or you’re intentionally moving the goal posts here and abandoned good-faith)

That's the end of our conversation, we're discussing grammar and its colloquial use, not anything that requires "good faith argumentation". Inane.

Every conversation requires good-faith, charitable interpretation of what others are saying. I don't know how to interpret your remark, in its original context, as good faith. I said nothing that could reasonably be interpreted as requiring that native speakers "not go shopping". If you were actually interested in a meaningful exchange of ideas, you would have given a more substantive reply than that one.

I agree that if you're not going to take the discussion seriously, you probably shouldn't join it -- it just makes HN worse. Strawman argumentation doesn't suddenly become okay just because "hey man, we were just discussing grammar and its colloquial use", as if it's somehow okay to deliberately misinterpret someone and waste their time in that case.

I'll finish up on the objections here as I don't wish to continue the conversation they come from but do wish to clear them up.

> Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean,

The other person doesn't need to know, it's acting like a specific place has been introduced without it being introduced because to specifically introduce it is wasteful.

> or b) I go there myself or will in the future. ie, the standard you use for deciding whether “the” would work in the conservatory example.

Everyone except the terminal and imminent misfortune will go shopping to the kind of shop "the" will be put in front of. If you were a musician and said "when I went to the conservatory" I wouldn't blink either.

> Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.

It may well be, and it still fits with what I described, and expected shared experience that is assumed to need no further introduction for the rest of what is about to be told.

> Finally, in case it matters: yes, I have had native speakers (my parents) say “the store” even when I (also a native speaker) didn’t go shopping at all, being too young to do it.

You have been or will go shopping in your life, and you know or will come to know what they are referring to. Older people will often use language to youngsters that youngsters do not fully understand yet. It helps the youngsters come to understand it.

> (This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)

Because they point out the stupidity of a response and may invite further stupidity in response? Yes, that is a downside.

>>Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean,

>The other person doesn't need to know, it's acting like a specific place has been introduced without it being introduced because to specifically introduce it is wasteful.

That was in response to the reply where you said:

>I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work,

In other words, I only brought that up, because you were saying it falls under a case where both people know which one it refers to. If you weren't using that defense, you shouldn't have replied here.

>>Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.

>It may well be, and it still fits with what I described, and expected shared experience that is assumed to need no further introduction for the rest of what is about to be told.

Great, but there you're definitely diverging from native speaker usage (as illustrated from the original comment [1]) -- native speakers do not otherwise use "the" for such cases, and would agree you shouldn't say "the conservatory" in that case just because the listener has also gone to a conservatory.

>You have been or will go shopping in your life, and you know or will come to know what they are referring to. Older people will often use language to youngsters that youngsters do not fully understand yet. It helps the youngsters come to understand it.

True, but irrelevant to the issue at at hand. Here you were claiming that it's fine because it's expected that the listener has already shopped at that store. If you want to switch to "well, they're going to model how other people would treat the store's definiteness" that is a different reason for making the noun definite here, which would still make this case different and break the usual pattern of when a noun is made definite.

>>(This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)

>Because they point out the stupidity of a response and may invite further stupidity in response? Yes, that is a downside.

Any stupidity it pointed out was on your own side -- you were absolutely incredulous at the idea that there might be a native speaker that never goes shopping. Haha! Point for you! What a dumb argument! Now everyone will see the light because you have pointed out a clear absurdity in the other person's position!

Except ... such people (non-shoppers) do exist. Which means, not only did you make a demonstrably false assumption, you were calling the other person stupid despite being correct, and adding one more layer of correction that has to be resolved before the discussion can continue.

Yeah -- that counts as a reason to be cautious of that technique.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32619524

I feel like this has something to do with whether the identity of the thing is central to the story or incidental.

"On my last vacation I went to the beach to work on my tan." vs "on my last vacation I went to a beach to work on my tan". "The beach" feels like I went to a specific beach on purpose (or that there was only one), while "a beach" feels like I just picked one at random.

"On my way here I stopped at the store to get an apple" vs "On my way here I stopped at a store to get an apple". Similarly, "the store" implies intentionality/singularity, while "a store" implies I happened upon it.

Wow, that's interesting. In Dutch you would definitely use an article in that sentence:

ze heeft op/aan het conservatorium gestudeerd - she studied at (the) conservatory

hij heeft op/aan het hbo/de universiteit gestudeerd - he studied at (the) college/university

I’ll send this to her! Would love to know how her mental translation arrived there.

I agree it's pretty complicated. Although the general principle of 'definiteness' covers many/most cases, it is far from complete.

I found this page by the British Council to be quite comprehensive, but may still miss something (eg. 'go to school' vs 'go to the school')

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-gram...

Do you know of some other resources that explain many grammatical points well?

Really? "The" is used when the listener knows which one you're talking about, or if there's only one. "A" is used when it's not known or not important which specific one you're referring to. What's an example that deviates from that framework?

[edit] "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians). Properly they mean "I go to [the/a] church", and the reason they leave out the particle is that they mean "THE CHURCH" but they want to sound humble, so they can't say that; but they also can't say "I go to a church," because that would be denying that the church they go to is the One True Church. That's why they don't use a particle in that particular phrase. The proper particle is "a", and "church" shouldn't be capitalized.

[edit2] this is not an attempt to start a religious flame war. I'm just commenting on the grammar.

[edit3] Just to demonstrate the proper noun thing I'm referring to, Jews "go to Temple" (capitalized, proper noun), or go to a temple, but they don't "go to temple".

It isn't that simple, unfortunately for learners of English. One example would be "Shall we go to the pub?" (British usage at least): No specific pub is intended, so a learner would expect 'a pub'. The only sure-fire way to grasp the subtleties of articles (or lack thereof in phrases like "go to school") in English is via immersion, as any rule system is going to fall foul of idiomatic exceptions. To bring this back to Japanese, I feel the same about 'wa' vs 'ga', it's best just to develop a feel for the distiction.

“I went to THE post office”, “I went to THE train station”. These are typically used without context, and are exceptions that confuse learners, particularly those who are learning about articles for the first time.

Regarding “I go to Church”, the verb to go here doesn’t actually mean movement, it’s a euphemism for “I worship”. Same with “temple”. If you say “I go to a/the church” you are actually stating movement towards a definite or indefinite place.

Again, these are challenging subtleties for language speakers where all nouns are conceptual. And most native speakers can’t explain these exceptions spontaneously

> “I went to THE post office”, “I went to THE train station”.

In my hometown: There's only 1 of each and wouldn't be confusing.

Where I live now: Which one?

These don't refute GP's definition, your examples are just missing the shared context that determines whether it's correct or not.

I think definiteness doesn't need to be a shared context.

"I went to the the train station to pick up a map on my way here". "Great, thanks!"

It was a specific train station that I chose intentionally or visit regularly, but it's not relevant to the conversation which one.

If I were to use "a train station" then it implies I didn't care which train station it was.

I go to school.

I think school is in the same class as “work.”

> "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians).

You're definitely wrong here, because "I go to school" and "I go to work" are equally grammatical statements, and there is no way to construe those as involving proper nouns. You can also see this construction with words like bed or the various mealtimes.

The commonality I can derive from these various examples is something along the lines of "state of being," although I find that a poor descriptor. This kind of formation is limited to relatively few locations (you can't say "I go to mall" for example), but for everything I can think up, you can also use the word sans determiner in other circumstances ("College has gotten expensive as of late," for example).

If you try to translate from one language with a definite/indefinite article distinction to another (say English to German or Spanish), you'll notice that in many edge cases, one language uses a different article than the other (or one of them uses no article, while the other does).

The "I go to Church" example, is a case in point. In both German and Spanish, a definite article is required.

That shows that, while there is a systematic difference between "a" and "the", it breaks down in many edge cases.

As a native speaker of English, I didn't know about mass nouns until I was an adult and I was trying to explain to a non-native speaker that they were using "the" too much.

Then you have “I go home”, which drops not only “the” but “to”. Religious in nature? No.

This was some truly bizarre reasoning based off one example and it has zero actual foundation in language. One of the strangest comments I’ve ever seen on HN.

I wonder if “hospital” behaves the same way in some countries due to religious roots

In American English, people are in the hospital, but in UK English people are in hospital. So it only behaves that way in some Englishes.

True. Currently I'm in the stage of writing my thesis. Grammar is hard. I know and learnt about the vs a vs no particle but I'm still struggling when to use any of them.

(And then there's US Eng vs UK Eng...)

I dunno - there after plenty of cases we use "the" despite it not referring to a known single instance of something. "The thing is..." or "what's the matter" or even "I've got the flu". Good luck trying to explain to Japanese speakers especially why "a dinner" or "go to a hospital" don't sound natural but "I'll have a beer" or "a few friends" are fine. And why is it "once upon a time" but "most of the time"...

English speakers across dialects can't even agree on how to use "the", "a" and no particle.

I went to hospital.

I went to the hospital.

>I went to hospital

Where would that be standard?

England.

Similar to "I went to university" and so on.

This is really not true of many ESL speakers whose first language does not have articles.

The evidence points to the contrary, you acquire a language as an adult faster than a child can. This is because you have more complex mental faculties available, and can have complex topics explained as analogies to a language you know.

As others have pointed out, ESL learners ask questions about English articles all the time, and it helps them understand how the language works faster than if they had to brute-force the patterns.

There is no "natural" way to learn, there's just ways that work and ways that don't. The fastest way to learn a language is by having comprehensible input, and more input becomes comprehensible with directed, structured study.

You may ramp up adult-level conversational ability faster, but it takes much longer to reach any state of native-like fluency.

For example, I lived and studied in Japan, and while I probably jumped from zero to ~middle-school in terms of basic communication ability in about a year with daily classwork and total immersion, I was nowhere near the average toddler in terms of basic fluency after that time. Even now, I can make myself understood in most adult-level contexts where a toddler would be helpless, but nobody would ever confuse me for a native toddler.

It's not just accent, either -- little kids still routinely teach me vocabulary and grammar.

If you had three years of paid vacation where you had to use the language exclusively for everything, your skills would probably improve to toddler-level or beyond. Though admittedly you already know many things that they have to learn at the same time.

Having to communicate with your family (and probably close friends/significant other/etc.) exclusively in the language probably makes a big difference as well.

I think a lot of fluency is having someone carry you around 24/7 and talk to you like a baby for a few years. Much of the rest is just having patient people around you for another 3-4 years who will listen to you babble like an idiot and correct you when you're wrong.

I agree that if I could do nothing but spend 3 years in total immersion, I'd probably accumulate an adult-level vocabulary (again, the ramp-up is steep), but I still wouldn't sound like a native at that point, whereas a toddler would sound like a native...but have a toddler vocabulary.

Hmmm I think if you observe children my personal conclusion is that in practice (over theory) thought and language are intractable and as we mature, expression becomes more acute and so language acquisition is faster because we no longer need to learn how to think.

A 6 year old needs to learn $LANGUAGE and science simultaneously

Indeed, that's why adults are still favored in language learning, with the exception of phonology (which does make sense, retraining all those fine movements truly is harder than starting with the right movements to begin with) - https://sites.psu.edu/bilingualismmatters/children-vs-adults...

Adults win in acquisition speed because we already have a template for learning a language.

> but I managed to get to a point where I could use the right one far more often than not based on what just felt right

It is the same for kanji for me. I usually don't actively know something by seeing it and reaching for it, I just see it enough times that one day I "feel" the answer first. I never go "Oh yes, that's the kanji for cat, this is definitely correct". My brain goes "CAT!", and then I just have to assume this is the kanji for cat. Almost like there's a disconnect between active recall and knowledge stored from repetition.

I’m going to challenge you buy saying this. I’ve progressed much much quicker by studying the differences between. は and が, because I learn it and I forget it. I don’t think about it when using it anymore, however it’s in there somewhere when I get lost.

Same for English. I did learn it, I also forgot it. It’s not in there but it is. Same for being able to explain verb conjugations.

I agree though on some points for sure. Especially how well my German fiends (for example) understand the theory of English compared to me.

I distinctly remember learning about articles in fourth grade English in my US public school, and distinctly remember most of my class having a lot of trouble with them.

To your point though, I taught myself to read at age three and was reading adult fiction by fourth grade, I've always been told I have a large vocabulary, and still had a lot of trouble in that class around parts of speech and grammar, because I apparently skipped out on essential English language skills by teaching myself to read and not learning by immersion.

My theory of language was fundamentally different and I had to relearn English from the bottom up. This also caused me to perform terribly in foreign language classes as I was learning concepts I should have already learned about English... I wasn't just learning a foreign language, I was learning my own language at the same time.

Grammar used to be a core part of grammar school. It was for me, along with penmanship. I'm not (that) old, my school was weird, but one is expected to graduate high school knowing what indefinite and definite articles are, which is which in English, and the distinction they represent.

Explicitly rather than implicitly, I mean. I believe this is still expected of high school graduates in America, yes? So the use of the negative particle in the first sentence isn't indicated.

> just keep practicing

I'm taking a course from my university and am active on Duolingo. How do you suggest I practice? How did you?

Duolingo is bad. You should have a mix of resources that fit you best: Wanikani (absolutely essential), Bunpo, LingoDeer, Bunpro, and audio drills lessons, like Pimsleur.

Add a occasional speaking lesson with a teacher on iTalki.

I checked out Wanikani's free blog posts to learn kana, but they seemed pretty useless as an L2 English speaker. They might be useful for L1 English speakers, though.

The interesting thing about it is learning the kanji, which is essential for reading. It might be an extra step to learn a few new words in English, but it is not a complex task.

It is not complex per se, but it is unnecessarily confusing.

For instance, Japanese い (i) is similar in pronunciation to the letter 'i' in various Germanic languages (e.g. Dutch, German, Swedish). The romaji reflects this similarity.

Enter Wanikani's (Tofugu's) explanation:

> い is pronounced like the ee in "eel." To remember this kana, just think of a couple of eels hanging out.

Like I mentioned, this is probably useful for L1 English speakers, but it is not worth having to go from Dutch 'i' to English 'eel' in order to finally go to Japanese い (i).

When you use the app, not the blog, there are audios with the pronunciation, instead of these approximations. Wanikani is the app I refer to as useful, not Tofugu’s blog.

OK, I'll check out the app once I get to studying kanji (still working on kana at the moment). Thanks!

Talk with natives. I used HelloTalk back in the day and it was pretty good for Japanese.

If you can afford the cost and time investment, I greatly recommend studying at a Japanese language school in Japan. The experience is invaluable. I was able to get a one-year student visa, later extended for another year, as well as an amendment (there's a proper word for this but I can't recall) to the visa which allowed me to work part-time (above-the-table, that is) to help cover the costs. What's available to you will vary based on your citizenship (I'm American) but if you really want to learn this stuff seriously and have the opportunity available to you, I'd definitely recommend it.

Currently, though, I use DuoLinguo (yeah, not very comprehensive, but the gamificaiton works to induce me to use it every day, and a little study every day is better than none) and occasionally write up "Moments" (blog posts) on HelloTalk. As there's no IRL language schools that teach Japanese in the area I live currently, I hope to do online lessons some day, but those can be spendy and I'm not currently at a point in life with much disposable income.

I'm just starting out with Japanese, but a weird thing I have found is that private lessons with professional teachers (with 5-star reviews) on Italki seem to be about as expensive on an hourly basis as group-based lessons (at least in my country).

I was going to sign up for a class, but noticing this has made me reconsider, and now I am planning to just take private lessons for the same amount of money (or cheaper, as a class needs to move at the pace of its slowest student).

But if you want to be thrifty, I have heard of people who mostly self-study, and only consult with a private teacher to practice their speaking. I don't think Duolingo is a truly effective way to learn, but the last time I tried it was a decade ago.

The community on /r/LearnJapanese is massive and contains a lot of information.

Read and listen to a lot of native language. You will absorb the patterns and eventually produce them automatically. Much much easier than memorising lots of grammar.

You could say this about many aspects of many foreign languages. So what?

Reading explanations helps. Immersion helps too. They are both useful tools, and for many people, immersion or "the natural way" are not available unless they move to a different country, so reading explanations is a perfectly reasonable approach.

I would like a Japanese primary school teacher to confirm that this isn't actually taught in schools there.

I feel like the big language models have proved this style of learning a language is the wrong approach.

I learnt Japanese; I studied it for 4 years and spent a year in japan.

You know what worked?

Lots of examples of people using particles.

What did not work?

Text books explaining what the particles do.

A grammatical study of particles is only useful after you’ve gained an understanding of when you should use them from shed loads of examples.

It helps you refine specific fine detail points of when to use them technically, and in formal writing.

For early learning, I posit it’s next to useless.

Language is not a well designed programming language full of orthogonal concepts.

This has long been an argument, but language models reallly nail down the fact that a probabilistic approach to “similar to existing examples” approach to language is categorically superior to attempting to construct semantically correct statements from “rules”.

I find that examples and technical explanations complement each other. Examples are important, but the grammar explanations help give an idea of what to focus on in the examples.

In fact I see it as a gradient. Vocabulary that stands on its own (like "apple") is best learned through examples. Stuff that is extremely structural (like how verbs conjugate in Japanese) is much easier to learn through explanations, instead of going through examples trying to find the pattern yourself. And there is of course middle ground, like grammar particles, which are vocabulary that also obey lots of rules.

There is an entire book (in Japanese) about は vs. が. I have read it. It breaks down hundreds of use cases and provides a generic guide to which one is correct. But it as nowhere near as helpful as just reading and listening to a ton of Japanese until I had a sense for which one was correct automatically.

Out of curiosity, what's the book?

https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%80%8C%E3%81%AF%E3%80%8D%E3%81%A...

edit: what I really want is a list of sentences which are exactly the same except the particle is different, and an explanation of how the meaning changes. I haven't found any resources like that online.

The difficulty of the exercise is that a same sentence with は can even vary in nuance depending on context...

Inferring rules from shed loads of examples instead of coding them explicitly is only superior for big language models because machines are faster at processing examples than humans are at implementing a comprehensive set of rules for the machines to follow. So it's a trade-off between slow and expensive human labor vs. fast and comparatively cheap machine labor.

When it's a human learning a language, that speed difference doesn't apply. When the choice is between a slow human processing a lot of examples vs. a slow human processing a small number of examples plus a description of the rule governing them, it's no longer so obvious that the first approach is better.

The answer usually comes from experience. Once you've learned a language through immersion and deliberate practice, you can never go back to the classroom setting.

Language learning gets obfuscated by the profitable industry that has sprung up around it, but in the end it's clear which method works the best.

> it's no longer so obvious that the first approach is better.

That’s an easy arm chair argument to make.

I won’t argue it because, because there’s plenty of literature about the topic of immersion vs book learning for languages. I’ll just tldr; I spent a lot of time on this, and I am convinced you are just flat out wrong.

…but, instead of arguing over a difference in opinion, how about this?

Given that in digital products space is not at a premium, why not, instead of one or two contrived examples of each particle, have 50 examples of usage of each?

It’s easy. It’s addresses the problem of rule based approach vs examples by having both.

…because, a trivial example and a rule is quite useless for real world purposes; and if you cant make a bunch of different examples, you don’t understand the particle and shouldn’t be trying to teach it to people.

I mean, here’s a specific example:

> Just like the particle に (ni), へ (e) is used to indicate destination or direction. They are translated as to in English and are often interchangeable.

> e is also used as a term to which we turn our actions.

> Also in this case it can be replaced by に.

Are they totally interchangeable? Nope.

When do you use which? It depends.

Guess how you figure that out? Examples.

In many cases, both in English and Japanese rules become long lists of examples and specific cases when they are made complex enough to encapsulate the full range of when to use when.

Language models show categorically that predictive models of language work well. Anecdotally, the same approach works well for people too.

Why not offer both approaches? There’s totally a place for rules too. Let people pick what they want to use, try both and pick what works for them?

I'm not sure what qualifies his argument as an arm-chair argument relative to yours.

Grammar is a shortcut to a basic understanding, the primary complaint of users of Duolingo is the lack of grammar lessons, and having to infer rules solely through examples.

I don't know of anyone who is arguing for a single approach to language learning either. Pretty much everyone who has ever worked through a textbook recommends supplementing with real content, examples, media, conversations and so on. It doesn't invalidate the use of a textbook focused on grammar.

As for language models they're pretty much entirely irrelevant to human learning.

Language models show that language is predictive, not rule based.

Every bit of research in the last 30 years shows this.

If you want to ignore that and use rule based approaches, that’s fine, but you’re a) wrong and b) it doesn’t work.

/shrug

Of course people want rules, they think it’s a shortcut to learning.

…but there is no shortcut to learning. You have to do the hard work.

> Language models show that language is predictive, not rule based.

Training language models by making them predict missing words in a text is a trick to optimize their ability to extract information from text. That doesn't mean that making humans do the exact same task is the optimal way to learn a language. And it definitely doesn't mean there are no rules.

Millenia of linguistic research have succeeded in identifying a lot of rules in every language. You don't have to learn them explicitly, but it speeds things up a bit.

If you think there are no shortcuts to learning, you're either blind to the shortcuts you used, or you missed out on a lot.

Like dictionaries. They just tell you what a word means in a language you can understand! That saves a lot of time compared to having to figure out everything from context.

The Wiktionary entry for the particle に https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%AB#Particle lists eight different uses and has a note on the different nuance of ヘ. Do you think this entry is completely useless? If someone looks up に, what information should they get?

The rules of a natural language are not prescriptive, but descriptive. Studying the rules may work if the language's grammar is similar to that of one's native language.

And all language models of any use also have way more data than a human could read in a lifetime.

Look, you learned a basic understanding of particles and had some _meaning_ associated with them, before going out and practicing and finally learning the language.

No one is saying you’ll learn a language by just reading grammar rules. What text books on grammar says is that it’s a good support to give you an understanding that helps you process and create sentence so you can get to listening and speaking and learn to use the language.

Agreed. One thing grammar books also ignore is that spoken Japanese skips lots of particles: nobody ever says を in casual speech, and が, は, に are often disposable. Okaasan mise itte pan katta, not *okaasan GA mise NI itte pan WO katta".

I'm curious why this occurs in Japanese and not English (or I assume other similar languages). It's easier and just as clear to say "mum went shop bought bread" but you very sound like someone that hasn't learnt the language properly. On the flip side it's the things that don't get omitted in the Japanese despite being superfluous (the o- and -san!) that makes it even more peculiar.

Not a native in either English or Japanese, but fluent in both, and I feel that skipping particles in Japanese doesn't alter the flow of speech (because Japanese doesn't really have consecutive consonants), while it does in English (at least in your example).

I agree 100%. One big problem with Japanese textbooks is that they usually cover formal Japanese only. You encounter Japanese in the wild and see a lot of things handled differently from textbooks or at all. All Japanese All The Time was an intense early solution to this based around learning sentences over specific parts of speech and you intuit as you go.

I'm currently in a 6 months streak on Duolingo japanese and this article is actually very useful to understand the difference between ha, ga and he, that I think are the most tricky. In fact the ga explanation is the longest hehe :p Keep it going, the website is super well made and fast (what's the tech behind?).

I'm not sure if the kana-only view is very useful, since the kanji view already has full yomigana. Maybe have a button to toggle furigana instead?

I keep this in a userstyles sheet:

    ruby rt {
        visibility: hidden;
    }

    ruby:hover rt {
        visibility: visible;
    }

For most sites that have kanji w/ furigana, this makes it visible only on mouse-hover.

There’s a language joke in Uncle from Another World, where to pass himself off as an elf girl he adds a “-wa” to his sentences in a completely unconvincing way because that’s “how girls talk”.

So in this case is -wa a particle? What kind?

That's a 終助詞 (shuujoshi) or "sentence-ending particle". Note that despite both being pronounced as "wa", the sentence-ending one is written as わ ("wa"), while the topic-marker particle is written as は ("ha").

In standard Japanese, わ is feminine and mildly emphatic (used for asserting an opinion or stating a fact).

In this case wa modifies a particle to make it sound more feminine. It's not a particle by itself.

For example "yo" might become "wayo".

I'm not sure I know about "wa" being used in that way by itself (maybe in some cases you can completely replace the particle with "wa" when it's obvious) but I'm not a native speaker (this is information I'm relaying from by partner/teacher)

Interesting website, but looks like it is still work in progress. Filtering on Kanji page is broken and Grammar page is just empty. Keep up the good work!

> They are also called postpositions because, unlike prepositions, they follow the noun or the element they are modifying

I did learn of particles as pre and post positions but I never really thought of them as modifying. I’ve always thought of them more as connecting and showing relationships between words and sentences.

If anyone is curious why particle は is read as wa instead of ha I recommend reading this: https://briefjapanese.fun/history-of-%e3%81%af/

I made a popular reader app for learning Japanese with unique word by word and kanji by kanji learning progress tracking functionality as you read: https://reader.manabi.io

> Particles are a particular and specific concept in Japanese language, and do not exist in many other languages, in particular Western languages

English's particles are few.

"Particle" and "copula" are two words that might as well be Japanese-learning-specific jargon, for how disproportionately common they appear in that context, and their meanings in that context subtly differs from their meanings in general linguistics.

I don't know what's happening but the font on that website rendered so bad on my standard DPI monitor with Chrome/Win11 (100%) that it's very distracting.

Same issue for me using Chrome/Win10. There seem to be some sharp artefacts above letters: https://imgur.com/a/lt8Kdah

I find this article rather confused. The difference between は and が is not adequately explained, there are questionable analyses (verbs of motion analysed as transitive just because they can take を), weird terminology ("genitive case"... in a language that doesn't have cases, also it's not like the article is at least consistent in calling を an "accusative case" marker), and at times weird English to the point of being confusing (誰が described as "confidential", I think what they mean is "non-polite")...

but regardless, that's nowhere near a "complete introduction" to particles. I have a textbook (The Structure of the Japanese Language by Susumu Kuno) that devotes three entire chapters only to は vs. が. Of course, you can give a tl;dr of it, ignoring edge cases, but you do have to at least talk a bit more carefully about what a topic is, and what a subject is.

>verbs of motion analysed as transitive just because they can take を

I think it's fine to call 移動動詞 transitive because they take a direct object. The reason why a lot of people call them intransitive is because they are 自動詞. It's appealing to want to be able to interchange transitive / intransitive and 他動詞 / 自動詞.

>that's nowhere near a "complete introduction"

I agree. There wasn't anything complete other than defining what a particle is. The article didn't even define a single particle that is classified as a 終助詞 (か, よ, な, ね, ...) despite even using them in the example sentences.

Edit:

>"genitive case"... in a language that doesn't have cases, also it's not like the article is at least consistent in calling を an "accusative case" marker

格助詞 is in JMDict as "case-marking particle (e.g. "ga", "no", "wo", "ni")." I can't be bothered to look up what cases actually are and verify this since I find applying western linguistics to Japanese to not be very useful.

> I think it's fine to call 移動動詞 transitive because they take a direct object.

I would agree if it were a direct object. I think mainstream analysis is that を is considered to not always mark the object, but sometimes the place you walk through, and as such frequently stands in opposition to に. I would argue that these are essentially adjunct phrases, not core arguments, although that's always a difficult argument to make in Japanese, since all NPs are theoretically optional, even arguments.

> I can't be bothered to look up what cases actually are and verify this since I find applying western linguistics to Japanese to not be very useful.

As usual, everyone will have their different definitions, but I consider case to be morphological (see also: https://wals.info/chapter/49). I think using vocabulary such as "genitive" muddies the waters. The genitive has a number of functions in, say, Latin or Ancient Greek, not all of which are related to possession. I think it's less confusing to call の a possessive marker - although technically, it's not always possession (e.g. 校長のスズキ先生), so maybe you could even find a better term, like "relational".

> I think mainstream analysis is that を is considered to not always mark the object,

But even in English we can say things like "fly the skies" or "walk the streets", which map reasonably well to how を is used. When it's used for sentences like 自転車を盗んでいるところを捕まった (roughly "caught about to steal a bicycle") however it's harder to understand it that way. It's not the ところ that was caught, but the (implied) topic, probably "I" with no other context

>to not always mark the object, but sometimes the place you walk through

This is anecdotal, but from the 2 Japanese people I've asked they see these usages of を as being the same. Ultimately the way it's classified doesn't really matter so I personally see both ways an being valid.

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