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.
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
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")
The name for what you're talking about is "morphological typology". Languages occupy a spectrum from analytic (words stay the same) to synthetic (words change). English is usually categorized as analytic, since we only have a few ways to change words: plural -s, past tense -ed, etc., and English has been getting more analytic over time. Other European languages are more synthetic (fusional), like French, German, Spanish, etc. Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian are very synthetic (agglutinative). Chinese (all varieties) is on the opposite end of the spectrum, and it's much more analytic than English.
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.
You should definitely see Turkish. it's belong to same family with Japanese. But verbs are even bigger. There are more variants as suffixes to the verbs. Sometimes a whole English sentence can be translated into one Turkish word. Have a look. "okutamadıklarımızdansınız" just one word. It means you are one of those who we can not make them read.
The conjugation of japanese verbs are non negotiable - it has to be there for you to make any sense, and I don't think OP was claiming that you can move(?) how a verb is conjucated - just that the subject and object order doesn't matter (which is correct). The tense of the verb or conjucation of the verb has nothing to do with that.
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.
There are actually a number of ways to say "if" in japanese, and the one you mention can only be used in certain contexts.
People might get your gist if you use the conditional tense for everything, but you'll be wrong a lot. The -tara/nara grammar is at least as commonly used, if not more so.
I bring this up to illustrate only that the "programming language" metaphor doesn't go very far. Japanese, like any human language, is loaded with weird, illogical exceptions.
Japanese actually has a confusing array of conditional constructions
VERB (conjugated) + nara (or the ridiculously formal "naraba")
VERB (conjugated) + some noun, such as baai (case)
VERB (plain form) + to
VERB (izenkei form) + ba
VERB (past form) + ra
And there are complex forms such as:
VERB (plain form) + to shitara
VERB (plain form) + to sureba
And you can add moshi or moshimo in the beginning to increase the level of supposition.
Each has a slightly different use and meaning of course, but it's still confusing enough for me even now.
5 or 6 grammar points can go a long way? If it's that few then I guess they must be the formal forms. So you'll need at least another 5 or 6 to understand the casual forms that you would use with friends or when you're the sempai in the situation. Want to talk to kids or young adults? Better learn another 5 or 6 forms of manga styled grammar slang. And if you interact with sales clerks, listen to train announcements or want to hear other official announcements, they're going to speak keigo, so there's another "5 or 6" forms to learn.
If you're interested in learning to read Japanese, you should give it a shot. It's intimidating but pretty do-able. Set yourself up with flash cards (I suggest AnkiDroid) and you can be pretty good at reading hiragana and katakana within a week. Then, study kanji flash cards for an hour a day and you'll know all the common kanji before you know it. Try to memorize 10-25 kanji per day and you can learn all the jōyō kanji within a few months. If you spend a few minutes telling yourself a story about each radical and kanji as you study you'll have no trouble memorizing them.
I had an ex-colleague (a dev) who also knew Japanese well. He was doing Japanese <-> English translation part-time in the same company. Later quit software to do translation full time. When I asked him how difficult it was for him to learn Japanese, he said that Japanese grammar was very similar to Marathi grammar (which, I'm guessing, may be similar to Hindi grammar). Wonder if any one else has observed the same points as him, even for the similarity of Japanese to some other language.
I've only glanced at japanese before but after reading this article i had a similar notion.
It's as if you populate the parameters to a function by placing them in specific registers (using specific particles) and then execute the function (verb) once you're done.
I imagine this idea breaks down horribly once multiple verbs are introduced to a single sentence...
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
Most important for what? For speaking about linguistics, maybe. But if you are using the language to communicate, there is no most important single thing to "learn", since using the language to communicate means that you are using the language in a way that resembles a skill, and the language grows in your brain as an implicit system – you acquire it bit-by-bit, but the internal system doing the acquiring doesn't care what counts as "grammar" and what counts as "lexicon". You can teach yourself rules, but that doesn't mean that you are able to use them spontaneously.
TL;DR: knowledge about language is different from skill of communicating in language.
> 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.
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.
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.
I strongly recommend a method of language learning called TPR (Total Physical Response).[1][2][3] It is by far the fastest and easiest way I know of learning vocabulary and grammar.
In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action.
For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down.
This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command.
As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned.
What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space.
Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway.
TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part.
When I taught my tutor this method, he told me that I was by far the fastest of his students to pick up vocabulary, and he wound up switching completely to teaching with this method. It was really effective for me, and I highly recommend it.
TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly.
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.
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).
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/
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you're probably falling into a common trap: There are plenty of exceptions, you just don't know them yet.
For sure, Japanese verbs are more regular than English verbs. But most materials written about Japanese are aimed squarely at beginners. They naturally skip over any foibles for pedagogical reasons. There isn't all that much written (in English) about tricky sentences, syntactic ambiguity and similar mistakes.
We had it in school in grades 8-10 or so and I really enjoyed learning it. The grammar rules are fairly simple and there are not many of them, IIRC. Words can be made up out of smaller words by joining them together by simple rules.
Another interesting thing is that many words have multiple meanings, a fact that poet and prose writes in the Sanskrit literature leveraged heavily. So a passage of text can have multiple layers of meaning.
It is almost like a programming language where you compose bigger structures such as functions and classes out of the atomic elements of the language.
> the idea that a natural language could actually be designed was a shock to me
Perhaps the Japanese grammar was designed by a small group of individuals, maybe even one individual, a long time ago, and promoted officially by the Japanese Emperor of the time. Many writing systems have been designed from scratch in the past. Many spoken languages have risen from regional dialect to imperial language, and at least one language, Israeli, was brought to life after being dead as a spoken language for centuries. No-one's ever found a definitive link between Japanese and any other language. Perhaps at some time, the Japanese grammar was designed from scratch, perhaps using a mixture of vocabulary from many other nearby languages existing at that time, and promulgated to become the language of all Japan.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sure. "piza wo taberu?" can be "piza taberu?" and that's fine, even normal.
> (including pronouns)
This is different and I think there are a few misconceptions bundled up in this assumption.
1. Particles don't exist on their own; they're permanently linked to the word that precedes them; if you've ever studied a Romance language, you can think of them as a way of declining nouns.
So "watashi wa" is the nominative, "watashi wo" is the accusative.
2. Pronoun dropping is done in the sense that the pronoun is not essential to the sentence and can be inferred from context.
For example, if you and your friend are eating and you ask "motto taberu [gonna eat more?]," nobody's going to be confused about whether the subject of that sentence is "watashi wa" or "anata wa."
It happens in English, too, but people overthink it a lot when presented with it consciously in Japanese.
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.
That's a common question... and unfortunately the answer is that "watashi wa tabemasu" and "tabemasu" are absolutely different from each other and you can't just go around substituting one for the other. You also can't really translate the difference between the two of them, but in context, a good translation might be:
Watashi wa tabamasu. -> As for me, I'm eating.
Tabemasu. -> I'm eating.
It bears repeating: this depends on context. But you can see how "watashi wa" sticks out like a sore thumb, and you can instantly recognize novice Japanese second-language speakers because they say "watashi wa" all the time. And you'll later learn that "watashi" is sometimes an inappropriate way to refer to yourself...
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.
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).
1. You can't topicalise the subject of a subordinate clause. 2. Only plain form is valid for verbs in a subordinate clause. (maybe the particle "kara" could be seen as an exception here)
kazinator|9 years ago
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
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.
raverbashing|9 years ago
I've watched it a bit and it seems very nicely done
glandium|9 years ago
Panoramix|9 years ago
whym|9 years ago
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
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")
klodolph|9 years ago
iamnotlarry|9 years ago
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.
risyasin|9 years ago
fenomas|9 years ago
Surely that's the whole point of the "8020" in the URL?
Personally I thought it was excellent, compact, understandable introduction. Sure it leaves things out, but if it didn't it would be a textbook!
gdilla|9 years ago
lovemenot|9 years ago
iamnotlarry|9 years ago
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.
irq11|9 years ago
There are actually a number of ways to say "if" in japanese, and the one you mention can only be used in certain contexts.
People might get your gist if you use the conditional tense for everything, but you'll be wrong a lot. The -tara/nara grammar is at least as commonly used, if not more so.
I bring this up to illustrate only that the "programming language" metaphor doesn't go very far. Japanese, like any human language, is loaded with weird, illogical exceptions.
unscaled|9 years ago
Each has a slightly different use and meaning of course, but it's still confusing enough for me even now.
dcw303|9 years ago
Sir_Cmpwn|9 years ago
vram22|9 years ago
rkachowski|9 years ago
It's as if you populate the parameters to a function by placing them in specific registers (using specific particles) and then execute the function (verb) once you're done.
I imagine this idea breaks down horribly once multiple verbs are introduced to a single sentence...
greenhatman|9 years ago
ThinkingGuy|9 years ago
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.
stephengillie|9 years ago
mcaruso|9 years ago
myrandomcomment|9 years ago
xelxebar|9 years ago
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.
marak830|9 years ago
tempodox|9 years ago
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.
xelxebar|9 years ago
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.
GolDDranks|9 years ago
TL;DR: knowledge about language is different from skill of communicating in language.
kalleboo|9 years ago
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.
dbshapco|9 years ago
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|9 years ago
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.
pmoriarty|9 years ago
In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action.
For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down.
This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command.
As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned.
What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space.
Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway.
TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part.
When I taught my tutor this method, he told me that I was by far the fastest of his students to pick up vocabulary, and he wound up switching completely to teaching with this method. It was really effective for me, and I highly recommend it.
TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response
[2] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.di...
[3] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.di...
a_c|9 years ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Information_eXchange
unknown|9 years ago
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Grue3|9 years ago
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).
CinnamonStick|9 years ago
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.
ehsquared|9 years ago
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".
unknown|9 years ago
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creamyhorror|9 years ago
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
unscaled|9 years ago
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|9 years ago
akssri|9 years ago
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
It is also fascinating to look at the Thai/Khmer scripts and realize these are related to current day Telugu/Kannada scripts.
monster_group|9 years ago
Arnavion|9 years ago
Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, Hindi's sambandh kaarak (ka-ke-ki-ra-re-ri-na-ne-ni) is the genitive case. watashi no hon <-> meri pustak, etc
scarygliders|9 years ago
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.
iamnotlarry|9 years ago
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.
unscaled|9 years ago
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.
laurieg|9 years ago
For sure, Japanese verbs are more regular than English verbs. But most materials written about Japanese are aimed squarely at beginners. They naturally skip over any foibles for pedagogical reasons. There isn't all that much written (in English) about tricky sentences, syntactic ambiguity and similar mistakes.
vram22|9 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit
We had it in school in grades 8-10 or so and I really enjoyed learning it. The grammar rules are fairly simple and there are not many of them, IIRC. Words can be made up out of smaller words by joining them together by simple rules.
Another interesting thing is that many words have multiple meanings, a fact that poet and prose writes in the Sanskrit literature leveraged heavily. So a passage of text can have multiple layers of meaning.
It is almost like a programming language where you compose bigger structures such as functions and classes out of the atomic elements of the language.
vorg|9 years ago
Perhaps the Japanese grammar was designed by a small group of individuals, maybe even one individual, a long time ago, and promoted officially by the Japanese Emperor of the time. Many writing systems have been designed from scratch in the past. Many spoken languages have risen from regional dialect to imperial language, and at least one language, Israeli, was brought to life after being dead as a spoken language for centuries. No-one's ever found a definitive link between Japanese and any other language. Perhaps at some time, the Japanese grammar was designed from scratch, perhaps using a mixture of vocabulary from many other nearby languages existing at that time, and promulgated to become the language of all Japan.
kalleboo|9 years ago
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)
migueloller|9 years ago
> 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|9 years ago
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.
RayVR|9 years ago
* 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
fenomas|9 years ago
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R3iCWi...
glandium|9 years 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.
Razengan|9 years ago
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
unknown|9 years ago
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yawaramin|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
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panorama|9 years ago
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.
sdrothrock|9 years ago
Sure. "piza wo taberu?" can be "piza taberu?" and that's fine, even normal.
> (including pronouns)
This is different and I think there are a few misconceptions bundled up in this assumption.
1. Particles don't exist on their own; they're permanently linked to the word that precedes them; if you've ever studied a Romance language, you can think of them as a way of declining nouns.
So "watashi wa" is the nominative, "watashi wo" is the accusative.
2. Pronoun dropping is done in the sense that the pronoun is not essential to the sentence and can be inferred from context.
For example, if you and your friend are eating and you ask "motto taberu [gonna eat more?]," nobody's going to be confused about whether the subject of that sentence is "watashi wa" or "anata wa."
It happens in English, too, but people overthink it a lot when presented with it consciously in Japanese.
teraflop|9 years ago
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.
klodolph|9 years ago
Watashi wa tabamasu. -> As for me, I'm eating.
Tabemasu. -> I'm eating.
It bears repeating: this depends on context. But you can see how "watashi wa" sticks out like a sore thumb, and you can instantly recognize novice Japanese second-language speakers because they say "watashi wa" all the time. And you'll later learn that "watashi" is sometimes an inappropriate way to refer to yourself...
joshka|9 years ago
[1]: https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/#comparison
DrPhish|9 years ago
eg: Taberu (eat) or Hayai (fast)
It sounds like cavemen talk if you translate it literally, but it is perfectly valid japanese
dasfasf|9 years ago
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|9 years ago
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|9 years ago
rootsudo|9 years ago
Of course, generally speaking I am learning Japanese.
lisper|9 years ago
vram22|9 years ago
randomgyatwork|9 years ago