10 ms·

An introduction to Japanese

363 points by e-sushi 10y ago

melling 10y ago
I'm collecting links for Japanese language resources, as well as other languages on Github: https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning/tree/master/japanese https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning/tree/master/japa... Other languages: https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning I'd love to find more great resources.
- brokencup 10y ago
  The stickied posts at Koohii are a great resource for everything related to learning Japanese. It's a pretty popular forum for Japanese learners: http://forum.koohii.com/index.php http://forum.koohii.com/index.php
redthrow 10y ago
This doesn't seem to be a good resource to learn the language as a beginner. For example Prof Victor Mair is against teaching Chinese characters to beginners: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 pay little or no attention to memorizing characters (I would have been content with actively mastering 25 or so very high frequency characters and passively recognizing at most a hundred or so high frequency characters during the first year) focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, particles, morphology, syntax, idioms, patterns, constructions, sentence structure, rhythm, prosody, and so forth — real language, not the script
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  This book is not for people who want to stay a beginner for a year, this is for people who want to learn the language at the same pace as a typical university student: you get a few weeks to learn hiragana and katakana, then the romaji is taken away. After a year, you'll already know anywhere between 1000 common kanji and the full jouyou set. I wrote this book based on that need. So step 1: learn hiragana, because after the introductory chapter you're not getting romanised Japanese anymore. However, because it's not a writing course, all kanji have furigana so that you can read every sentence. This book is not going to calmly and gently lead you through the Japanese grammar, it's meant as a proper "you need this book for a year at most, after that you should already know everything that we cover". Perhaps not to the degree that you can duplicate the book, or in a way that makes you remember all the technical terms, but all the constructions and how they use them: this is the pace you run through learning Japanese at first year university level.
  - beevai142 10y ago
    Mair's argument is that it is a waste of effort to spend time on learning the characters, in the first stages of learning the language. They are more easily learnt systematically somewhat later on, when you know the corresponding words to which you can anchor them. Note that the people advocating for this are university language professors and teachers, who are claiming they have data backing up the claim.
    - TheRealPomax 10y ago
      Right, my counter to that is that's great if you want to leisurely learn Japanese, but also not very relevant for the type of course this book supports. These typically start you on kanji pretty much in week 3, in conjunction with the word lists that support the kanji you're learning every week (and constantly use throughout that week and subsequent ones), specifically because of the argument raised: learning kanji without the words they're in, and even if that, without using those words, is ridiculous.
      - beevai142 10y ago
        The argument above applies specifically to university courses, and was made by someone who is familiar with teaching such courses. So I don't think you can just discount it with handwaving, especially as there are claims about better success rates.
        TheRealPomax 10y ago
        I'm not discounting anything, but different people want, or need, different courses. My book is geared specifically towards people who are to enthusiastically committed to learning Japanese, and want more information about the language they're paying money for to learn, with some assumptions about what that means: they, like me, and like many of my fellow students at the time, but not like everyone, want to learn Japanese properly, without hand holding because some grammar or some orthography is deemed too hard. We'll see whether that's the case as we learn, not as an assumption baked into the course. Of course that method doesn't work for everyone, but for me, and for many others, but again not for everyone, getting kanji early was exciting, motivating, and awesome. I would have been angry at a promise of a better approach without kanji for half a year as a paying student. So that's the book you get here, too: I am not making assumptions on how slowly you want material, this is a grammar for supplementing your course work, or deep diving if that's what you want to do. And if the Japanese used in the book is too much, too soon: it's a free book, find one you feel fits you better. But we're better off with a spectrum of works: rather than every book following the best methodology, we need all those methodologies, and then people who go hard, fast, can pick the hard, fast books, and people who don't can pick the slower, "better success rate" approaches and do well with those instead. And another comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516, expands on that a bit more.
- wila 10y ago
  Japanese is very different from Chinese, as such the recommendation you are quoting is not making much sense.
  - redthrow 10y ago
    The first link is about both Japanese and Chinese. I think Mair's advice of not focusing on the script is valid. Look at Kanamoji-kai for example (if you can read Japanese): http://kanamozi.org/ http://kanamozi.org/
    - new299 10y ago
      He's mostly talking about Kanji from what I can tell. Learning Hiragana is probably a big different. It takes about a weekend and helps with pronunciation. Everybody is different, but I found it useful to at least know about...
      - redthrow 10y ago
        I agree, I'd recommend learners to learn kana because you can learn it in a few weeks (as opposed to many years for kanji, and even after that many years, people - including natives - don't remember them very well). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg
      - Ezhik 10y ago
        With kana there's really no better way to do it than just writing it. Like a certain Japanese guide puts it, "write it 100 times and drink some beer".
- resoluteteeth 10y ago
  Even if research has shown advantages to waiting to teach the writing system, this approach has become extremely unpopular, to say the least. There are only one or two places still using the textbook "Japanese: The Spoken Language," and all other modern textbooks teach the writing system from the beginning. Even textbooks that used to use romanized Japanese for fairly logical pragmatic reasons, like "Japanese for Busy People," which is aimed specifically at busy adults who are trying to learn the spoken language in the least amount of time/effort, have been rewritten to eliminate romanized Japanese! Many people studying Japanese go so far as to consider the presence of romanized Japanese, even in combination with normal written Japanese, a black mark against a book, a viewpoint which I think is a bit extreme. Additionally, even if there is a benefit to early spoken fluency, it's going to really annoy students when after two years they suddenly have to start learning the writing system from the very beginning. With this approach, students wouldn't be able to use any modern instructional or reference materials for 2-3 years. Basically, they wouldn't be able to study on their own at all. Also, from the standpoint of practical language instruction, since many students drop out of Japanese classes the second they're asked to learn hiragana (much less katakana and kanji), it is much more efficient for all parties involved to have this occur earlier in the process. Many people studying Japanese as a foreign language actually also 1) find it very discouraging to discover that they can't read words they know because they haven't been taught the characters, and 2) find it very difficult to parse romanized Japanese since it is harder to tell where words end and distinguish particles/verb endings from nouns and verb stems. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 > The problem was that all of my language teachers insisted that I memorize hundreds of characters right from the very start. For every person who is mad that that they were made to learn kanji from the beginning, there is another who thinks their Japanese ability was permanently impaired by not being taught kanji early enough (I have met plenty of the latter). Regardless of the method, there are people who are going to object to it.
- Grue3 10y ago
  You will never remember, or "passively recognize" any characters, (especially low-frequency ones) unless you specifically focus on remembering them. Also, at least 75% of words meanings become trivial once you learn what their corresponding characters mean. Or you can spend all your time getting all those similarly-sounding kanji compounds mixed up in your head because you can only write them in hiragana.
- T-R 10y ago
  > pay little or no attention to memorizing characters I'm not usually one to speak bluntly, but, at least for Japanese, speaking from a lot of experience, this is flat out the wrong approach. Older books like the romanzied "Japanese for Busy People" took this approach. I started with this book, it felt easy at the time, but it was immensely impractical - you don't build up enough of a base to learn from any other material. It's completely useless. After over a year, in a formal setting, I ultimately decided to just completely start over. Currently Japanese courses mostly just focus on Hiragana and Katakana, since material for children usually has pronunciation guides over the kanji anyway. This is workable, but it just gives you no leverage where you could have some - you end up memorizing a thousand indiviaul words, some of which maybe kind of sound similar in parts, when you could instead learn a dozen charcters, and know that they share root words. Phoenetic approaches work for children who are in a situation where they can memorize from immersion with native speakers, and have additional clues like context and intonation to emphasize root words, to pick up new vocabulary. When I started studying Chinese, we instead went with a "radicals-first" approach, and after just a short time of that, my Japanese vocabulary exploded - I could suddenly pick out all the seafood on a menu, and I started asking people mid-conversation "oh, does that use these characters?", and I could understand what it meant without them having to struggle to translate to English: Heart+Electric+Map - it's probably an electrocardiogram, especially if we're talking about hospitals. If you haven't learned the kanji, you don't even know if you can make that association from the sounds, much less how to ask that question. That's how you get to fluency, by building up a foundation that lets you learn without active study. You can't get there by avoiding the basis of word composition in the language. Apologies if my frustration with characters-last approaches came through a little strong - they wasted a lot of my time.
  - redthrow 10y ago
    Mair's point is that "building up a foundation" means learning the language not the script. > characters-last approaches I think it's more accurate to call what Mair's advocating a "language-first-characters-later-if-necessary" approach. Here's what Mair said about Chinese classes: It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25. If the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-how-to-argue-for-foreign-language-instruction/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-h...
mrcactu5 10y ago
this is so thorough! I lived in Tokyo for 3 months during the end of 2010 -- so this is a great review!
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Thanks! and if you spot anything that's questionable or weird, let me know through the issue tracker; there's always room for improvement.
djent 10y ago
The furigana in this is very light and small - not easy to see despite beginners relying on them.
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  feel free to file an issue about that. This material is the basis for the print copy, in which the furigana ends up looking fine, so if the CSS can be tweaked for better screen presentation, let me know and let's tweak the CSS. Issue tracker link: https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues
- dexwiz 10y ago
  For some reason it's got a transparency set. Removing bit of css should fix it. .nrGrammardata rt { color: rgba(0,0,0,0.4); }
riotdash 10y ago
For Finnish readers or people who happen to know Finnish. Skip the pronunciation part. Japanese and Finnish are ~99% similar in pronunciation.
mahranch 10y ago
The article is better than I thought it would be (I typically don't have my hopes high) but it does skip over something in the pronunciation section: silent letters. When reading Japanese, sometimes the "u" is, or can be, silent in the word. Most common times (but not the only) you'll see this is for words like "desu" and "masu". The "u" is usually not spoken or sounded out. So spoken, it would sound like "Des" or "Mas". But you can see it silent in other words, like daigaku or eikoku. Now I'm not a linguistic or Japanese expert so they may not use "silent" to describe not voicing the letter/vowel, but my point is that the article doesn't mention this. And given how often "desu" and "masu" are used by beginners, I'd include that in beginning for an introduction to Japanese.
- bajsejohannes 10y ago
  It does talk about that: https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-1-1-3-1-Not_pronouncing_Japanese https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-1-1-3-1-Not_prono...
- gizmo686 10y ago
  I'm not a trained linguist, but I do have an amature interest in the subject, and have studied Japanese from both a second language, and a linguistic perspective. The basic building block of English phonetics is the syllable. In Japanese, it is the mora. If you are fammilar with the Japanese writing system, to a first approximation, each phonetic character maps to a single mora [0]. A mora comes in three forms: 1) (C)V - A vowel, optionally preceeded by a consonant (almost all phonetic characters, and compounds like しゃ) 2) The first part of a long consonant. (little っ). 3) Syllable-final nassal /n/ (ん). Although moras map closely to the writing system, their classification is based on an analysis of spoken japanese (including word games and common mistakes by native speakers). The relevent piece of this is that there is no way to express "des" in terms of moras/. Instead, we view is as "de-su" with a devoiced vowel. Devoicing is not common in all dialects of Japanese. In the dialects where it is common, a native speaker would recognize the voiced and de-voiced variations as being different ways of pronouncing the same thing. In dialects where devoicing occurs, there are well understood rules for predicting when it will occur. The particular rule prediciting desu and masu is that high vowels (い/i as in igloo, う/u as in goose) are devoiced when they are word ending and follow a voiceless consonant [1]. [0] Compounds like しゃ are still a single mora, but little っ is its own mora. [1] A voiceless consonant is one that is made without vibrating the vocal chords. This is the difference between, for example, ka/か and ga/が.
zylonbane 10y ago
From what little I know and from reading this, Japanese seems exactly like what Microsoft would design if it needed to make its own language. Complicated, full of ambiguity, still trying to keep compatibility with an older system (but breaks it anyway), pointlessly redesigned every once in a while. Reading seems even worse because very visually dense kanji just do not survive compression as much as a couple of sticks (like letters in an English or Cyrillic alphabet). Granted, the language may have a beautiful side which you only learn about by actually learning the language, but still, spending an eternity to do so doesn't seem like a nice way to spend time.
- dwg 10y ago
  Every language was designed organically and is full of exceptions and flaws. I don't think most people realize this of their native language. As a native English speaker with a minor in Japanese, I found Japanese to be quite systematic compared to English. I also believe Japanese is more expressive, which is probably true for many languages. The kanji writing system can be difficult, it is true, but there are nice parts about it too if you care to think about them. On the whole I prefer Japanese as a spoken language to English and wish I was better at it. Writing could be argued either way.
- mrschwabe 10y ago
  Kanji is tough indeed, but that's why hiragana is awesome. You can learn it quickly and since it covers the entire spectrum of pronunciation - you can use it to write/type any word, even if said word uses Kanji. This is how most Japanese type it anyway, since digital text input auto-convert hiragana to Kanji as you put together sentences.
- new299 10y ago
  I'd probably disagree on most points here. The spoken grammar of Japanese isn't too bad. I'd say it's more logical than English overall. Written Japanese in Hiragana and Katakana is unambiguous in spelling/pronunciation. It's not like English where you need to learn a bunch of spelling (and sometimes multiple spellings). So it's massively easier. There's Hiragana and Katakana which have a similar purpose, but then English has upper and lowercase letters for seemly no very useful reason. Kanji is a significant additional workload and there where efforts to get rid of it in the past. The problem is I'd guess it does have utility, cramming more data in per unit area is useful, as is being able know it mean "on" or "off" or "of passable quality". And now with computers you can type in Hiragana and it prompts for the Kanji. That makes things significantly easier. The other thing that's interesting about Kanji is the meaning is divorced from the sound. With English your forcing a discretized serialization on sounds. With Kanji the idiographic communication feels closer to a visual representation of a concept.
somenomadicguy 10y ago
Orthogonally, I've always wondered, why are geeks so into Japan? Slashdot and all of it's children, like HN, are always full of posts by Westerners about Japanese culture, language, etc, but pretty much lacking in any interest for any other foreign lands. Is it solely an anime thing?
- showerst 10y ago
  The real answer is of course "it's complicated", but i'll take a shot: Since the 80s, Japan has been seen as very 'futuristic' in the west. Some combo of extreme density and a high percent of the economy being manufacturing makes people more comfortable with technology, and that's reflected in their pop art and music, on top of the normal exoticism of a non-western language and culture. Aside from this, their (extra future-y) nerd culture is more accessible to westerners through manga, anime, and video games than countries like China or India. They also have fewer taboos about mixing sex and digital entertainment, so things like dating sims and porn games probably draw a segment of the particularly digitally comfortable into Japanese culture.
  - SerLava 10y ago
    I'll add to this. Every place has its ups and downs, and the cultural distance allows Westerners to completely miss the negatives. Normally this is canceled out because the majority of nonwestern nations are visibly poor. That means it can just seem incredibly cool and fun, while it's actually a relatively boring country in the scheme of things
    - tingol 10y ago
      Boring compared to what?
      - krapp 10y ago
        Possibly the "weird, perverted, hyper-futuristic" image of Japan that gets conveyed through memes and anime.
brokencup 10y ago
Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese is a resource that has been around for a while that has helped a lot of beginners with the language. I'd recommend checking it out if you are interested in learning the language: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Yeah, we've both been around for a long time now. Tae Kim's book is great to have too, but we wrote our material with different audiences in mind. His work takes a slightly more gentle approach, my work started with being for people who want the same material as university students of Japanese get, without being able to afford $100 text books (my print copy's $30 max) or even without being able to afford classes (not every country has affordable education for those who would do well). I'd echo the link to his Guide to Japanese, and if you want a grammar reference as well, adding my book to the mix can carry you through your first year university pretty decently.
  - xamuel 10y ago
    In my experience, those $100 university textbooks aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Tae Kim's guide is infinitely better, if you're an autodidact. Use Tae Kim for grammar, use Heisig Volume 1 for kanji, and use real Japanese for everything else.
    - TheRealPomax 10y ago
      That's why I wrote mine - my fellow students needed lecture notes in "not Dutch", which mine were, so this books started as a website with my lecture notes in html form, which slowly grew into the material for this book. It's $25 on paper, free online (donate whatever you feel it's worth), and generally covers what actually made sense to cover given the classes we were in.
- miles 10y ago
  Decades ago, the single most useful Japanese learning resource for me was Mangajin, which explained Japanese comics and concepts in excruciating detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin http://www.thespectrum.net/features/mangajin/ http://www.thespectrum.net/features/mangajin/ https://tinyapps.org/blog/windows/201605280700_mangajin_software.html https://tinyapps.org/blog/windows/201605280700_mangajin_soft...
SalahEddine 10y ago
Is there something like this but for Chinesse ?
gcr 10y ago
Is there a way to hide the table of contents on the right? It overlaps the text pretty badly and makes the content unreadable on iPad.
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Asking that on HN instead of on the actual repo doesn't make the most sense =) Click the github icon on the grammar page, or just click here: https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues, and let me know what you'd like to see improved.
  - gone35 10y ago
    Not everyone has a github account. Quick feedback on HN is perfectly OK.
    - TheRealPomax 10y ago
      As the author: no it's not. I am in no way notified of comments on my works when someone-not-me submits a link to hackernews. I only discovered this HN thread because people pointed it out to me almost a day after the fact, so if you leave a comment on an HN thread in the expectation that the right person will magically find it: that is not how things work. If you want something improved, tell the people who need to be told, not a random person who posted an interesting link to reddit or hackernews. Your comment just gets lost and there was no value in posting it.
  - gcr 10y ago
    ha, pardon. will file a bug report/patch when i get a moment... Actually, I didn't realize the PDF version was linked from the Github README. I might just use that version...
nlawalker 10y ago
Cool! I'm traveling to Japan for the first time later this year. When I started making a few flash cards here and there for common phrases, I realized that learning a new language might be a good use of spare brain cycles, and Japanese seemed pretty cool, so I kind of fell into it. From a beginner's perspective, this seems like a good overview of the "mechanics" - good to read at the beginning in order to get a basic understanding of the concepts, and a good reference, but not a good way to actually start learning the language. My local library has the full beginner/intermediate/advanced set of Pimsleur Japanese, which has been great to use during my commute - I say "use" rather than "listen to" because the point of the Pimsleur method is that it's interactive - you're supposed to respond to the prompts out loud so you get used to physically forming the words and so you can hear yourself in comparison to the reference speaker. The Human Japanese "app textbook" is pretty good as well. Anki is a good flashcard app but making the cards yourself is painful and time consuming, I need to go find a few more premade decks.
Bromskloss 10y ago
I something like this available for other languages, say, for French and Russian?
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Probably? Give amazon or google a search for a "grammar" (which is a style of book in the educational space) on those languages, rather than a textbook and see what comes back?
ktRolster 10y ago
Introductions are cool. My difficulty is figuring out how to advance from 'vaguely conversant' to 'highly competent.' There should be more research into that.
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  There is, and it's literally "use Japanese daily". How you do that is entirely up to you, but start speaking Japanese every day to people around you. Easy to do in a university or school setting, because everyone else is doing that too, harder to do from home, but that's where the internet and local classes come in. Use something like italkie, pay someone for home-tutor style conversation classes, find a Japanese cultural center near where you live and get chatting, hang out in Japanese chatrooms, just get yourself in there. The simple truth is that you don't get to "highly competent" without "high frequency use".
jotux 10y ago
If you're looking for a book, this is what I used in my college Japanese class: https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471195877&sr=8-1&keywords=genki https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-... With the associated workbook: https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/4789010015/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1471195924&sr=8-6&keywords=genki https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-...
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Although I should point out those are a different kind of book: these books, with associated workbooks, are for guiding you through learning Japanese at a slow and steady pace. That's super useful, but not what a grammar is about. my book is more an encyclopeadia of the grammatical constructions used in Japan, organized by broad category, which you can cherry pick parts of to supplement whatever topics you're covering in your regular course work, or leaf through when you want to refresh your understanding of the grammar. Books like Nakama, Genki, Japanese: the spoken language, etc. are great (although I don't like how many of these books don't use hiragana after the first few weeks), and then having a cheap grammar (this one's free, or $30 at most if you want a copy you can leaf through) alongside it only helps you get a deeper insight into the learning you're doing in your school or university course, or even your spare time.
cloudjacker 10y ago
I'm familiar with Japanese, but I had a question: do the phonetic building blocks have individual names? In western alphabets, the letters each have a name that is separate and sometimes loosely related to their sounds. In Japanese alphabets, I haven't noticed this yet, but I've never asked specifically Do they?
- rspeer 10y ago
  I'm far from an expert or even intermediate in Japanese, but I think not. The names of the kana are just their sounds. A sketch in Azumanga Daioh comes to mind, where one girl is talking about the character じ ("ji"), and another girl thinks she's talking about hemhorroids, 痔 ("ji").
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  As an inherent phoneme, the kana don't really "need" separate names, their pronunciation already works in sentences, although the columns (based on consonant) and rows (based on vowel sound) do have their own designation, being 行(ぎょう) and 段(だん) respectively. For example, if you wanted to "precisely" talk about し, you could refer to it as さ行のい段 ("the i-dan entry in sa-gyou"), or even さ行のい段の「し」 ("the 'shi' that is the i-dan entry in sa-gyou")
helloworld 10y ago
Len Walsh's "Read Japanese Today" is a gem. By exploring the history behind the symbols -- using what the author calls a "pictorial mnemonic method" -- it's easy to learn many kanji in an enjoyable way. Before a few-month stay in Japan, I sampled a variety of books and audio programs. Now, looking back many years later, Walsh's simple introduction is the one I remember best. https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT8#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT... http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-Today/Len-Walsh/9784805309810 http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-Today/Le...
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  No question, his text is quite lovely, although also a part of the language my book (intentionally) stays away from. There are many, many ways to teach kanji, depending on how courses are taught (even learning it at home from books/internet on your own). Another good source for mnemonic-based kanji is Heisig's work, although I've found the best approach so far to still be "learning the kanji in the words we're using that week", with plenty of repetition and practice. It's tedious, but for a large number of people, effective! (but of course, not effective for all)
  - ionforce 10y ago
    One thing that texts seem to ignore (in my never learned Japanese opinion) is that not all letters are equally important, if we equate importance with frequency. For example, the letter E is much more fundamental and useful to learn than the letter X. Thus, any alphabet shouldn't be looked upon as a sequence of equivalent letters. There are contours and characters and color... Things that are more obvious when learning with actual words/phrases.
    - TheRealPomax 10y ago
      That is not how Japanese works in the slightest. Kanji represent full words, often multiple ones (due to use in compound nouns) not individual letters without inherent meaning on their own.
Grue3 10y ago
Oh, looks like it's time to plug my website: http://ichi.moe http://ichi.moe It's very helpful if you're trying to learn Japanese, or read some Japanese. Just copy-paste any sentence in Japanese and it will show how to read it, and what do the words mean. Read up on grammar, and you're ready to go. Also I generated an Anki deck for learning kanji and all the words [1]. It's really big, and I'm almost halfway through it myself (about 1.5 years of study). Good luck if you try to attempt this challenge. [1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744
canjobear 10y ago
The content of this grammar seems good and I like it! But I have a pedantic nitpick: Seeing the kana and kanji sections listed under "syntax" is a huge red flag for anyone trained in linguistics. The writing system is not usually considered part of the syntax (or even the grammar) of a language, rather it is just a means to express the spoken language on paper. These should be in an "orthography" section; they are certainly not syntax in the modern linguistics sense of the word. Just some advice to make this impressive work more palatable to linguists :)
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Protip: mention that over on https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues rather than in a comment thread (or, of course, do both!). I stuck it in syntax mostly for chapter convenience at the time (it's been almost ten years O_O), but splitting it out into its own orthography section sounds fine to me.
oDot 10y ago
For me, the hardest thing with learning a new language is immersion. I can study grammar, read books and use Duolingo all day long, but in the end it comes down to "living" it. I wish there was an app for that.
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  pretty sure many airlines have apps that let you book a flight! Joking aside, though, there are sometimes alternatives. The most obvious is "study it at a college, not at home", but that can be prohibitively expensive, so an alternative is "volunteer at your local Japanese cultural center". And for at least the writing part, 2ch (not to be confused with 4chan) is still a very popular IRC network: find some channels, hang out in them, and start contributing to conversations. It's a great way to get your brain to exercise its Japanese modalities, even if you don't improve your pronunciations that way.
  - oDot 10y ago
    Thanks! I will definitely look for the nearest culture center.
coin 10y ago
The author needs to test this page on an iPad.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
glandium 10y ago
Only skimmed through the beginning of the grammar section, and it looks more technical than most of what I've seen so far online. I must say that after I had studied Japanese for some time, reading Reiko Shimamori's systematic japanese grammar (Grammaire Japonaise Systématique, actually, I don't think there's an english edition of this french book) was an eye opener. Japanese grammar made so much more sense to me once I heard about 連体形, 未然形, etc. And I'm glad you talk about those. As I said, though, I only skimmed, but a quick search doesn't reveal any mention of 助動詞, sadly. PS: the menu on the right overlaps with the text if the window is narrow, and that makes it impossible to read.
partycoder 10y ago
If you want to learn kana, you can drill it in this website: realkana.com . You select the kanas you want to learn, then you drill them until you learn them. Writing each one repeteadly also helps. Note that they have a stroke order that you are expected to respect. Kanji is really hard, you will need to spend some good time learning them. A chrome plugin called rikaikun, or rikaichan for firefox might help you get familiar with kanji by annotating them when you hover over them as you encounter them on websites.
solidsnack9000 10y ago
There are some dubious examples of English usage in the section on verbs. I understood what was intended but only because I am already well familiar with the topics the author intended to illustrate. > However, there is something funny about transitivity: some verbs, like "walk", you can only use intransitively (we don't say that we "walked the street", for instance), but many verbs can be used either intransitively or transitively, like "eat". One can "walk the streets of Bakersfield". > For instance, traversal verbs (such as 'walk', 'run', 'fly', 'sail', etc.) are intransitive in English, but ... while in English one does not "fly the sky" or "swim the ocean" (at the very least you'd need a preposition such as "through" or "in" to make those correct English), in Japanese this is exactly what you're doing. Although we don't often say that someone swam the ocean, Columbus "sailed the ocean blue".
natch 10y ago
Wow, this is impressive. If I ever need a Japanese grammar, this looks really good. The author has said it's not intended as a tutorial, so let's get that out of the way, and just say good job on creating a resource that students of other languages can envy.
SomeHacker44 10y ago
Thank you for this. I would like to have read this, especially since I'm on vacation in Hokkaido now, but unfortunately your "clever" right-side table of contents overlaps the actual content on my iPad Pro running the current iOS. So, it's impossible to read the last 10-15% of each line, especially once the TOC expands to most of the height of the screen. Please give a less "clever" and more traditional UI. Thanks!
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  Please file that on the issue tracker for the project instead. https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar
ljw1001 10y ago
FWIW, what may be the largest language program in Japan (called Hippo in Japan and Lex in the US) focuses to an enormous degree on spoken language and does no grammatical training at all. Instead, they try to emulate, as much as possible, learning the way children do. More info: Hippo Japan: https://www.lexhippo.gr.jp/english/ https://www.lexhippo.gr.jp/english/ The US branch's online store: https://audio.lexlrf.org/ https://audio.lexlrf.org/ On the store, you can pick a language you speak, and the languages you want to learn, and it generates a download, with playlists (iPhone) that mix the audio segments in a variety of ways: https://audio.lexlrf.org/#!Customize https://audio.lexlrf.org/#!Customize (They are a non-profit and I have done some volunteer programming for them)
garfieldnate 10y ago
As long as we're mentioning Japanese resources, here are my favs (all paper): * A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar, Makino and Tsutsui. These have 99% of all of the grammar you will ever need, and they are packed with lots of helpful example sentences. * Remembering the Kanji, Volumes I and II (III is extra credit), James W. Heisig. Keep in mind you need about a month of dedicated brain time for volume I (great for ALT jobs!), and volume II can then be repeatedly skimmed afterwards while engaging with real texts. * Making Sense of Japanese, Jay Rubin. He has a way of explaining concepts that seem weird to English speakers. * Colloquial Kansai Japanese, D.C. Palter. It is not very fun to get to Japan and realize they don't talk like the text books. If you get the basics of Kansai you'll be less lost in all of western Japan, which shares a lot of features, plus you'll be more aware of the types of variation that are possible. * Polite Fictions, Nancy Sakamoto. This book is getting old, but as long as you remember that times change and culture is a continuum this is a fantastic introduction to group culture. Actually, the first book I learned Japanese from was "Speak Japanese Today," by Taeko Kamiya. It's meant for business travelers and gets you set up with the basics without using the native orthography. I read it when I was 13. Good memories.
twoquestions 10y ago
This book looks really cool to learn literal meanings of words and how to speak them in Japanese, I'll have to keep it bookmarked for later if I ever go there! However, the big difficulty for me when I studied Japanese in school was how indirect you have to be when speaking. Even once I could follow along simple conversations and translate the literal meaning of everything, it turns out Japanese people generally only imply what they really mean, rather than state it directly. I have similar problems with American Southerners. I wonder if that's a cause of someone becoming a hikikomori (basically a shut-in), as they may be unable to keep up with the huge number of unspoken social rules.

363 points by e-sushi 10y ago

I'm collecting links for Japanese language resources, as well as other languages on Github: https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning/tree/master/japanese https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning/tree/master/japa... Other languages: https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning https://github.com/melling/LanguageLearning I'd love to find more great resources.

brokencup 10y ago
The stickied posts at Koohii are a great resource for everything related to learning Japanese. It's a pretty popular forum for Japanese learners: http://forum.koohii.com/index.php http://forum.koohii.com/index.php

redthrow 10y ago

This doesn't seem to be a good resource to learn the language as a beginner. For example Prof Victor Mair is against teaching Chinese characters to beginners: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 pay little or no attention to memorizing characters (I would have been content with actively mastering 25 or so very high frequency characters and passively recognizing at most a hundred or so high frequency characters during the first year) focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, particles, morphology, syntax, idioms, patterns, constructions, sentence structure, rhythm, prosody, and so forth — real language, not the script

TheRealPomax 10y ago
This book is not for people who want to stay a beginner for a year, this is for people who want to learn the language at the same pace as a typical university student: you get a few weeks to learn hiragana and katakana, then the romaji is taken away. After a year, you'll already know anywhere between 1000 common kanji and the full jouyou set. I wrote this book based on that need. So step 1: learn hiragana, because after the introductory chapter you're not getting romanised Japanese anymore. However, because it's not a writing course, all kanji have furigana so that you can read every sentence. This book is not going to calmly and gently lead you through the Japanese grammar, it's meant as a proper "you need this book for a year at most, after that you should already know everything that we cover". Perhaps not to the degree that you can duplicate the book, or in a way that makes you remember all the technical terms, but all the constructions and how they use them: this is the pace you run through learning Japanese at first year university level.
- beevai142 10y ago
  Mair's argument is that it is a waste of effort to spend time on learning the characters, in the first stages of learning the language. They are more easily learnt systematically somewhat later on, when you know the corresponding words to which you can anchor them. Note that the people advocating for this are university language professors and teachers, who are claiming they have data backing up the claim.
  - TheRealPomax 10y ago
    Right, my counter to that is that's great if you want to leisurely learn Japanese, but also not very relevant for the type of course this book supports. These typically start you on kanji pretty much in week 3, in conjunction with the word lists that support the kanji you're learning every week (and constantly use throughout that week and subsequent ones), specifically because of the argument raised: learning kanji without the words they're in, and even if that, without using those words, is ridiculous.
    - beevai142 10y ago
      The argument above applies specifically to university courses, and was made by someone who is familiar with teaching such courses. So I don't think you can just discount it with handwaving, especially as there are claims about better success rates.
      - TheRealPomax 10y ago
        I'm not discounting anything, but different people want, or need, different courses. My book is geared specifically towards people who are to enthusiastically committed to learning Japanese, and want more information about the language they're paying money for to learn, with some assumptions about what that means: they, like me, and like many of my fellow students at the time, but not like everyone, want to learn Japanese properly, without hand holding because some grammar or some orthography is deemed too hard. We'll see whether that's the case as we learn, not as an assumption baked into the course. Of course that method doesn't work for everyone, but for me, and for many others, but again not for everyone, getting kanji early was exciting, motivating, and awesome. I would have been angry at a promise of a better approach without kanji for half a year as a paying student. So that's the book you get here, too: I am not making assumptions on how slowly you want material, this is a grammar for supplementing your course work, or deep diving if that's what you want to do. And if the Japanese used in the book is too much, too soon: it's a free book, find one you feel fits you better. But we're better off with a spectrum of works: rather than every book following the best methodology, we need all those methodologies, and then people who go hard, fast, can pick the hard, fast books, and people who don't can pick the slower, "better success rate" approaches and do well with those instead. And another comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12286516, expands on that a bit more.
wila 10y ago
Japanese is very different from Chinese, as such the recommendation you are quoting is not making much sense.
- redthrow 10y ago
  The first link is about both Japanese and Chinese. I think Mair's advice of not focusing on the script is valid. Look at Kanamoji-kai for example (if you can read Japanese): http://kanamozi.org/ http://kanamozi.org/
  - new299 10y ago
    He's mostly talking about Kanji from what I can tell. Learning Hiragana is probably a big different. It takes about a weekend and helps with pronunciation. Everybody is different, but I found it useful to at least know about...
    - redthrow 10y ago
      I agree, I'd recommend learners to learn kana because you can learn it in a few weeks (as opposed to many years for kanji, and even after that many years, people - including natives - don't remember them very well). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNxPRBvRQg
    - Ezhik 10y ago
      With kana there's really no better way to do it than just writing it. Like a certain Japanese guide puts it, "write it 100 times and drink some beer".
resoluteteeth 10y ago
Even if research has shown advantages to waiting to teach the writing system, this approach has become extremely unpopular, to say the least. There are only one or two places still using the textbook "Japanese: The Spoken Language," and all other modern textbooks teach the writing system from the beginning. Even textbooks that used to use romanized Japanese for fairly logical pragmatic reasons, like "Japanese for Busy People," which is aimed specifically at busy adults who are trying to learn the spoken language in the least amount of time/effort, have been rewritten to eliminate romanized Japanese! Many people studying Japanese go so far as to consider the presence of romanized Japanese, even in combination with normal written Japanese, a black mark against a book, a viewpoint which I think is a bit extreme. Additionally, even if there is a benefit to early spoken fluency, it's going to really annoy students when after two years they suddenly have to start learning the writing system from the very beginning. With this approach, students wouldn't be able to use any modern instructional or reference materials for 2-3 years. Basically, they wouldn't be able to study on their own at all. Also, from the standpoint of practical language instruction, since many students drop out of Japanese classes the second they're asked to learn hiragana (much less katakana and kanji), it is much more efficient for all parties involved to have this occur earlier in the process. Many people studying Japanese as a foreign language actually also 1) find it very discouraging to discover that they can't read words they know because they haven't been taught the characters, and 2) find it very difficult to parse romanized Japanese since it is harder to tell where words end and distinguish particles/verb endings from nouns and verb stems. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 > The problem was that all of my language teachers insisted that I memorize hundreds of characters right from the very start. For every person who is mad that that they were made to learn kanji from the beginning, there is another who thinks their Japanese ability was permanently impaired by not being taught kanji early enough (I have met plenty of the latter). Regardless of the method, there are people who are going to object to it.
Grue3 10y ago
You will never remember, or "passively recognize" any characters, (especially low-frequency ones) unless you specifically focus on remembering them. Also, at least 75% of words meanings become trivial once you learn what their corresponding characters mean. Or you can spend all your time getting all those similarly-sounding kanji compounds mixed up in your head because you can only write them in hiragana.
T-R 10y ago
> pay little or no attention to memorizing characters I'm not usually one to speak bluntly, but, at least for Japanese, speaking from a lot of experience, this is flat out the wrong approach. Older books like the romanzied "Japanese for Busy People" took this approach. I started with this book, it felt easy at the time, but it was immensely impractical - you don't build up enough of a base to learn from any other material. It's completely useless. After over a year, in a formal setting, I ultimately decided to just completely start over. Currently Japanese courses mostly just focus on Hiragana and Katakana, since material for children usually has pronunciation guides over the kanji anyway. This is workable, but it just gives you no leverage where you could have some - you end up memorizing a thousand indiviaul words, some of which maybe kind of sound similar in parts, when you could instead learn a dozen charcters, and know that they share root words. Phoenetic approaches work for children who are in a situation where they can memorize from immersion with native speakers, and have additional clues like context and intonation to emphasize root words, to pick up new vocabulary. When I started studying Chinese, we instead went with a "radicals-first" approach, and after just a short time of that, my Japanese vocabulary exploded - I could suddenly pick out all the seafood on a menu, and I started asking people mid-conversation "oh, does that use these characters?", and I could understand what it meant without them having to struggle to translate to English: Heart+Electric+Map - it's probably an electrocardiogram, especially if we're talking about hospitals. If you haven't learned the kanji, you don't even know if you can make that association from the sounds, much less how to ask that question. That's how you get to fluency, by building up a foundation that lets you learn without active study. You can't get there by avoiding the basis of word composition in the language. Apologies if my frustration with characters-last approaches came through a little strong - they wasted a lot of my time.
- redthrow 10y ago
  Mair's point is that "building up a foundation" means learning the language not the script. > characters-last approaches I think it's more accurate to call what Mair's advocating a "language-first-characters-later-if-necessary" approach. Here's what Mair said about Chinese classes: It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25. If the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-how-to-argue-for-foreign-language-instruction/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-h...

mrcactu5 10y ago

this is so thorough! I lived in Tokyo for 3 months during the end of 2010 -- so this is a great review!

TheRealPomax 10y ago
Thanks! and if you spot anything that's questionable or weird, let me know through the issue tracker; there's always room for improvement.

djent 10y ago

The furigana in this is very light and small - not easy to see despite beginners relying on them.

TheRealPomax 10y ago
feel free to file an issue about that. This material is the basis for the print copy, in which the furigana ends up looking fine, so if the CSS can be tweaked for better screen presentation, let me know and let's tweak the CSS. Issue tracker link: https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues
dexwiz 10y ago
For some reason it's got a transparency set. Removing bit of css should fix it. .nrGrammardata rt { color: rgba(0,0,0,0.4); }

riotdash 10y ago

For Finnish readers or people who happen to know Finnish. Skip the pronunciation part. Japanese and Finnish are ~99% similar in pronunciation.

mahranch 10y ago

The article is better than I thought it would be (I typically don't have my hopes high) but it does skip over something in the pronunciation section: silent letters. When reading Japanese, sometimes the "u" is, or can be, silent in the word. Most common times (but not the only) you'll see this is for words like "desu" and "masu". The "u" is usually not spoken or sounded out. So spoken, it would sound like "Des" or "Mas". But you can see it silent in other words, like daigaku or eikoku. Now I'm not a linguistic or Japanese expert so they may not use "silent" to describe not voicing the letter/vowel, but my point is that the article doesn't mention this. And given how often "desu" and "masu" are used by beginners, I'd include that in beginning for an introduction to Japanese.

bajsejohannes 10y ago
It does talk about that: https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-1-1-3-1-Not_pronouncing_Japanese https://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-1-1-3-1-Not_prono...
gizmo686 10y ago
I'm not a trained linguist, but I do have an amature interest in the subject, and have studied Japanese from both a second language, and a linguistic perspective. The basic building block of English phonetics is the syllable. In Japanese, it is the mora. If you are fammilar with the Japanese writing system, to a first approximation, each phonetic character maps to a single mora [0]. A mora comes in three forms: 1) (C)V - A vowel, optionally preceeded by a consonant (almost all phonetic characters, and compounds like しゃ) 2) The first part of a long consonant. (little っ). 3) Syllable-final nassal /n/ (ん). Although moras map closely to the writing system, their classification is based on an analysis of spoken japanese (including word games and common mistakes by native speakers). The relevent piece of this is that there is no way to express "des" in terms of moras/. Instead, we view is as "de-su" with a devoiced vowel. Devoicing is not common in all dialects of Japanese. In the dialects where it is common, a native speaker would recognize the voiced and de-voiced variations as being different ways of pronouncing the same thing. In dialects where devoicing occurs, there are well understood rules for predicting when it will occur. The particular rule prediciting desu and masu is that high vowels (い/i as in igloo, う/u as in goose) are devoiced when they are word ending and follow a voiceless consonant [1]. [0] Compounds like しゃ are still a single mora, but little っ is its own mora. [1] A voiceless consonant is one that is made without vibrating the vocal chords. This is the difference between, for example, ka/か and ga/が.

zylonbane 10y ago

From what little I know and from reading this, Japanese seems exactly like what Microsoft would design if it needed to make its own language. Complicated, full of ambiguity, still trying to keep compatibility with an older system (but breaks it anyway), pointlessly redesigned every once in a while. Reading seems even worse because very visually dense kanji just do not survive compression as much as a couple of sticks (like letters in an English or Cyrillic alphabet). Granted, the language may have a beautiful side which you only learn about by actually learning the language, but still, spending an eternity to do so doesn't seem like a nice way to spend time.

dwg 10y ago
Every language was designed organically and is full of exceptions and flaws. I don't think most people realize this of their native language. As a native English speaker with a minor in Japanese, I found Japanese to be quite systematic compared to English. I also believe Japanese is more expressive, which is probably true for many languages. The kanji writing system can be difficult, it is true, but there are nice parts about it too if you care to think about them. On the whole I prefer Japanese as a spoken language to English and wish I was better at it. Writing could be argued either way.
mrschwabe 10y ago
Kanji is tough indeed, but that's why hiragana is awesome. You can learn it quickly and since it covers the entire spectrum of pronunciation - you can use it to write/type any word, even if said word uses Kanji. This is how most Japanese type it anyway, since digital text input auto-convert hiragana to Kanji as you put together sentences.
new299 10y ago
I'd probably disagree on most points here. The spoken grammar of Japanese isn't too bad. I'd say it's more logical than English overall. Written Japanese in Hiragana and Katakana is unambiguous in spelling/pronunciation. It's not like English where you need to learn a bunch of spelling (and sometimes multiple spellings). So it's massively easier. There's Hiragana and Katakana which have a similar purpose, but then English has upper and lowercase letters for seemly no very useful reason. Kanji is a significant additional workload and there where efforts to get rid of it in the past. The problem is I'd guess it does have utility, cramming more data in per unit area is useful, as is being able know it mean "on" or "off" or "of passable quality". And now with computers you can type in Hiragana and it prompts for the Kanji. That makes things significantly easier. The other thing that's interesting about Kanji is the meaning is divorced from the sound. With English your forcing a discretized serialization on sounds. With Kanji the idiographic communication feels closer to a visual representation of a concept.

somenomadicguy 10y ago

Orthogonally, I've always wondered, why are geeks so into Japan? Slashdot and all of it's children, like HN, are always full of posts by Westerners about Japanese culture, language, etc, but pretty much lacking in any interest for any other foreign lands. Is it solely an anime thing?

showerst 10y ago
The real answer is of course "it's complicated", but i'll take a shot: Since the 80s, Japan has been seen as very 'futuristic' in the west. Some combo of extreme density and a high percent of the economy being manufacturing makes people more comfortable with technology, and that's reflected in their pop art and music, on top of the normal exoticism of a non-western language and culture. Aside from this, their (extra future-y) nerd culture is more accessible to westerners through manga, anime, and video games than countries like China or India. They also have fewer taboos about mixing sex and digital entertainment, so things like dating sims and porn games probably draw a segment of the particularly digitally comfortable into Japanese culture.
- SerLava 10y ago
  I'll add to this. Every place has its ups and downs, and the cultural distance allows Westerners to completely miss the negatives. Normally this is canceled out because the majority of nonwestern nations are visibly poor. That means it can just seem incredibly cool and fun, while it's actually a relatively boring country in the scheme of things
  - tingol 10y ago
    Boring compared to what?
    - krapp 10y ago
      Possibly the "weird, perverted, hyper-futuristic" image of Japan that gets conveyed through memes and anime.

brokencup 10y ago

Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese is a resource that has been around for a while that has helped a lot of beginners with the language. I'd recommend checking it out if you are interested in learning the language: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

TheRealPomax 10y ago
Yeah, we've both been around for a long time now. Tae Kim's book is great to have too, but we wrote our material with different audiences in mind. His work takes a slightly more gentle approach, my work started with being for people who want the same material as university students of Japanese get, without being able to afford $100 text books (my print copy's $30 max) or even without being able to afford classes (not every country has affordable education for those who would do well). I'd echo the link to his Guide to Japanese, and if you want a grammar reference as well, adding my book to the mix can carry you through your first year university pretty decently.
- xamuel 10y ago
  In my experience, those $100 university textbooks aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Tae Kim's guide is infinitely better, if you're an autodidact. Use Tae Kim for grammar, use Heisig Volume 1 for kanji, and use real Japanese for everything else.
  - TheRealPomax 10y ago
    That's why I wrote mine - my fellow students needed lecture notes in "not Dutch", which mine were, so this books started as a website with my lecture notes in html form, which slowly grew into the material for this book. It's $25 on paper, free online (donate whatever you feel it's worth), and generally covers what actually made sense to cover given the classes we were in.
miles 10y ago
Decades ago, the single most useful Japanese learning resource for me was Mangajin, which explained Japanese comics and concepts in excruciating detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangajin http://www.thespectrum.net/features/mangajin/ http://www.thespectrum.net/features/mangajin/ https://tinyapps.org/blog/windows/201605280700_mangajin_software.html https://tinyapps.org/blog/windows/201605280700_mangajin_soft...

SalahEddine 10y ago

Is there something like this but for Chinesse ?

gcr 10y ago

Is there a way to hide the table of contents on the right? It overlaps the text pretty badly and makes the content unreadable on iPad.

TheRealPomax 10y ago
Asking that on HN instead of on the actual repo doesn't make the most sense =) Click the github icon on the grammar page, or just click here: https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues, and let me know what you'd like to see improved.
- gone35 10y ago
  Not everyone has a github account. Quick feedback on HN is perfectly OK.
  - TheRealPomax 10y ago
    As the author: no it's not. I am in no way notified of comments on my works when someone-not-me submits a link to hackernews. I only discovered this HN thread because people pointed it out to me almost a day after the fact, so if you leave a comment on an HN thread in the expectation that the right person will magically find it: that is not how things work. If you want something improved, tell the people who need to be told, not a random person who posted an interesting link to reddit or hackernews. Your comment just gets lost and there was no value in posting it.
- gcr 10y ago
  ha, pardon. will file a bug report/patch when i get a moment... Actually, I didn't realize the PDF version was linked from the Github README. I might just use that version...

nlawalker 10y ago

Cool! I'm traveling to Japan for the first time later this year. When I started making a few flash cards here and there for common phrases, I realized that learning a new language might be a good use of spare brain cycles, and Japanese seemed pretty cool, so I kind of fell into it. From a beginner's perspective, this seems like a good overview of the "mechanics" - good to read at the beginning in order to get a basic understanding of the concepts, and a good reference, but not a good way to actually start learning the language. My local library has the full beginner/intermediate/advanced set of Pimsleur Japanese, which has been great to use during my commute - I say "use" rather than "listen to" because the point of the Pimsleur method is that it's interactive - you're supposed to respond to the prompts out loud so you get used to physically forming the words and so you can hear yourself in comparison to the reference speaker. The Human Japanese "app textbook" is pretty good as well. Anki is a good flashcard app but making the cards yourself is painful and time consuming, I need to go find a few more premade decks.

Bromskloss 10y ago

I something like this available for other languages, say, for French and Russian?

TheRealPomax 10y ago
Probably? Give amazon or google a search for a "grammar" (which is a style of book in the educational space) on those languages, rather than a textbook and see what comes back?

ktRolster 10y ago

Introductions are cool. My difficulty is figuring out how to advance from 'vaguely conversant' to 'highly competent.' There should be more research into that.

TheRealPomax 10y ago
There is, and it's literally "use Japanese daily". How you do that is entirely up to you, but start speaking Japanese every day to people around you. Easy to do in a university or school setting, because everyone else is doing that too, harder to do from home, but that's where the internet and local classes come in. Use something like italkie, pay someone for home-tutor style conversation classes, find a Japanese cultural center near where you live and get chatting, hang out in Japanese chatrooms, just get yourself in there. The simple truth is that you don't get to "highly competent" without "high frequency use".

jotux 10y ago

If you're looking for a book, this is what I used in my college Japanese class: https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789014401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471195877&sr=8-1&keywords=genki https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-... With the associated workbook: https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-Workbook/dp/4789010015/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1471195924&sr=8-6&keywords=genki https://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-...

TheRealPomax 10y ago
Although I should point out those are a different kind of book: these books, with associated workbooks, are for guiding you through learning Japanese at a slow and steady pace. That's super useful, but not what a grammar is about. my book is more an encyclopeadia of the grammatical constructions used in Japan, organized by broad category, which you can cherry pick parts of to supplement whatever topics you're covering in your regular course work, or leaf through when you want to refresh your understanding of the grammar. Books like Nakama, Genki, Japanese: the spoken language, etc. are great (although I don't like how many of these books don't use hiragana after the first few weeks), and then having a cheap grammar (this one's free, or $30 at most if you want a copy you can leaf through) alongside it only helps you get a deeper insight into the learning you're doing in your school or university course, or even your spare time.

cloudjacker 10y ago

I'm familiar with Japanese, but I had a question: do the phonetic building blocks have individual names? In western alphabets, the letters each have a name that is separate and sometimes loosely related to their sounds. In Japanese alphabets, I haven't noticed this yet, but I've never asked specifically Do they?

rspeer 10y ago
I'm far from an expert or even intermediate in Japanese, but I think not. The names of the kana are just their sounds. A sketch in Azumanga Daioh comes to mind, where one girl is talking about the character じ ("ji"), and another girl thinks she's talking about hemhorroids, 痔 ("ji").
TheRealPomax 10y ago
As an inherent phoneme, the kana don't really "need" separate names, their pronunciation already works in sentences, although the columns (based on consonant) and rows (based on vowel sound) do have their own designation, being 行(ぎょう) and 段(だん) respectively. For example, if you wanted to "precisely" talk about し, you could refer to it as さ行のい段 ("the i-dan entry in sa-gyou"), or even さ行のい段の「し」 ("the 'shi' that is the i-dan entry in sa-gyou")

helloworld 10y ago

Len Walsh's "Read Japanese Today" is a gem. By exploring the history behind the symbols -- using what the author calls a "pictorial mnemonic method" -- it's easy to learn many kanji in an enjoyable way. Before a few-month stay in Japan, I sampled a variety of books and audio programs. Now, looking back many years later, Walsh's simple introduction is the one I remember best. https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT8#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT... http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-Today/Len-Walsh/9784805309810 http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-Today/Le...

TheRealPomax 10y ago
No question, his text is quite lovely, although also a part of the language my book (intentionally) stays away from. There are many, many ways to teach kanji, depending on how courses are taught (even learning it at home from books/internet on your own). Another good source for mnemonic-based kanji is Heisig's work, although I've found the best approach so far to still be "learning the kanji in the words we're using that week", with plenty of repetition and practice. It's tedious, but for a large number of people, effective! (but of course, not effective for all)
- ionforce 10y ago
  One thing that texts seem to ignore (in my never learned Japanese opinion) is that not all letters are equally important, if we equate importance with frequency. For example, the letter E is much more fundamental and useful to learn than the letter X. Thus, any alphabet shouldn't be looked upon as a sequence of equivalent letters. There are contours and characters and color... Things that are more obvious when learning with actual words/phrases.
  - TheRealPomax 10y ago
    That is not how Japanese works in the slightest. Kanji represent full words, often multiple ones (due to use in compound nouns) not individual letters without inherent meaning on their own.

Grue3 10y ago

Oh, looks like it's time to plug my website: http://ichi.moe http://ichi.moe It's very helpful if you're trying to learn Japanese, or read some Japanese. Just copy-paste any sentence in Japanese and it will show how to read it, and what do the words mean. Read up on grammar, and you're ready to go. Also I generated an Anki deck for learning kanji and all the words [1]. It's really big, and I'm almost halfway through it myself (about 1.5 years of study). Good luck if you try to attempt this challenge. [1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744

canjobear 10y ago

The content of this grammar seems good and I like it! But I have a pedantic nitpick: Seeing the kana and kanji sections listed under "syntax" is a huge red flag for anyone trained in linguistics. The writing system is not usually considered part of the syntax (or even the grammar) of a language, rather it is just a means to express the spoken language on paper. These should be in an "orthography" section; they are certainly not syntax in the modern linguistics sense of the word. Just some advice to make this impressive work more palatable to linguists :)

TheRealPomax 10y ago
Protip: mention that over on https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar/issues rather than in a comment thread (or, of course, do both!). I stuck it in syntax mostly for chapter convenience at the time (it's been almost ten years O_O), but splitting it out into its own orthography section sounds fine to me.

oDot 10y ago

For me, the hardest thing with learning a new language is immersion. I can study grammar, read books and use Duolingo all day long, but in the end it comes down to "living" it. I wish there was an app for that.

TheRealPomax 10y ago
pretty sure many airlines have apps that let you book a flight! Joking aside, though, there are sometimes alternatives. The most obvious is "study it at a college, not at home", but that can be prohibitively expensive, so an alternative is "volunteer at your local Japanese cultural center". And for at least the writing part, 2ch (not to be confused with 4chan) is still a very popular IRC network: find some channels, hang out in them, and start contributing to conversations. It's a great way to get your brain to exercise its Japanese modalities, even if you don't improve your pronunciations that way.
- oDot 10y ago
  Thanks! I will definitely look for the nearest culture center.

coin 10y ago

The author needs to test this page on an iPad.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

glandium 10y ago

Only skimmed through the beginning of the grammar section, and it looks more technical than most of what I've seen so far online. I must say that after I had studied Japanese for some time, reading Reiko Shimamori's systematic japanese grammar (Grammaire Japonaise Systématique, actually, I don't think there's an english edition of this french book) was an eye opener. Japanese grammar made so much more sense to me once I heard about 連体形, 未然形, etc. And I'm glad you talk about those. As I said, though, I only skimmed, but a quick search doesn't reveal any mention of 助動詞, sadly. PS: the menu on the right overlaps with the text if the window is narrow, and that makes it impossible to read.

partycoder 10y ago

If you want to learn kana, you can drill it in this website: realkana.com . You select the kanas you want to learn, then you drill them until you learn them. Writing each one repeteadly also helps. Note that they have a stroke order that you are expected to respect. Kanji is really hard, you will need to spend some good time learning them. A chrome plugin called rikaikun, or rikaichan for firefox might help you get familiar with kanji by annotating them when you hover over them as you encounter them on websites.

solidsnack9000 10y ago

There are some dubious examples of English usage in the section on verbs. I understood what was intended but only because I am already well familiar with the topics the author intended to illustrate. > However, there is something funny about transitivity: some verbs, like "walk", you can only use intransitively (we don't say that we "walked the street", for instance), but many verbs can be used either intransitively or transitively, like "eat". One can "walk the streets of Bakersfield". > For instance, traversal verbs (such as 'walk', 'run', 'fly', 'sail', etc.) are intransitive in English, but ... while in English one does not "fly the sky" or "swim the ocean" (at the very least you'd need a preposition such as "through" or "in" to make those correct English), in Japanese this is exactly what you're doing. Although we don't often say that someone swam the ocean, Columbus "sailed the ocean blue".

natch 10y ago

Wow, this is impressive. If I ever need a Japanese grammar, this looks really good. The author has said it's not intended as a tutorial, so let's get that out of the way, and just say good job on creating a resource that students of other languages can envy.

SomeHacker44 10y ago

Thank you for this. I would like to have read this, especially since I'm on vacation in Hokkaido now, but unfortunately your "clever" right-side table of contents overlaps the actual content on my iPad Pro running the current iOS. So, it's impossible to read the last 10-15% of each line, especially once the TOC expands to most of the height of the screen. Please give a less "clever" and more traditional UI. Thanks!

TheRealPomax 10y ago
Please file that on the issue tracker for the project instead. https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar https://github.com/Pomax/nrGrammar

ljw1001 10y ago

FWIW, what may be the largest language program in Japan (called Hippo in Japan and Lex in the US) focuses to an enormous degree on spoken language and does no grammatical training at all. Instead, they try to emulate, as much as possible, learning the way children do. More info: Hippo Japan: https://www.lexhippo.gr.jp/english/ https://www.lexhippo.gr.jp/english/ The US branch's online store: https://audio.lexlrf.org/ https://audio.lexlrf.org/ On the store, you can pick a language you speak, and the languages you want to learn, and it generates a download, with playlists (iPhone) that mix the audio segments in a variety of ways: https://audio.lexlrf.org/#!Customize https://audio.lexlrf.org/#!Customize (They are a non-profit and I have done some volunteer programming for them)

garfieldnate 10y ago

As long as we're mentioning Japanese resources, here are my favs (all paper): * A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar, Makino and Tsutsui. These have 99% of all of the grammar you will ever need, and they are packed with lots of helpful example sentences. * Remembering the Kanji, Volumes I and II (III is extra credit), James W. Heisig. Keep in mind you need about a month of dedicated brain time for volume I (great for ALT jobs!), and volume II can then be repeatedly skimmed afterwards while engaging with real texts. * Making Sense of Japanese, Jay Rubin. He has a way of explaining concepts that seem weird to English speakers. * Colloquial Kansai Japanese, D.C. Palter. It is not very fun to get to Japan and realize they don't talk like the text books. If you get the basics of Kansai you'll be less lost in all of western Japan, which shares a lot of features, plus you'll be more aware of the types of variation that are possible. * Polite Fictions, Nancy Sakamoto. This book is getting old, but as long as you remember that times change and culture is a continuum this is a fantastic introduction to group culture. Actually, the first book I learned Japanese from was "Speak Japanese Today," by Taeko Kamiya. It's meant for business travelers and gets you set up with the basics without using the native orthography. I read it when I was 13. Good memories.

twoquestions 10y ago

This book looks really cool to learn literal meanings of words and how to speak them in Japanese, I'll have to keep it bookmarked for later if I ever go there! However, the big difficulty for me when I studied Japanese in school was how indirect you have to be when speaking. Even once I could follow along simple conversations and translate the literal meaning of everything, it turns out Japanese people generally only imply what they really mean, rather than state it directly. I have similar problems with American Southerners. I wonder if that's a cause of someone becoming a hikikomori (basically a shut-in), as they may be unable to keep up with the huge number of unspoken social rules.