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Reverse Engineering the Japanese Sentence
- jolmg 6y agoThis is great. Would be awesome if the little squares also held a romanized version of the japanese text they contained. Are the first lines hiragana, then the second ones kanji? Are they always pronounced the same (i.e. would they both always have the same romanized representation)?
- howlgarnish 6y ago> Are the first lines hiragana, then the second ones kanji? Yes. > Are they always pronounced the same? The hiragana show how the kanji is read in this particular sentence, but most common kanji have at least two readings (kunyomi/Japanese and on'yomi/Chinese) and there can be 30+ for pathological cases like 生. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Japanese
- presentation 6y agoWhile Romaji is convenient for casual learners who have little interest in actually learning Japanese, learning the kana is easy to do and much more natural for parsing Japanese - I think that if this material is for a serious learner then they should not include the Romaji.
- jolmg 6y agoSo the reason to not include it is for gatekeeping? What's wrong with just having a casual interest instead of being serious about it? Perhaps interest would grow from learning a bit more, but an attitude about needing to be serious from the start hinders that. In particular, I think Romaji would help for those that have some interest in understanding spoken Japanese, but not really in understanding written Japanese (at least not yet).
- presentation 6y agoNo, because a lot of learners use it as a crutch. I don’t think everything needs to be for everybody. If you want a casual resource, the amount of casual resources is already overwhelming.
- zumu 6y agoPlease excuse the rant, but as an avid language learner, this type of approach bothers me to no end. Learning a language is _not_ like learning math. Yes, there are rules, and if you learn enough of them you can construct valid sentences by translating words from your native language and adding in the necessary syntactic filler, but you will not actually learn that language. Languages are greater than a sum of their syntax and grammar. If you really want to learn a language, you need to listen to A LOT of source material and start speaking it with real people and forming relationships in that language and its cultural context.
- jolmg 6y agoBut it's still good for a step, no? I definitely agree that one cannot learn a language to the point of fluency from just studying rules like this, but the material is helpful I believe.
- bdowling 6y ago> But it's still good for a step, no? No. The site here is advocating a non-standard method of parsing and understanding Japanese sentences. In the long run, that will be counter-productive because the method is counter to standard grammatical parsing used by virtually every other textbook and dictionary. The author also mixes up the standard grammatical terms for two types of adjectives, 形容詞 and 形容動詞, which suggests the author doesn't understand standard Japanese grammar very well.
- jolmg 6y agoI don't know why you got downvoted. If the grammar is misrepresented as you suggest, then I'm inclined to agree with you. That's unless it's not so much a misrepresentation, but rather a non-standard presentation with pedagogical benefits. It doesn't seem like you believe that's the case, though.
- bdowling 6y agoIt's an idiosynchratic system which deviates from traditional grammar. That's a strong reason not to use it. The author claims pedagogical benefits, but provides no hard evidence or even endorsement from educational authorities. The only endorsements appear to be from beginning learners, who by definition don't know enough to make an informed endorsement.
- howlgarnish 6y agoThis site seems to make a big deal about not following standard terms for Japanese grammar, eg. calling 形容詞 "na-nouns" instead of "na-adjectives" and 形容動詞 "i-verbs" instead of "i-adjectives". It's rather unclear to me why? I get that if you only speak English it may seem weird to you that some adjectives are conjugated (akai "red", akakunai not red), but I'm not sure calling them "verbs" is particularly helpful.
- edflsafoiewq 6y agoI think it's a good first intuition that words are either noun-like, which do not conjugate and combine using particles, or verb-like, which do conjugate and combine by juxtaposition.
- presentation 6y agoWhen I was first learning Japanese, the way people taught these concepts definitely felt suspicious - while verbs and adjectives is how we’d explain the concepts in English, the terms don’t seem to fit as neatly into Japanese - unsurprising given that the classification comes from a different linguistic tradition. This seems to focus more on how these forms conjugate, as you mentioned. That said, my intuition is that this format might produce equally as confusing patterns.
- bdowling 6y ago> This site seems to make a big deal about not following standard terms for Japanese grammar, eg. calling 形容詞 "na-nouns" instead of "na-adjectives" and 形容動詞 "i-verbs" instead of "i-adjectives". The site is wrong. 形容詞 are the "i-adjectives" and 形容動詞 are the "na-adjectives". [0] It's not a good indicator of quality that the authors mixed up the traditional grammatical terms on a site promoting an alternative grammar for Japanese learners. [0] See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_(Japanese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_(Japanese)
- sova 6y agoThank you good catch. Yes, they were flipped unfortunately.
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- tidenly 6y agoEven if I think it misses the mark, I understand the impetus behind making this kind of description to be honest. Learning Japanese is a big adventure of looking back and realising you were told white lies by about 50 different sources, and that there are much more intuitive ways of looking at the language. The problem is is that compared to other languages, which people often learn through practice, Japanese attracts a lot of students who want to study in isolation, using tools or through books. There is a lot of preachiness about how good you have to be or how you have to study, which I've not felt studying French or Chinese. People seem to care more about theorycrafting how to study Japanese than actually getting good at talking to people with it.
- sova 6y agoTheorycrafting is only helpful when it simplifies the scenario. This breakdown of only nouns and verbs comes from many conversations with a leading Japanese professor at the University College London and are meant to help simplify the complexity in acquiring an understanding of Japanese and how words may fit together. It is not an exercise in some arcane method, but is the result of many years of deciphering. Granted, once you know the elements, it is imperative to put them into practice and actually get exposure in the language. The main obstacle is that one can not simply drop in to Japan and acquire the language by ear, the structure is not amenable to absorption this way, unless your native grammar is Korean or Turkish, in which case there are many similarities with post-positional particles that describe the grammatical import of each element. Whatever method gets one to fluency is clearly the best, but this is a new way to view Japanese that has not been presented before to the knowledge of the author.
- kazinator 6y agoI'm afraid these sentences are weird, and the English translation is awkward. A verb in the dictionary form, like 剃る(soru), when it's used as such in a sentence, either refers to a future action (someone will shave), or to a habitual action (someone shaves habitually, not necessarily now). The latter interpretation needs to be confirmed by the presence of some habitual time like 毎日 (mainichi, everyday). ４月の朝に髭を剃る is a weird sentence which basically means something like "On an April morning, I will shave my beard". ４月の朝 doesn't establish a habitual time, so the future tense interpretation applies. To say something like "On April mornings, I shave my beard" (habitual action taking place throughout every April) would be ４月の毎朝髭を剃る.
- rk06 6y agoas a hindi speaker, looks like learning japanese (apart from kanji) won't be hard