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Even 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 lookin
by tidenly 6y ago
Even 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.