9 ms·

It's interesting that this sort of thing is not something native speakers actually learn in a classroom or textbook sense; they just learn it by natural languag

It's interesting that this sort of thing is not something native speakers actually learn in a classroom or textbook sense; they just learn it by natural language acquisition. But foreign language speakers have no choice. Quick, native English speakers: How do you define the word "the?" Or "a?" How do you explain when to use "the" and when to use "a?" This is not something we can really put into words easily since we never intentionally learned it themselves; just acquired it. Same with native Japanese speakers and all the little words here. It's really the more natural way to learn in the end. In all my studies I feel like I never really retained the differences between へ and に for very long, and the same with は and が, but I managed to get to a point where I could use the right one far more often than not based on what just felt right. So don't sweat it too much if you can't remember all these particles; just keep practicing and it should fall into place eventually.

madmoose 4y ago
> just keep practicing and it should fall into place eventually. You just have to train your skull-housed neural network with lots of examples.
kretaceous 4y ago
> just keep practicing I'm taking a course from my university and am active on Duolingo. How do you suggest I practice? How did you?
- becquerel 4y ago
  Talk with natives. I used HelloTalk back in the day and it was pretty good for Japanese.
- bluepizza 4y ago
  Duolingo is bad. You should have a mix of resources that fit you best: Wanikani (absolutely essential), Bunpo, LingoDeer, Bunpro, and audio drills lessons, like Pimsleur. Add a occasional speaking lesson with a teacher on iTalki.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    I checked out Wanikani's free blog posts to learn kana, but they seemed pretty useless as an L2 English speaker. They might be useful for L1 English speakers, though.
    - bluepizza 4y ago
      The interesting thing about it is learning the kanji, which is essential for reading. It might be an extra step to learn a few new words in English, but it is not a complex task.
      - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
        It is not complex per se, but it is unnecessarily confusing. For instance, Japanese い (i) is similar in pronunciation to the letter 'i' in various Germanic languages (e.g. Dutch, German, Swedish). The romaji reflects this similarity. Enter Wanikani's (Tofugu's) explanation: > い is pronounced like the ee in "eel." To remember this kana, just think of a couple of eels hanging out. Like I mentioned, this is probably useful for L1 English speakers, but it is not worth having to go from Dutch 'i' to English 'eel' in order to finally go to Japanese い (i).
        bluepizza 4y ago
        When you use the app, not the blog, there are audios with the pronunciation, instead of these approximations. Wanikani is the app I refer to as useful, not Tofugu’s blog.
        Tijdreiziger 4y ago
        OK, I'll check out the app once I get to studying kanji (still working on kana at the moment). Thanks!
- rjh29 4y ago
  Read and listen to a lot of native language. You will absorb the patterns and eventually produce them automatically. Much much easier than memorising lots of grammar.
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  If you can afford the cost and time investment, I greatly recommend studying at a Japanese language school in Japan. The experience is invaluable. I was able to get a one-year student visa, later extended for another year, as well as an amendment (there's a proper word for this but I can't recall) to the visa which allowed me to work part-time (above-the-table, that is) to help cover the costs. What's available to you will vary based on your citizenship (I'm American) but if you really want to learn this stuff seriously and have the opportunity available to you, I'd definitely recommend it. Currently, though, I use DuoLinguo (yeah, not very comprehensive, but the gamificaiton works to induce me to use it every day, and a little study every day is better than none) and occasionally write up "Moments" (blog posts) on HelloTalk. As there's no IRL language schools that teach Japanese in the area I live currently, I hope to do online lessons some day, but those can be spendy and I'm not currently at a point in life with much disposable income.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    I'm just starting out with Japanese, but a weird thing I have found is that private lessons with professional teachers (with 5-star reviews) on Italki seem to be about as expensive on an hourly basis as group-based lessons (at least in my country). I was going to sign up for a class, but noticing this has made me reconsider, and now I am planning to just take private lessons for the same amount of money (or cheaper, as a class needs to move at the pace of its slowest student). But if you want to be thrifty, I have heard of people who mostly self-study, and only consult with a private teacher to practice their speaking. I don't think Duolingo is a truly effective way to learn, but the last time I tried it was a decade ago. The community on /r/LearnJapanese is massive and contains a lot of information.
charcircuit 4y ago
>This is not something we can really put into words easily since we never intentionally learned it themselves; just acquired it. I'm from America and this was taught in primary school. At school you learn a lot about English grammar. I'm sure it's similar in Japan with Japanese grammar.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Well, you get told it in primary school. In practice, we don’t get tested on identifying the proper grammar structure much, and so probably the vast majority of people forget how to classify it as adults. I know I have.
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  The grammar I was taught in school was basically linguistic phlogiston theory. The 20th century might as well not have happened.
aikinai 4y ago
I think any English speaker could tell you the difference between “the” and “a”. Even if it’s not in their immediate knowledge bank as a fact, they could think of a tiny set of examples and work it out immediately.
- jhanschoo 4y ago
  This is really not true of many ESL speakers whose first language does not have articles.
- rjh29 4y ago
  I've been teaching the vs. a vs. no particle at all (e.g. 'I go to church') and it's a lot more complicated than you think. There are many edge cases. Native speakers know exactly which one is correct, but cannot always explain why.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Really? "The" is used when the listener knows which one you're talking about, or if there's only one. "A" is used when it's not known or not important which specific one you're referring to. What's an example that deviates from that framework? [edit] "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians). Properly they mean "I go to [the/a] church", and the reason they leave out the particle is that they mean "THE CHURCH" but they want to sound humble, so they can't say that; but they also can't say "I go to a church," because that would be denying that the church they go to is the One True Church. That's why they don't use a particle in that particular phrase. The proper particle is "a", and "church" shouldn't be capitalized. [edit2] this is not an attempt to start a religious flame war. I'm just commenting on the grammar. [edit3] Just to demonstrate the proper noun thing I'm referring to, Jews "go to Temple" (capitalized, proper noun), or go to a temple, but they don't "go to temple".
    - tominous 4y ago
      As a native speaker of English, I didn't know about mass nouns until I was an adult and I was trying to explain to a non-native speaker that they were using "the" too much.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
I'm on ell.stackexchange.com and actually the question about articles comes up often - especially since languages like Russian and Chinese don't have them. The thing is, English really wants all singular nouns tagged with a determiner - that can be an article, possessive such as "my, your," etc., demonstrative such as "this, that,", or other determiners such as "any, all, one, some," etc. Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract (think type of X instead of instance of X). So, "the X" means the speaker has a particular X in mind and is expecting you to know which X he/she is talking about it - either from previous conversation, assumed shared experience/culture, or rarely the speaker intentionally wants you to feel like you're missing out on something. "A/an X" means the listener isn't expected to have been tracking X. IMHO more difficult than articles is explaining the perfect aspect of verbs - e.g. difference between "I X'ed" and "I have X'ed". English has something like particles too - often called phrasal verbs. E.g. knock and knock out mean two completely different things.
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  > Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract You need an article here. If there's only one exception, it should be, "The exception is when...", and if there are multiple exceptions, say, "An exception is when..."
  - Twisol 4y ago
    In this case, it's grammatical, just for a different reason. You can sometimes drop the leading article or pronoun of a clause -- don't know why, just happens sometimes. ("I" don't know why, "it" just happens sometimes.) Or for instance, if you're viewing a house on the market: "Kitchen is to the left, sitting room to the right; office is upstairs." It's certainly a casual register, but it's no less grammatical than including the articles explicitly. In the ancestor comment's "Exception is when ...", the article is implied but elided, in the same way. (I inferred "the".) You could argue whether it's effective to drop the article there, because it's ambiguous in the way you noted, but it's still grammatically valid. (Chomsky's "colorless green ideas" is the usual example where semantic sense diverges from grammatical validity.)
bamboozled 4y ago
I’m going to challenge you buy saying this. I’ve progressed much much quicker by studying the differences between. は and が, because I learn it and I forget it. I don’t think about it when using it anymore, however it’s in there somewhere when I get lost. Same for English. I did learn it, I also forgot it. It’s not in there but it is. Same for being able to explain verb conjugations. I agree though on some points for sure. Especially how well my German fiends (for example) understand the theory of English compared to me.
twblalock 4y ago
You could say this about many aspects of many foreign languages. So what? Reading explanations helps. Immersion helps too. They are both useful tools, and for many people, immersion or "the natural way" are not available unless they move to a different country, so reading explanations is a perfectly reasonable approach.
dymk 4y ago
The evidence points to the contrary, you acquire a language as an adult faster than a child can. This is because you have more complex mental faculties available, and can have complex topics explained as analogies to a language you know. As others have pointed out, ESL learners ask questions about English articles all the time, and it helps them understand how the language works faster than if they had to brute-force the patterns. There is no "natural" way to learn, there's just ways that work and ways that don't. The fastest way to learn a language is by having comprehensible input, and more input becomes comprehensible with directed, structured study.
- djtango 4y ago
  Hmmm I think if you observe children my personal conclusion is that in practice (over theory) thought and language are intractable and as we mature, expression becomes more acute and so language acquisition is faster because we no longer need to learn how to think. A 6 year old needs to learn $LANGUAGE and science simultaneously
  - dymk 4y ago
    Indeed, that's why adults are still favored in language learning, with the exception of phonology (which does make sense, retraining all those fine movements truly is harder than starting with the right movements to begin with) - https://sites.psu.edu/bilingualismmatters/children-vs-adults-who-wins-the-second-language-acquisition-match/ https://sites.psu.edu/bilingualismmatters/children-vs-adults... Adults win in acquisition speed because we already have a template for learning a language.
- timr 4y ago
  You may ramp up adult-level conversational ability faster, but it takes much longer to reach any state of native-like fluency. For example, I lived and studied in Japan, and while I probably jumped from zero to ~middle-school in terms of basic communication ability in about a year with daily classwork and total immersion, I was nowhere near the average toddler in terms of basic fluency after that time. Even now, I can make myself understood in most adult-level contexts where a toddler would be helpless, but nobody would ever confuse me for a native toddler. It's not just accent, either -- little kids still routinely teach me vocabulary and grammar.
samatman 4y ago
Grammar used to be a core part of grammar school. It was for me, along with penmanship. I'm not (that) old, my school was weird, but one is expected to graduate high school knowing what indefinite and definite articles are, which is which in English, and the distinction they represent. Explicitly rather than implicitly, I mean. I believe this is still expected of high school graduates in America, yes? So the use of the negative particle in the first sentence isn't indicated.
ehnto 4y ago
> but I managed to get to a point where I could use the right one far more often than not based on what just felt right It is the same for kanji for me. I usually don't actively know something by seeing it and reaching for it, I just see it enough times that one day I "feel" the answer first. I never go "Oh yes, that's the kanji for cat, this is definitely correct". My brain goes "CAT!", and then I just have to assume this is the kanji for cat. Almost like there's a disconnect between active recall and knowledge stored from repetition.
Robadob 4y ago
My favourite example of this in English is adjective order. Native speakers learn that it should be "big red bus" rather than "red big bus", however most couldn't list the ~7 adjective types and order they should be used in, yet will know straight away when they're wrong.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cecilpl2 4y ago
  Can I call it a green whittling rectangular little silver French old lovely knife? This makes no sense. Clearly it's the lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Any minor reordering of these adjectives just sounds innately wrong.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    Whatever you do, never flash your lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife in front of Crocodile Dundee. He'll give you a sharp rejoinder.
  - glandium 4y ago
    What's interesting to me is that I'm not a native, I don't know the exact rules for these things, and yet, the first one somehow sounds wrong to me.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    "Innately"? If that were true all languages would be the same.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  The idea that there are "adjective types and order" is a bit misleading; the underlying order is primarily semantic/pragmatic. The order is, roughly, extrinsic to intrinsic, situational to innate, contrastive to contextual; how closely attached a descriptor is to the head noun generally implies how "essential" a property it describes. This isn't really an English thing, either—English just happens to be the language most frequently taught to non-native speakers—but adjective order actually correlates pretty well across languages. The oft-repeated opinion-to-purpose order of adjectives has decent descriptive power, but is easily oversold; the classes described do not have consistent ordering across contexts. The same woman may be an "old American woman" when interviewed for his opinions on global politics, or an "American old woman" in the context of comparing healthcare for the elderly across countries. The "big bad wolf" is a fairy-tale villain; a "bad big wolf" is a failure at being a big wolf.
Jabbles 4y ago
I would like a Japanese primary school teacher to confirm that this isn't actually taught in schools there.
soulofmischief 4y ago
I distinctly remember learning about articles in fourth grade English in my US public school, and distinctly remember most of my class having a lot of trouble with them. To your point though, I taught myself to read at age three and was reading adult fiction by fourth grade, I've always been told I have a large vocabulary, and still had a lot of trouble in that class around parts of speech and grammar, because I apparently skipped out on essential English language skills by teaching myself to read and not learning by immersion. My theory of language was fundamentally different and I had to relearn English from the bottom up. This also caused me to perform terribly in foreign language classes as I was learning concepts I should have already learned about English... I wasn't just learning a foreign language, I was learning my own language at the same time.

madmoose 4y ago

> just keep practicing and it should fall into place eventually. You just have to train your skull-housed neural network with lots of examples.

kretaceous 4y ago

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

becquerel 4y ago
Talk with natives. I used HelloTalk back in the day and it was pretty good for Japanese.
bluepizza 4y ago
Duolingo is bad. You should have a mix of resources that fit you best: Wanikani (absolutely essential), Bunpo, LingoDeer, Bunpro, and audio drills lessons, like Pimsleur. Add a occasional speaking lesson with a teacher on iTalki.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  I checked out Wanikani's free blog posts to learn kana, but they seemed pretty useless as an L2 English speaker. They might be useful for L1 English speakers, though.
  - bluepizza 4y ago
    The interesting thing about it is learning the kanji, which is essential for reading. It might be an extra step to learn a few new words in English, but it is not a complex task.
    - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
      It is not complex per se, but it is unnecessarily confusing. For instance, Japanese い (i) is similar in pronunciation to the letter 'i' in various Germanic languages (e.g. Dutch, German, Swedish). The romaji reflects this similarity. Enter Wanikani's (Tofugu's) explanation: > い is pronounced like the ee in "eel." To remember this kana, just think of a couple of eels hanging out. Like I mentioned, this is probably useful for L1 English speakers, but it is not worth having to go from Dutch 'i' to English 'eel' in order to finally go to Japanese い (i).
      - bluepizza 4y ago
        When you use the app, not the blog, there are audios with the pronunciation, instead of these approximations. Wanikani is the app I refer to as useful, not Tofugu’s blog.
        Tijdreiziger 4y ago
        OK, I'll check out the app once I get to studying kanji (still working on kana at the moment). Thanks!
rjh29 4y ago
Read and listen to a lot of native language. You will absorb the patterns and eventually produce them automatically. Much much easier than memorising lots of grammar.
Cyberdog 4y ago
If you can afford the cost and time investment, I greatly recommend studying at a Japanese language school in Japan. The experience is invaluable. I was able to get a one-year student visa, later extended for another year, as well as an amendment (there's a proper word for this but I can't recall) to the visa which allowed me to work part-time (above-the-table, that is) to help cover the costs. What's available to you will vary based on your citizenship (I'm American) but if you really want to learn this stuff seriously and have the opportunity available to you, I'd definitely recommend it. Currently, though, I use DuoLinguo (yeah, not very comprehensive, but the gamificaiton works to induce me to use it every day, and a little study every day is better than none) and occasionally write up "Moments" (blog posts) on HelloTalk. As there's no IRL language schools that teach Japanese in the area I live currently, I hope to do online lessons some day, but those can be spendy and I'm not currently at a point in life with much disposable income.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  I'm just starting out with Japanese, but a weird thing I have found is that private lessons with professional teachers (with 5-star reviews) on Italki seem to be about as expensive on an hourly basis as group-based lessons (at least in my country). I was going to sign up for a class, but noticing this has made me reconsider, and now I am planning to just take private lessons for the same amount of money (or cheaper, as a class needs to move at the pace of its slowest student). But if you want to be thrifty, I have heard of people who mostly self-study, and only consult with a private teacher to practice their speaking. I don't think Duolingo is a truly effective way to learn, but the last time I tried it was a decade ago. The community on /r/LearnJapanese is massive and contains a lot of information.

charcircuit 4y ago

>This is not something we can really put into words easily since we never intentionally learned it themselves; just acquired it. I'm from America and this was taught in primary school. At school you learn a lot about English grammar. I'm sure it's similar in Japan with Japanese grammar.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Well, you get told it in primary school. In practice, we don’t get tested on identifying the proper grammar structure much, and so probably the vast majority of people forget how to classify it as adults. I know I have.
edflsafoiewq 4y ago
The grammar I was taught in school was basically linguistic phlogiston theory. The 20th century might as well not have happened.

aikinai 4y ago

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

jhanschoo 4y ago
This is really not true of many ESL speakers whose first language does not have articles.
rjh29 4y ago
I've been teaching the vs. a vs. no particle at all (e.g. 'I go to church') and it's a lot more complicated than you think. There are many edge cases. Native speakers know exactly which one is correct, but cannot always explain why.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Really? "The" is used when the listener knows which one you're talking about, or if there's only one. "A" is used when it's not known or not important which specific one you're referring to. What's an example that deviates from that framework? [edit] "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians). Properly they mean "I go to [the/a] church", and the reason they leave out the particle is that they mean "THE CHURCH" but they want to sound humble, so they can't say that; but they also can't say "I go to a church," because that would be denying that the church they go to is the One True Church. That's why they don't use a particle in that particular phrase. The proper particle is "a", and "church" shouldn't be capitalized. [edit2] this is not an attempt to start a religious flame war. I'm just commenting on the grammar. [edit3] Just to demonstrate the proper noun thing I'm referring to, Jews "go to Temple" (capitalized, proper noun), or go to a temple, but they don't "go to temple".
  - tominous 4y ago
    As a native speaker of English, I didn't know about mass nouns until I was an adult and I was trying to explain to a non-native speaker that they were using "the" too much.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

I'm on ell.stackexchange.com and actually the question about articles comes up often - especially since languages like Russian and Chinese don't have them. The thing is, English really wants all singular nouns tagged with a determiner - that can be an article, possessive such as "my, your," etc., demonstrative such as "this, that,", or other determiners such as "any, all, one, some," etc. Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract (think type of X instead of instance of X). So, "the X" means the speaker has a particular X in mind and is expecting you to know which X he/she is talking about it - either from previous conversation, assumed shared experience/culture, or rarely the speaker intentionally wants you to feel like you're missing out on something. "A/an X" means the listener isn't expected to have been tracking X. IMHO more difficult than articles is explaining the perfect aspect of verbs - e.g. difference between "I X'ed" and "I have X'ed". English has something like particles too - often called phrasal verbs. E.g. knock and knock out mean two completely different things.

AlchemistCamp 4y ago
> Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract You need an article here. If there's only one exception, it should be, "The exception is when...", and if there are multiple exceptions, say, "An exception is when..."
- Twisol 4y ago
  In this case, it's grammatical, just for a different reason. You can sometimes drop the leading article or pronoun of a clause -- don't know why, just happens sometimes. ("I" don't know why, "it" just happens sometimes.) Or for instance, if you're viewing a house on the market: "Kitchen is to the left, sitting room to the right; office is upstairs." It's certainly a casual register, but it's no less grammatical than including the articles explicitly. In the ancestor comment's "Exception is when ...", the article is implied but elided, in the same way. (I inferred "the".) You could argue whether it's effective to drop the article there, because it's ambiguous in the way you noted, but it's still grammatically valid. (Chomsky's "colorless green ideas" is the usual example where semantic sense diverges from grammatical validity.)

bamboozled 4y ago

I’m going to challenge you buy saying this. I’ve progressed much much quicker by studying the differences between. は and が, because I learn it and I forget it. I don’t think about it when using it anymore, however it’s in there somewhere when I get lost. Same for English. I did learn it, I also forgot it. It’s not in there but it is. Same for being able to explain verb conjugations. I agree though on some points for sure. Especially how well my German fiends (for example) understand the theory of English compared to me.

twblalock 4y ago

You could say this about many aspects of many foreign languages. So what? Reading explanations helps. Immersion helps too. They are both useful tools, and for many people, immersion or "the natural way" are not available unless they move to a different country, so reading explanations is a perfectly reasonable approach.

dymk 4y ago

The evidence points to the contrary, you acquire a language as an adult faster than a child can. This is because you have more complex mental faculties available, and can have complex topics explained as analogies to a language you know. As others have pointed out, ESL learners ask questions about English articles all the time, and it helps them understand how the language works faster than if they had to brute-force the patterns. There is no "natural" way to learn, there's just ways that work and ways that don't. The fastest way to learn a language is by having comprehensible input, and more input becomes comprehensible with directed, structured study.

djtango 4y ago
Hmmm I think if you observe children my personal conclusion is that in practice (over theory) thought and language are intractable and as we mature, expression becomes more acute and so language acquisition is faster because we no longer need to learn how to think. A 6 year old needs to learn $LANGUAGE and science simultaneously
- dymk 4y ago
  Indeed, that's why adults are still favored in language learning, with the exception of phonology (which does make sense, retraining all those fine movements truly is harder than starting with the right movements to begin with) - https://sites.psu.edu/bilingualismmatters/children-vs-adults-who-wins-the-second-language-acquisition-match/ https://sites.psu.edu/bilingualismmatters/children-vs-adults... Adults win in acquisition speed because we already have a template for learning a language.
timr 4y ago
You may ramp up adult-level conversational ability faster, but it takes much longer to reach any state of native-like fluency. For example, I lived and studied in Japan, and while I probably jumped from zero to ~middle-school in terms of basic communication ability in about a year with daily classwork and total immersion, I was nowhere near the average toddler in terms of basic fluency after that time. Even now, I can make myself understood in most adult-level contexts where a toddler would be helpless, but nobody would ever confuse me for a native toddler. It's not just accent, either -- little kids still routinely teach me vocabulary and grammar.

samatman 4y ago

Grammar used to be a core part of grammar school. It was for me, along with penmanship. I'm not (that) old, my school was weird, but one is expected to graduate high school knowing what indefinite and definite articles are, which is which in English, and the distinction they represent. Explicitly rather than implicitly, I mean. I believe this is still expected of high school graduates in America, yes? So the use of the negative particle in the first sentence isn't indicated.

ehnto 4y ago

> but I managed to get to a point where I could use the right one far more often than not based on what just felt right It is the same for kanji for me. I usually don't actively know something by seeing it and reaching for it, I just see it enough times that one day I "feel" the answer first. I never go "Oh yes, that's the kanji for cat, this is definitely correct". My brain goes "CAT!", and then I just have to assume this is the kanji for cat. Almost like there's a disconnect between active recall and knowledge stored from repetition.

Robadob 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cecilpl2 4y ago
Can I call it a green whittling rectangular little silver French old lovely knife? This makes no sense. Clearly it's the lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Any minor reordering of these adjectives just sounds innately wrong.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  Whatever you do, never flash your lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife in front of Crocodile Dundee. He'll give you a sharp rejoinder.
- glandium 4y ago
  What's interesting to me is that I'm not a native, I don't know the exact rules for these things, and yet, the first one somehow sounds wrong to me.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  "Innately"? If that were true all languages would be the same.
naniwaduni 4y ago
The idea that there are "adjective types and order" is a bit misleading; the underlying order is primarily semantic/pragmatic. The order is, roughly, extrinsic to intrinsic, situational to innate, contrastive to contextual; how closely attached a descriptor is to the head noun generally implies how "essential" a property it describes. This isn't really an English thing, either—English just happens to be the language most frequently taught to non-native speakers—but adjective order actually correlates pretty well across languages. The oft-repeated opinion-to-purpose order of adjectives has decent descriptive power, but is easily oversold; the classes described do not have consistent ordering across contexts. The same woman may be an "old American woman" when interviewed for his opinions on global politics, or an "American old woman" in the context of comparing healthcare for the elderly across countries. The "big bad wolf" is a fairy-tale villain; a "bad big wolf" is a failure at being a big wolf.

Jabbles 4y ago

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

soulofmischief 4y ago

I distinctly remember learning about articles in fourth grade English in my US public school, and distinctly remember most of my class having a lot of trouble with them. To your point though, I taught myself to read at age three and was reading adult fiction by fourth grade, I've always been told I have a large vocabulary, and still had a lot of trouble in that class around parts of speech and grammar, because I apparently skipped out on essential English language skills by teaching myself to read and not learning by immersion. My theory of language was fundamentally different and I had to relearn English from the bottom up. This also caused me to perform terribly in foreign language classes as I was learning concepts I should have already learned about English... I wasn't just learning a foreign language, I was learning my own language at the same time.