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.
Theorycrafting 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.
Please 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.
I definitely agree... but it's funny you say that.
I helped tutor a Japanese couple (grad students) when I was an undergrad. They both spoke very passable english, but wanted to improve, and I was happy to cover the many cultural, pronunciation, and listening challenges that Japanese face. When I started to discuss the difference between Urban and Rural America... they at first refused to believe that Rural was a word. I learned some Japanese history/culture (one of the only times I've ever been invited into a Japanese couple's home!), how to pronounce a few phrases, and tried Japanese food (natto and nankotsu) that I wouldn't have otherwise.
However, after about 6 months the wife (who had studied English literature) asked me for help with a test she was (re)taking on English grammar. It was multiple choice English and about half the problems she asked for help on were impossible for me. Often, all of the choices seemed wrong, but I knew at least one must be right!
In the end I apologized humbly, and said that there were many things that were correct by the rules, but native speakers would find them so strange that they would likely be misunderstood. Also, something which apparently was not being taught (and needed to be) was ordering of adjectives in a description (e.g. fat bald white guy), which I made up on the fly (increasing order of permanence). Changing the order implies emphasis... but I had never noticed it as part of the language before, and neither had they.
Not because it's necessarily incorrect but because it makes a huge assumption that all people learn in the same way.
I am fluent in 3 languages, have a decent grasp of another 2 (although cannot really speak much of either for lack of practice), and have picked up basic grasp of a couple others.
Most things I learn through extensive practice using theory on top to help me understand my practical results. Programming, engineering, robotics, electronics, physics, etc. Even much of mathematics!
With languages, the only way I start to truly grasp them is by analysing grammar, syntax and etymology, then starting to match those to pronounciation, and then I can go from there.
The idea that everybody should learn a language in way you deem better has hindered my ability to learn many, and has slowed me down a lot. I wonder how many other people learn like me and are currently out of options when it comes to language courses because of this kind of one-size-fits-all approach to teaching.
Honestly the emphasis on over optimization and the idea of finding the right way of learning something has wasted me so much time and lost me countless opportunities. I'm not the average person. I need a solution that works for myself and sometimes that means the method only works for me.
The most important thing is to just start and stick with it, no matter how meaningless or small the thing you are doing is. You will jump onto something better as soon as you find it. However, if you haven't even started then you will always look for something that's even better than the best thing you already know about. i.e. you will do nothing even though your methodology or the instructional material you found is already more than good enough.
> this kind of one-size-fits-all approach to teaching.
It's not so much that there's a one size fits all learning method, but rather that there are certain constants in language learning. Namely one must actually hear and speak the language.
Learning the grammar and syntax of the target language entirely in ones native language may provide some value for some people, but in and of itself doesn't teach anyone a language and is entirely optional. In general formal study of grammar is an advanced topic.
> 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
You will learn the language's grammar, which can be very helpful in understanding sentences as well as creating sentences which are grammatically correct.
Once you learn adequate vocabulary as well as correct grammar and correct usage, you can make some pretty respectable sentences.
I believe in practice you learn how to speak by listening (input learning) and only use grammar in a post-facto fashion to check your phrases. So grammar is just a critic, not an artist.
I read that Japanese sentence structure is different and always wanted to learn more about that. German is also interesting in how it makes large constructions that resolve at the end. I finally discovered that Japanese and Korean have similar sentence structures and having learned Korean as a child can understand and speak it at a basic level without any comprehension of its structure.
> Learning a language is _not_ like learning math.
I disagree. As a mathematician, looking at the language learning problem from a very "structural" perspective helped me a lot to grasp languages much better. Unluckily, most language learning textbooks are written by people who are not very "mathematically-minded", thus making their method of teaching overly complicated for me.
PhD students in mathematics told me that my explanations of languages make so much more sense than how the foreign language is taught at the language course at the university. On the other hand, from people who are more "humanities-minded", I often get reactions that my way of explaining languages is deeply confusing and has no value.
One keen insight I have had recently into the stratification between mathematics and language is that language immediately presents the 5 or 6 main "Who, what, when, where, how," as we introduce more language. Mathematics can start with few axioms or many. Taking those points in mind, I think there can be a lot of similarity when thinking around an equals sign and the verb is/to be.
> Taking those points in mind, I think there can be a lot of similarity when thinking around an equals sign and the verb is/to be.
I am cautious about this: In Spanish and Portuguese, there exist two "to be": ser and estar, which roughly refer to "general situation" vs. "current state".
(Spanish)
Tú eres linda.
Tú estás linda.
(Portuguese)
Você é linda.
Você está linda.
("you are gorgeous" (referring to a female person)). The second means that she is currently beautiful with a possible hint that she might normally be ugly.
But 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.
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.
I 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.
It'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.
I don't follow this complaint at all. Sure, talking with native speakers is important, but what good will it do if you haven't first learned the basics of how verbs and particles work?
There's something called the input hypothesis that's trending upwards in language learning. More input is basically a substitute for studying grammar, or even superior, because the brain is phenomenal at pattern matching. Bad grammar will sound "off" well before you understand the rule in your own language, same thing happens when learning new languages, given sufficient input.
It takes a leap of faith but learning grammar almost exclusively through example sentences is actually really efficient.
Krashen, Khatzumoto, Matt vs. Japan, and Antimoon are all worth reading if you want to go down this rabbit hole.
How you absorb the grammar of a language is a separate question from when you should do conversations though.
Some folks advocate conversation day one, but most pro-input folks do recommend waiting until you have a sense of how things work and can make fewer mistakes.
Thanks for this explanation. I'd not heard of the debate before, but now that you describe it I find I've been a fan of input learning for a long time.
With that said I still find GP's complaint pretty weird, since TFA strikes me as being in the "beginning stuff that even advocates of input learning would teach out of a book" category.
I mean, if I was teaching somebody Japanese then I'd probably cover how particles work on the first day. Surely only a madman would expect someone to absorb that organically.
Particles are the hardest parts of the language, often untranslatable by themselves. I have a 100 page booklet about these words which are so few they can sit on one or two rows.
Can confirm. I studied grammar through Anki deck of about 2000 sentences and a tonne of native content. It took my about a year to truly internalize に to the point it became second nature and I could understand it intuitively.
Passed JLPT1 after a couple of years, and had the time of my life learning Japanese. Particles are the glue that holds it all together but they are deceptively simple on the surface with an ocean of complexity lying underneath.
Definitely seems to be the case in machine learning. Flexible models trained on huge amounts of data beat older hand tuned grammar rule models every time.
There are very many people who have learned to speak foreign languages while never reading any material about the grammar of the language. (In fact the vast majority have learned this way, since the vast majority of languages in history have been unwritten and uncodified.) But there are very few people who can read a grammatical description like this one and speak fluently.
While I agree with OP that you need to listen to a lot of source content, a reasonable amount grammatical understanding can definitely speed up your comprehension. This is a lot of what gives adult learners an advantage to learn quickly over infants.
Sure, lots of people learn verb conjugation rules without a textbook. But they still needed to learn the rules. Having a textbook just makes it easier.
I don't think TFA is claiming to be the only thing anyone needs to reach fluency. It's clearly just meant to be a learning aid. Unless you believe it's counterproductive, and that lists like that actually make it harder to learn a language, then I don't understand the complaint here.
What good is knowing how verbs work, if you don't know any of them? Vocabulary is the corner-stone of learning a language.
You can make yourself understood using simple sentences and botched grammar, if the key words in them are the right ones.
You can't even study grammar without vocabulary, because grammar study uses examples. Examples loaded with words you don't understand are poorly conducive to learning.
The best resources for Japanese grammar assume that you can read. You get some furigana over some of the kanji and that's it.
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".
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.
> 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.
Classifying the 形容動詞 stem as a noun is kind of nice for ... not getting a very confused intuition on what they do and how they work, because they really are more like 名詞 and/or nouns in most senses†. Choosing to classify 形容詞 as a kind of verb is a bit of an odder, best-kind-of-correct sort of take, since their conjugation paradigm is a bit removed from the usual "verb" paradigms, and it makes me kind of wonder whether they'd call the stems of サ変 compounds "su(ru)-nouns". But it's kind of a logical step to jump to if you're going to call 形容動詞 "na-nouns", I guess.
(The page gets 形容動詞 and 形容詞 mixed up, though, which isn't a great sign.)
As for why you'd want to avoid calling them adjectives, basically, calling both "adjectives" would make it sound like these two groups kinds of lemmas make up a coherent lexical category. At least for anglophones, "adjective" is a word that only comes when discussing "grammar", and that carries the implication that the "adjective" classification has something to do with "grammar".
It's not. There is no morphological similarity between 形容詞 and 形容動詞; the similarity between them is purely semantic (and rather tenuous at that). The similarity between them and adjectives is likewise semantic, not morphological: they happen to be groupings of mostly descriptive words. And adjectives, likewise, happen to be a grouping of mostly descriptive words. But the word "adjective" reaches at a different characterizing property that makes bad abstraction: "adjectives" are actually almost a coherent word class.
Frankly, seeing the contortions people hallucinate up when they bring preconceived notions about how "adjectives" work, I can kind of sympathize with an attempt to drill in the point that 形容動詞 stems are basically nouns, 形容詞 are basically verbs, and avoid all the nonsense around the concept of "adjectives".
†There are a few features where nouns that refer to descriptive traits often differ from nouns that describe concrete objects (not to mention all the grammatical nouns—to wit, every single loanword—that are harder to classify as "things"), but the ability to form a 連体形 with -な certainly doesn't make a clean cut of them. There are at least fair few that prefer to take -の while being semantically descriptive, for one, and a handful of more exotic types.
If I would have had a second life, I would then have read this excellent book many times, from cover to cover.
It is a trove of information for deeper understanding of historic (and then modern) grammar.
An historical grammar of Japanese (1928)
By Sir Sansom, George Bailey
I 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.
When 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.
It's always fun in Japanese when people flip conjugations by tacking nakunai on the end like you make a statement "akakunai" "it's not red" and they, disagreeing with you in disbelief, fire back "akakunakunai?" Like "it ain't not red!" but it's phrased as a question intonation-wise.
Yes they are verbs in the sense that the object is not "red" but "actively red'ing" -- if one looks at the onomatopoetic language of Japanese it becomes clear that many things are memetic and more similar to the "live photo" transient glimpse of motion than a static trait.
I'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.
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)?
While 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.
So 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).
No, 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.
> 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.
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.