Intro to Basic Japanese Grammar

[Macko Darlack]

don't know what you mean... the post is the same... or which post you refer to??

[Zyzzyva165]

i was practicing so while coming home on the bus now i'm done with vowels and K~* (10 kanas). let me see in 3 hours, then tomorrow, if i still remember yay, simply thinking of kanjis being 2000+ i'm kinda freaky T_T going first with hira and then kata is fine, right??

Yes, it is perfectly fine. In fact, that's what the Jpn education system does, for some reasons.

Well, you don't really need to know that many kanji. You could probably get away with knowing 3-400 basic kanji. I'm pretty sure I've forgotten a number of kanji, though being able to recognize them really helps in reading raws. If you can memorize that much info, go for it, but when you don't use a word/character for a while, it just disappears. Or at least, that's been happening to me.

Yeah, agreed. Since I'm experiencing the same thing with my Chinese as well... T.T

Kore.

[Macko Darlack]

mukyaa!
well, i hardly remember... mmm well, i said i learnt 10 kanas, vowels and K*- and that maybe i couldn't remember them now, but i do now i'm going with the S*-

don't mind, it's ok, since the questions were already answered, none problm (all but the onigiri thing...)

regards!!

[Zyzzyva165]

Hmm... Sure you don't want to edit it back? Never mind, just don't sue me for power abuse... I'm INNOCENT!!! XD

[Macko Darlack]

yes, i'm gonna report abuse then!!!

EDIT: only kidding!!!

no, man, it's okay, and we're going off-topic now, so we better leave it here. maybe there's a way to mend it but if not, then it's okay

[duncan]

kawaii so..? gotta remember it

Hmm- not kawaisou.. that means something a bit different. Just kawaii. Basically, she thinks it's cute when I speak broken Japanese. I have a rather dark suspicion that she actually prefers that I mess some things up, because she finds it cute . Little does she know that day by day I am learning from her Japanese and soon I will speak Japanese perfectly.. for a girl who speaks Osaka-ben... Mwahahaha...

Also, the whole thing about kudasai, nasai, etc.. was well answered, but it's worth noting just how poorly it works to try to shove Japanese into an English, or even Indo-European framework. In English the imperative mood doesn't really exist as a true mood, IMHO, but it still takes basically one form: "Do this." This can be tempered in many ways: "Please do this" or "Could you do this for me", etc. Japanese has a somewhat more defined structure for expressing the same things.

Anyway, when you first start studying Japanese you have no choice but to understand things like this by analogy to English (or another language, if it is your native language and you can find help in that language). As you go on, I think it is best to try, as much as possible to deal with the language on its own terms. So at first you need a good analogy- saying this in Japanese is like saying that in English. You might even benefit from some terminology that is not strictly appropriate. But in the end it's best to have a combination of detailed explanation and many examples of speech in which you understand the context well.

I think that saying that ...nasai is "firm" is a very good way to put it. It's not rude, and it's not not rude. Just as it would not be rude for you to firmly ask your child to do something, but it would be rude to firmly ask your boss to do something. I remember once trying to explain to some Japanese that English has plenty of keigo, in its own way- it's just that it doesn't have quite as sharply defined keigo as Japanese does...

Anyway, though you can study the Japanese forms a bit more easily than you can study the English forms, in the end you need to see a lot of examples of precisely who uses certain forms to who, in what circumstances, to really get it (not that I claim to understand it completely, or even adeqautely). Or at least I think that that is the case. What textbooks teach tends to be a level of politeness that is "safe". But there are a lot of gradations that can be tricky even for Japanese...

[Zyzzyva165]

To clarify what I mentioned about imperative form versus command, I quote the following from a textbook I just acquired (Shin Nihongo Kiso II).

[Before this, the book talked about the imperative form of verbs, its uses and gave examples.]

“The imperative style is not limited to the imperative form. One imperative style which is used comparatively often is “masu-form + nasai”. This style is used by mothers to children or by teachers to their students and conveys a touch of politeness compared with the imperative form of a verb. Yet it is an imperative style of a kind and is not used when speaking to a senior.

Hayaku nenasai.
Go to bed soon.”

So Trabius, you are right as well. Though -nasai is not imperative, it is still a style of imperative. Sorry for the confusion. =p

[Macko Darlack]

kawaii so..? gotta remember it

Hmm- not kawaisou.. that means something a bit different. Just kawaii. Basically, she thinks it's cute when I speak broken Japanese. I have a rather dark suspicion that she actually prefers that I mess some things up, because she finds it cute . Little does she know that day by day I am learning from her Japanese and soon I will speak Japanese perfectly.. for a girl who speaks Osaka-ben... Mwahahaha...

i didn't mean kawaisou. i meant what i wrote... "So then it is kawaii, eh?" cause of that i put kawaii in italics. sorry if it was understandable and yay, is it really strong the difference between mmm dialects (?) in Japan. cause i've seen how they say "your accent is kinda Osaka's"... but for my japanese-listener ears is the same...

Anyway, when you first start studying Japanese you have no choice but to understand things like this by analogy to English (or another language, if it is your native language and you can find help in that language). As you go on, I think it is best to try, as much as possible to deal with the language on its own terms. So at first you need a good analogy- saying this in Japanese is like saying that in English. You might even benefit from some terminology that is not strictly appropriate. But in the end it's best to have a combination of detailed explanation and many examples of speech in which you understand the context well.

I think that saying that ...nasai is "firm" is a very good way to put it. It's not rude, and it's not not rude. Just as it would not be rude for you to firmly ask your child to do something, but it would be rude to firmly ask your boss to do something. I remember once trying to explain to some Japanese that English has plenty of keigo, in its own way- it's just that it doesn't have quite as sharply defined keigo as Japanese does...

Anyway, though you can study the Japanese forms a bit more easily than you can study the English forms, in the end you need to see a lot of examples of precisely who uses certain forms to who, in what circumstances, to really get it (not that I claim to understand it completely, or even adeqautely). Or at least I think that that is the case. What textbooks teach tends to be a level of politeness that is "safe". But there are a lot of gradations that can be tricky even for Japanese...

so to do all that you mentioned.. better to live a season in Japan to learn the day-to-day speaking looking forward that...

and i got another question about the culture. is there really their "love" for english?? i mean, in anime there's almost always words said in english (i.e チョコレート)... so speaking in english is certainly helpful while you learn japanese??

[salv87]

kawaiisou if I'm not mistaken can mean "poor" not as in "don't have money" but rather someone pitiful ^_^
a for diffferences.. I think it's mostly in the part of word they put emphasis on, right?

as for chocolate.. they just don't have another word for it I think ^_^

[Zyzzyva165]

i got another question about the culture. is there really their "love" for english?? i mean, in anime there's almost always words said in english (i.e チョコレート)... so speaking in english is certainly helpful while you learn japanese??

Well, I am not complaining, since the language I learnt (Bahasa Melayu) is FULL of English-assimilated words. Personifikasi, klasifikasi, definisi, debat... and the list goes on and on and on. So I'm kinda used to this.

[Edit: They do have words from other language as well, eg: konkuru- from 'concour'. They are quite few compared to English though... ]

[duncan]

i didn't mean kawaisou. i meant what i wrote... "So then it is kawaii, eh?" cause of that i put kawaii in italics. sorry if it was understandable and yay, is it really strong the difference between mmm dialects (?) in Japan. cause i've seen how they say "your accent is kinda Osaka's"... but for my japanese-listener ears is the same...

Well, people from Osaka can speak "standard" Japanese, and generally do so when not in Kansai, I think. So in that case the only thing someone from, say Tokyo, might notice is a bit of an accent.

so to do all that you mentioned.. better to live a season in Japan to learn the day-to-day speaking looking forward that...

and i got another question about the culture. is there really their "love" for english?? i mean, in anime there's almost always words said in english (i.e チョコレート)... so speaking in english is certainly helpful while you learn japanese??

Well- actually just living in Japan for a season probably won't by itself teach you much about really formal Japanese, for instance, I don't think. You'll pick up the bits that are used by businesses like stores and restaurants to their customers, but you're unlikely to be exposed to too much of the really formal stuff unless you're there on some sort of business... of course the good news is that that means that you don't need the really formal stuff to navigate Japan, unless you are seriously trying to do business there. This is actually a problem even for some young Japanese in a lot of cases, I think, though obviously much less of one- they sometimes need to be trained a bit in the etiquette when they enter a company, because they might not have completely internalized it in day to day life.

Of course things like nasai vs kudasai are not nearly that difficult to get in daily use, and there really is a range of politeness levels that is orthogonal to keigo. Anyway, what I'm getting at in my roundabout fashion is that, while there's nothing wrong with worrying about terms like imperative, what's important is knowing what you ought to say in a given situation, and what it means if someone says something to you in a given situation, and grammatical categories are at best an aid in this regard.

I used to have a reader with a whole lot of dialogs in it at various levels of formality... that was really useful, maybe more so than something with a lot of explanation would be, though I can't remember what it was called now. But, tbh, I tend to be biased toward examples anyway- explanations are at best a necessary evil, I think (though of course they are sometimes necessary.) Anyway, you can also get a bit of a feel for it from watching television and reading books, but you have to be careful there. Anime is particularly dangerous in this regard. It's useful in that it presents a wide variety of speech, so wide that some of it is pretty much caricature, but it is dangerous because... well, anime characters tend to casually throw around language that could get you punched in some circumstances.

But other TV can be useful- I actually sort of associate the -nasai form with a particular character (Ochoufujin) from a Japanese drama called Ace wo Nerae... she's a bit of an Ojousama and she has a kind of imperious tone with her juniors in the tennis club- it's not unfriendly, but she knows she's at the top of the food chain, and she means business. Part of that is her use of nasai in cases where someone of lower status in the group might have used kudasai. It's around online, and it might be worth watching just for that .

kawaiisou if I'm not mistaken can mean "poor" not as in "don't have money" but rather someone pitiful ^_^
a for diffferences.. I think it's mostly in the part of word they put emphasis on, right?

Yeah, kawaiisou is something like "the poor thing", when you're talking about a wet kitten, but it would have a bit of a mean edge to it if you used it about someone's Japanese, I think. Saying that someone's Japanese is kawaii is not a compliment, but it is not mean-spirited either, at least in this case.

About the dialect thing- actually there are some pretty significant differences between Osaka-ben and "standard" Japanese. They go well beyond intonation (though you're right about that in some cases- for instance in "standard" Japanese hashi (chopsticks) has different pitch accent than "hashi" (bridge); I believe that this is actually reversed in Osaka-ben, though I could be wrong). The person I'm talking about tends to speak (or type) standard Japanese to me, but she'll break out the Osaka-ben for fun every once in a while, and quiz me to see if I understand it. I can generally follow her, but I couldn't even begin to try to speak it comprehensibly. Anyway, if I tried to describe the differences I'd get them wrong, but there are some pages online about it, and at least a couple of books aimed at a general audience.

As for the Japanese being "English-crazy"... well, they pretty much all have to take it for 6 years in school, though in a lot of cases they don't really learn much English, just as people who take French for 4 years in the states can't generally speak it at all. Actually, the Japanese seem to me both similar and different from Americans in their approach to foreign languages. Unlike Americans they are very interested in foreign languages. Like Americans, they are by and large pretty bad at them (compared to, say, the peoples of some European countries.) There was a real mania for English during the Japanese economic boom, but I think it has died down a bit since then- actually what I've heard from some young Japanese is that English is passe- they all want to learn French or Italian or Korean now . Of course English remains, for the moment at least, the most useful language to know (no offense to anyone, but it's a hard thing to deny) so like everyone else the Japanese will probably continue to study it for the foreseeable future.

But there are just _scads_ of English import words in the language. In many cases there's no good reason for it that I can see- the Japanese will use English words for which they have perfectly good Japanese words already. But.. the meaning of these loan-words is often radically different from their meaning in English, and they are often bent out of all recognition, so that no native speaker of English would recognize them. In some ways this is actually a problem for Japanese who study English, as they try to use these "English" words and... the results are often not pretty. It's also a problem for English-speaking learners of Japanese... katakanaized English borrowings are often the hardest things for me to deal with in some Japanese texts.

[Trabius]

Ugh, I think I've chosen a horrible way to present verbs. It isn't meshing at all, but I don't really want to do it the other way (i.e. simultaneously presenting conjugation for u and ru verbs) because I want to clearly separate them. With how disjointed it is right now, I get the feeling that people would be better off getting their lessons from a textbook or a more comprehensive learning site for basic grammar. On that note, I think it would work out better if I temporarily leave off the beginning and tried to answer any questions on grammar issues that popped up in this thread and incorporated them into the post. So if anyone has anything they want to see addressed in the guide, I'm just going to jump to that instead of trying to work my way through to it. That way I can bridge the gaps with some sort of focus, which would probably be a lot more beneficial than the rambling.

[duncan]

[quote="Trabius"I'm just going to jump to that instead of trying to work my way through to it. That way I can bridge the gaps with some sort of focus, which would probably be a lot more beneficial than the rambling.[/quote]

I think that might be wise. There are pretty good guides already. Tae Kim's guide is _really_ hard to beat. If people want to pick up the basics they ought to just use his, IMHO. But.. you're right that you can do something very useful by answering people's questions.

[Trabius]

Tae Kim's guide is _really_ hard to beat. If people want to pick up the basics they ought to just use his, IMHO.

Well holy crap, I didn't take the time to go through his entire site, but from the ToC and what I did check, I'd have to say I agree with you. It seems he covers everything I even considered going over and then some, in a well-planned out format even. If I'd have known, I wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to devise a good breakdown. I'll probably delete my initial post or maybe truncate it at some point. For now I'll stop adding to it at least, though I certainly don't mind continuing with questions.

[Macko Darlack]

But other TV can be useful- I actually sort of associate the -nasai form with a particular character (Ochoufujin) from a Japanese drama called Ace wo Nerae... she's a bit of an Ojousama and she has a kind of imperious tone with her juniors in the tennis club- it's not unfriendly, but she knows she's at the top of the food chain, and she means business. Part of that is her use of nasai in cases where someone of lower status in the group might have used kudasai. It's around online, and it might be worth watching just for that .

i'm looking forward to it... the company who provides the TV channels from 'cable' is delaying... i was to have that a month ago, but forgot to call them up to show... i wanna see NHK channel, is that good? ('cause its the only channel in japanese here.. )
and about the dialects (-ben is the suffix??) how many are they?? oh, and thx duncan for your very long response. learning more as days go by

Ugh, I think I've chosen a horrible way to present verbs. It isn't meshing at all, but I don't really want to do it the other way (i.e. simultaneously presenting conjugation for u and ru verbs) because I want to clearly separate them. With how disjointed it is right now, I get the feeling that people would be better off getting their lessons from a textbook or a more comprehensive learning site for basic grammar. On that note, I think it would work out better if I temporarily leave off the beginning and tried to answer any questions on grammar issues that popped up in this thread and incorporated them into the post. So if anyone has anything they want to see addressed in the guide, I'm just going to jump to that instead of trying to work my way through to it. That way I can bridge the gaps with some sort of focus, which would probably be a lot more beneficial than the rambling.

yay! more!! really nice intro i'm the questioner #1 thx for ur hard work btw

I think that might be wise. There are pretty good guides already. Tae Kim's guide is _really_ hard to beat. If people want to pick up the basics they ought to just use his, IMHO. But.. you're right that you can do something very useful by answering people's questions.

oh, going after that guy's guide

Well holy crap, I didn't take the time to go through his entire site, but from the ToC and what I did check, I'd have to say I agree with you. It seems he covers everything I even considered going over and then some, in a well-planned out format even. If I'd have known, I wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to devise a good breakdown. I'll probably delete my initial post or maybe truncate it at some point. For now I'll stop adding to it at least, though I certainly don't mind continuing with questions.

don't delete plz it's really helpful... it can be used as a First-to-Read before starting a new guide i mean, it'll really help if someone doesn't understand the guide he/she is reading so the question was the above, about the dialects

regards!!