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The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

8020japanese.com

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Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#101

Post by scarygliders »

I'm wondering if the main factor is one's ability to learn a new language - itself affected by many factors such as age, for example?

I've been married to a native Japanese for going on 19 years now.

I have tried to learn the language. I have lived in Japan for 6 years, hoping that full immersion would help. I even embarked in the Kumon Japanese course whilst in Japan, from beginner level to more advanced. I have piles and piles of the work books cluttering my home.

I ended up being able to read katakana, hiragana, and learned some 250 Kanji.

What I didn't end up managing was being able to have decent conversation in Japanese. Sure, I could ask for a beer, directions, talk about the weather, but that was about it. I had reached some plateau and could go no further.

In the end I gave up. It was basically something I couldn't do. I tried many different ways of learning, found none which could not prevent my sheer frustration at not being able to take the knowledge in.

Are some people simply 'wired' to learn language more than others? Is there an age limit, for example? Was it my low tolerance for frustration? Was it my perfectionist tendencies? Probably a 'yes' to most of those.

But I stopped after more than a decade of trying.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#102

Post by jzelinskie »

mikekchar wrote: post #78
ue_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also your rules don't really work. "tanoshii" => "tanoshiideshita"? I learned this quite early on, but I'm still a little confused for exactly when to conjugate desu instead.

The main problem beginning Japanese learners often face is that they are taught polite form before plain form. Polite form is a natural extension of plain form, but if you start with that, it's actually quite mind bending to back track to plain form. The secret is to abandon polite form entirely until you are relatively fluent with plain form and then add polite form back in. For example, "tanoshii" is present/future…

If I could upvote something multiple times, it'd be this post. The conjugations are well documented and can be intuited with enough exposure, but the insight as to why (い-verbs) and common usages (お早うございます) is something clearly lacking from the literature.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#103

Post by migueloller »

The article says:

> What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, 「これは車です」. There is no differentiation.

This is not always true. The latter could be 「これが車です」. The は and が particles are very similar but are still different. Fully grasping this small difference is one of the biggest problems Japanese learners encounter when studying grammar.

Closer to the beginning, the article also mentions:

> The topic of a Japanese sentence is very similar to what other languages refer to as the subject. The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that does the action described by the main verb in the sentence. These are, in fact, slightly different concepts, but for now, we will treat them as being the same so as to keep things simple.

It turns out that は marks the topic and が marks the subject. I feel that many times the confusion between は and が in Japanese learners happens because the learning material tries to make this simplification in the beginning. When it's time to learn が, it's hard to retrain the brain.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#104

Post by stephengillie »

Using particles in this way almost sounds like using flags to specify parameters when calling a function. This allows them to be placed in any order. A Powershell-like example:

  Construct-Sentence -subject Taro -object Noriko -verb to_see -time Past  
  > "Taro saw Noriko."

  Construct-Sentence -object Noriko -time Past -verb to_see -subject Taro 
  > "Taro saw Noriko."
The original sentence is "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." And "masu" appears to be the root verb "to see".

  Construct-Sentence -wa Taro -wo Noriko -verb masu -time Past
  > "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita."
Something more Bash-like:

  csent wa:Taro wo:Noriko masu -past_affirmative
  # "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita."
Meanwhile, subject-object-verb (SVO) and similar patterns depend on the order of inputs:

  Construct-Sentence Taro Norkio to_see Past
  > "Taro saw Noriko"

  Construct-Sentence Norkio Taro to_see Past
  > "Noriko saw Taro"
This allows for invalid outputs:

  Construct-Sentence Taro to_see Norkio Past
  > "Taro Noriko'ed see"

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#105

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

tom_mellior wrote: post #95
monster_group wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you brought up Sanskrit and topic of discussion is sentence structure I will provide one more data point. Because Sanskrit is a highly inflected language there is a lot of flexibility in sentence structure in Sanskrit. In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. This flexibility comes at a very high price though - there are tens of ways in which a noun can transform and theore…

> In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual…

Yeah, and reading Latin is complicated by the fact that Latin authors like to put the adjective and its noun on oppposite ends of a phrase and then stuff other things in between. So, instead of "the yellow car in my driveway that belongs to my brother" they'll say "the yellow in my driveway that belongs to my brother car". Because an adjective must match its noun in number, gender and case, the authors think of the noun and adjective as holding the phrase together. And this is only the beginning: in poetry there are even fewer patterns because the words are generally ordered to fit the meter: the only thing you can really count on is that certain particles must be the second word in a sentence (important because the manuscripts didn't have punctuation) and that a preposition always precedes its object.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#106

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

Razengan wrote: post #74
glandium wrote: post #68

Something I like about the whole "verb at the end of the sentence" thing is that you can totally flip over the meaning of what you're saying, right at the end. In English, you can achieve the same effect with awkward forms (like "not" at the end of the sentence), but in Japanese, it's just the natural form. Try to imagine the kind of snarks you could do if you could put things like "I don't reckon" on hold until the…

> Try to imagine the kind of snarks you could do if you could put things like "I don't reckon" on hold until the end of the sentence. Sadly (ironically?), that tends not to be the kind of language subtlety/humor the Japanese go for. If that's true, I think it might be more that such kind of humor is seen as too basic, or childish, and not particularly subtle for adults. Akin to simple puns or "ghost jokes" and the li…

As much as people claim to despise puns, the major English authors show very little reluctance to use them: they are everywhere in Shakespeare, for example, and you can also find them in more recent authors like TS Eliot (for example, in Ash Wednesday, he puns on dissembled/disassembled)

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#107

Post by gizmo686 »

migueloller wrote: post #103

The article says: > What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, 「これは車です」. There is no differentiation. This is not always true. The latter could be 「これが車です」. The は and が particles are very similar but are still different. Fully grasping this small difference is one of the biggest problems Japanese learners encounter when studying grammar. Closer to the beginning, the…

This isn't quite true.

は has two distinct usages. One is to mark the topic of the sentence. The other is to mark the subject of the sentence with a contrastive connotation.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#108

Post by mcaruso »

stephengillie wrote: post #104

Using particles in this way almost sounds like using flags to specify parameters when calling a function. This allows them to be placed in any order. A Powershell-like example: Construct-Sentence -subject Taro -object Noriko -verb to_see -time Past > "Taro saw Noriko." Construct-Sentence -object Noriko -time Past -verb to_see -subject Taro > "Taro saw Noriko." The original sentence is "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." A…

I've made the analogy of function calls before, it's a pretty cool way to think about it. But I think your example is slightly off. The verb is the head of the phrase, and would thus be the function (or command) itself:

    miru --topic=Taro --object=Noriko # Taro sees Noriko
This uses "miru", the plain non-past form of "to see". Conjugating the verb is a little trickier to translate, but I think it would be analogous to higher-order functions, functions that modify the verb to create a new verb. Using a Python-like syntax:

    formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object="Noriko")
    # Taro wa Noriko wo mimashita
I'm trying to think of a way to include relative clauses in this analogy, but it's a little harder. A relative clause is of the form "[verb-phrase] [noun]", e.g. "doresu wo kiru Noriko" (Noriko who wears a dress). Maybe we could use positional arguments for this:

    formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu", "Noriko"))
    # Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita ??
EDIT: or maybe currying would be a nice way to solve this. So each verb would be a function that takes arguments, and returns a new function that takes a noun to apply that verb to:

    formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=kiru(object="doresu")("Noriko"))
    # Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#109

Post by stephengillie »

mcaruso wrote: post #108
stephengillie wrote: post #104

Using particles in this way almost sounds like using flags to specify parameters when calling a function. This allows them to be placed in any order. A Powershell-like example: Construct-Sentence -subject Taro -object Noriko -verb to_see -time Past > "Taro saw Noriko." Construct-Sentence -object Noriko -time Past -verb to_see -subject Taro > "Taro saw Noriko." The original sentence is "Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita." A…

I've made the analogy of function calls before, it's a pretty cool way to think about it. But I think your example is slightly off. The verb is the head of the phrase, and would thus be the function (or command) itself: miru --topic=Taro --object=Noriko # Taro sees Noriko This uses "miru", the plain non-past form of "to see". Conjugating the verb is a little trickier to translate, but I think it would be analogous to…

Could this situation be described by nesting sentences?

  "Taro saw (Noriko wears a dress)."
To extend your example:

  formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object="Noriko")
  "Taro saw Noriko."

  formal(present(kiru))(topic="Noriko", object="doresu") 
  "Noriko wears a dress."
Nested:

  formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=(formal(present(kiru))(topic="Noriko", object="doresu")) )

  "Taro saw (Noriko wears a dress)."
  "Taro saw Noriko wear a dress."

  "Taro wa (doresu wo kiru Noriko wa(?)) wo mimashita"
  "Taro wa doresu wo kiru Noriko wo mimashita"
Does that make sense?

*Please help correct any errors, as I have never formally studied the Japanese language.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#110

Post by mcaruso »

stephengillie wrote: post #109
mcaruso wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made the analogy of function calls before, it's a pretty cool way to think about it. But I think your example is slightly off. The verb is the head of the phrase, and would thus be the function (or command) itself: miru --topic=Taro --object=Noriko # Taro sees Noriko This uses "miru", the plain non-past form of "to see". Conjugating the verb is a little trickier to translate, but I think it would be analogous to…

Could this situation be described by nesting sentences? "Taro saw (Noriko wears a dress)." To extend your example: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object="Noriko") "Taro saw Noriko." formal(present(kiru))(topic="Noriko", object="doresu") "Noriko wears a dress." Nested: formal(past(miru))(topic="Taro", object=(formal(present(kiru))(topic="Noriko", object="doresu")) ) "Taro saw (Noriko wears a dress)." "Taro saw Norik…

It wouldn't type-check, since `object` is expected to be a noun and not a verb. :)
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