The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action.

For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down.

This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command.

As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned.

What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space.

Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway.

TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part.

When I taught my tutor this method, he told me that I was by far the fastest of his students to pick up vocabulary, and he wound up switching completely to teaching with this method. It was really effective for me, and I highly recommend it.

TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response

[2] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.di...

[3] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.di...

To be clear, the comment about null anaphora was more of a throwaway comment anticipating the objection that sometimes the topicalizing wa does mark the subject. While I have seen this explanation presented, and it is my prefered explanation, I would not necessarily call it pervasive. Now, for the explanation itself (unfourtantly, I am on vacation, so cannot check any of my references).

Japanese is a clear example of a pro-drop language, so using pronoun dropping (aka, null anaphora) as an explanation requires less justification than it would in English, where we only see it in specific contexts. Additionally, we see the topicalizing "wa" in various contexts, not all of which can be understood as subjects, so a unified explanation that can account for all of them would be preferred.

For example, consider the sentence

1) Mary-ga ringo-o tabeta

We can topicalize Mary with the following derivation:

2) Mary-wa Mary-ga ringo-o tabeta

3) Mary-wa anohito-ga ringo-o tabeta (Pro-form substitution)

4) Mary-wa ringo-o tabeta (Deletion)

Simmilarly, we can topicalaize ringo with

2) Ringo-wa Mary-ga ringo-o tabeta

3) Ringo-wa Mary-ga are-o tabeta (Pro-form substitution)

4) Ringo-wa Mary-ga tabeta (Deletion)

We also have the following sentence (kudamono = fruit)

Kudamono-wa Mary-ga ringo-o tabeta

Admittedly, I struggle to think of a context where the speaker would not drop Mary due to context, but that should not be relevent here, and I am sure that there exists better examples.

Notice that, under the null anaphora explanation, all three of these examples could be explained in the same way. If we were to explain the first example as wa being a subject marker, then we would need to explain the second example as wa being an object marker, and the third example as wa being just a topic marker.

I have seen an alternative explanation that describes topicalization in Japanese as a transformation rule. I have mostly seen this by researchers who view Japanese non-configurationally, who argue that a rule such as [ga/o] -> [wa] in a non configurational language is directly analogous to a movement rule in a configurational analysis. Even under this approach, you still need to account for sentences where the topic has no co-referential place in the rest of the sentence.

Further, even under this alternative explanation, I would still not call wa a topic marker. Rather, I would say that when the listener reconstructs the deep-structure, he uses pragmatics to infer what syntactic role the topic plays. Indeed, If you consider a sentences such as ringo wa tabeta and Mary wa tabeta you can see that there is no syntactic way to identify where the topic falls in the deep structure.