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The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

8020japanese.com

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Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#41

Post by iamnotlarry »

chc wrote: post #35
iamnotlarry wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Japanese, you learn a handful of rules to conjugate a verb. Then those rules always apply with no exceptions. In English, there are not set rules. Every case is special. What is the past tense form of 'shake'? 'see'? 'walk'? 'sleep'? 'eat'? 'speak'? 'sit'? 'seek'? 'work'? There are no rules. You basically have to memorize every word and all the possible ways it can morph. English possessive: 's or s' or ' or s, d…

I think this is overstating the regularity of Japanese a bit. For example, what is the past tense of "kuru"? What is the present tense of "datta"?

Yes. It is overstating Japanese regularity a very little bit.

And understating the irregularity of English an enormous amount.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#42

Post by Grue3 »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #25
whym wrote: post #19

This article does a great job at presenting a gist of the Japanese sentence structure. Nevertheless, it makes me want to point out that it's not the whole story. If you take into account topics such as modality and conjugation, some of the information you add to a verb is placed after the verb and cannot be freely reordered. Japanese verbs are "greater" than English verbs in the sense that you conjugate/suffixate a v…

For Japanese, you learn a handful of rules to conjugate a verb. Then those rules always apply with no exceptions. In English, there are not set rules. Every case is special. What is the past tense form of 'shake'? 'see'? 'walk'? 'sleep'? 'eat'? 'speak'? 'sit'? 'seek'? 'work'? There are no rules. You basically have to memorize every word and all the possible ways it can morph. English possessive: 's or s' or ' or s, d…

You're forgetting that there are only 3 (three) verb conjugations in English, of which two are almost always the same. Only a finite number of verbs have irregular conjugations, so you just learn them along with vocabulary. In Japanese, the number of possible conjugations of all irregular verbs (copula, "suru", "kuru") is probably larger than the number of English irregular verbs that are commonly used. In fact, let's count the number of conjugations of "kuru" in my ICHIRAN [1] database:

    ICHIRAN/DICT> (length (get-kana-forms 1547720))
    186
Are English possessives considered difficult by anyone? Not sure what that demonstrates.

Plurals! Oh, that's my favorite topic that I'm working on right now. -tachi is mostly used with people, so can't be used in most context. For inanimate objects you just say the number of them. And that's where the counters come in... At which point any sane person gives up learning Japanese for good.

Past tense, isn't that the same as conjugations? Also your rules don't really work. "tanoshii" => "tanoshiideshita"? Pretty sure that's not a word. The correct past tense is "tanoshikatta [desu]".

[1] https://github.com/tshatrov/ichiran

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#43

Post by laurieg »

unscaled wrote: post #26

I have to enter a caveat here though. Spoken Japanese is a little bit different, and in some cases, arguments will follow the verb. It's pretty rare, but I did hear things like "Dou sureba ii ore" or "nani yatteru omae"? This is VERY rough and informal though, and not Japan being very polite, it's not something that I'd hear everyday. Maybe on TV or from really close friends, and even then I'm not sure if everyone wo…

I wouldn't describe that pattern as incredibly rough or even particularly informal. It's common to at the subject after the sentence when speaking quickly. You use it when you think the listener may have to quite picked up what you were saying etc.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#44

Post by akssri »

Interestingly, many Indic [2] languages follow similar verb-centric grammars. In the canonical Vyakarana tradition (of Panini), sentences are seen as revolving around the verb [1].

The "noun-cases" or कारक (karaka) are generally equivalent to the "particles" in Japanese. The genitive (eqv. の) is not a karaka, since it has no relation to the verb. Of course, since there is technically no syntactic difference between adjectives and nouns in Sanskrit, the semantics of the genitive in particular can be very undeterministic. This is not the case in others though.

I wish there were more studies on how Indic traditions affected East/SE Asia [3]. Sadly, most academics/people here don't believe there exists a world outside N. America & W.Europe (often no India either!).

[1] There is a competing tradition of semantics called "Nyaya" where sentences are seen to be Noun-centric. These discourses are generally not easily accessible.

[2] Dividing the languages based on presence/absence of noun inflections would appear not to have much discriminative power to claim anything about historical origins. Historical Linguistics, I believe, is mostly a politicized pseudoscience.

[3] This documentary highlights the kind of things I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WaenzbSJwk

It is also fascinating to look at the Thai/Khmer scripts and realize these are related to current day Telugu/Kannada scripts.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#46

Post by laurieg »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #12

Remember those English diagramming classes everyone hated? I'm not very familiar with the education system in Japan, but I doubt they have diagramming classes. In Japanese, the diagramming is built into the language. You tag the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, etc. Everything gets markup. Which part of the sentence is the direct object? Uh... the part with the direct object tag hanging off it? Correc…

I think you're probably falling into a common trap: There are plenty of exceptions, you just don't know them yet.

For sure, Japanese verbs are more regular than English verbs. But most materials written about Japanese are aimed squarely at beginners. They naturally skip over any foibles for pedagogical reasons. There isn't all that much written (in English) about tricky sentences, syntactic ambiguity and similar mistakes.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#47

Post by laurieg »

sdrothrock wrote: post #34
panorama wrote: post #15

Beginner question: In casual, spoken Japanese, I've been taught that I can drop the particles (including pronouns). Hence "watashi wa tabemasu" can be colloquially shortened to "tabemasu". Thanks to this article, I've come to understand particles much better and why they're important, but does it change in casual spoken Japanese? Are some particles okay to drop whereas others are kept? Thanks in advance.

> I can drop the particles (including pronouns) Sure. "piza wo taberu?" can be "piza taberu?" and that's fine, even normal. > (including pronouns) This is different and I think there are a few misconceptions bundled up in this assumption. 1. Particles don't exist on their own; they're permanently linked to the word that precedes them; if you've ever studied a Romance language, you can think of them as a way of declin…

"Dropping the pronoun" is a very English way of thinking about things. In English sentences have to have subjects. Consider the following paragraph:

John went to the shop. John bought a cake. John took it to Bill's house. John and Bill ate the cake.

It's not grammatically wrong, but it's clunky. We just use pronouns to sound 'normal' in English:

John went to the shop. He bought a cake. He took it to Bill's house. They ate the cake.

In Japanese instead of changing a noun (John) to a pronoun (he) you just don't say the subject if it hasn't changed:

John went to the shop, bought a cake and took it to Bill's house. They ate the cake.

Which, as you can see, is something that works in English at times too.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#48

Post by laurieg »

Grue3 wrote: post #42
iamnotlarry wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Japanese, you learn a handful of rules to conjugate a verb. Then those rules always apply with no exceptions. In English, there are not set rules. Every case is special. What is the past tense form of 'shake'? 'see'? 'walk'? 'sleep'? 'eat'? 'speak'? 'sit'? 'seek'? 'work'? There are no rules. You basically have to memorize every word and all the possible ways it can morph. English possessive: 's or s' or ' or s, d…

You're forgetting that there are only 3 (three) verb conjugations in English, of which two are almost always the same. Only a finite number of verbs have irregular conjugations, so you just learn them along with vocabulary. In Japanese, the number of possible conjugations of all irregular verbs (copula, "suru", "kuru") is probably larger than the number of English irregular verbs that are commonly used. In fact, let'…

We have counters in English too!

Tons of words are uncountable, like water, bread, and so on.

A slice of bread, a loaf of bread, a bread roll (Hey, why did that one come after the 'bread'...)

We even have lots of words that are both countable and uncountable. "I ate some tomato" and "I ate some tomatoes" has quite different meaning.

Overall I think all languages have their foibles, and trying to hold one widely used natural language up as "More regular" or "more difficult" is a pretty fruitless endeavour. Thought it is fun to talk about ;)

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#49

Post by lovemenot »

whym wrote: post #19

This article does a great job at presenting a gist of the Japanese sentence structure. Nevertheless, it makes me want to point out that it's not the whole story. If you take into account topics such as modality and conjugation, some of the information you add to a verb is placed after the verb and cannot be freely reordered. Japanese verbs are "greater" than English verbs in the sense that you conjugate/suffixate a v…

Why do you use nemuru as the root? Mostly I would hear and say neru. So I could not sleep would become nerarenakatta.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#50

Post by fenomas »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #33
irq11 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For Japanese, it's naraba . That's it. Unless? nakeriba ." There are actually a number of ways to say "if" in japanese, and the one you mention can only be used in certain contexts. People might get your gist if you use the conditional tense for everything, but you'll be wrong a lot. The -tara/nara grammar is at least as commonly used, if not more so. I bring this up to illustrate only that the "programming language…

What? You mean there's a ternary operator? I bring this up to illustrate that the metaphor isn't perfect, but it has some legs. I meant that BNF diagrams would be easier to create and understand for Japanese than for English. You are right that there are more forms for saying 'if'. Then again, I've seen programmers who spell 'if' 'f-o-r'.

I don't think this metaphor has legs. "naraba" can mean other things, and there are lots of cases where you'd say "if" in English but "naraba" wouldn't work.

I certainly agree that Japanese grammar is simpler than English, and relatively easy to learn, but I don't think this case (either "naraba", or the "if/then" case generally) illustrates that.

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