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The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

8020japanese.com

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Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#91

Post by bonzini »

risyasin wrote: post #80
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…

You should definitely see Turkish. it's belong to same family with Japanese. But verbs are even bigger. There are more variants as suffixes to the verbs. Sometimes a whole English sentence can be translated into one Turkish word. Have a look. "okutamadıklarımızdansınız" just one word. It means you are one of those who we can not make them read.

"can not make" or "cannot make"?

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#92

Post by RayVR »

Anyone that would benefit from this style of learning (rapid, focused on structure and rules) may actually be hurt by the rush to cover many topics without treating any precisely. I'm by no means an expert but here are some issues in just the first section.

* example that glosses over the difference between a topic and a subject is frustrating because, in fact, the similarity is fairly superficial.

* there is no "a", "an", or "the" in Japanese, however to specify "this is the car" (implying that it is in answer to some question about which car) one would say これが車です。Using the が particle instead of は.

I'm always on the lookout for useful resources. So far, Tae Kim's guide [1] has been the best I've found. Kim doesn't assume much about the reader's pre-existing knowledge yet he is able to remain succinct.

[1] http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#93

Post by yawaramin »

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…

I was just thinking about negation by adding the suffix. We have it in Bangla too. In fact, we share the same word, 'nai', for 'is not there'.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#94

Post by kazinator »

Hey all, on a topic related to this: here is another way to get some feeling for the different sentence structure.

I recently finished making English subs for a 45 minute Japanese rock concert video from the 1980's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqfX9nm-No

Here I introduce a concept in subtitling whereby a subtitle template with dashed ("------") blanks appears for an entire English sentence, and the blanks convert to words and phrases as the corresponding concepts appear in the Japanese audio, in that order.

The viewer has a better idea of what is being sung at the moment it is sung, and which words are receiving the emotional emphasis in the song. Also, the revelation of meaning is delayed for the English viewer in the same way. The "kicker" phrase at the end of a verse or a meaning-altering particle (such as an entire sentence negation) isn't prematurely revealed in the translation.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#95

Post by tom_mellior »

monster_group wrote: post #75
akssri wrote: post #44

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 a…

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 meanings expressed by the variants are so different that Hungarian speakers wouldn't consider them "the same sentence expressed a bit differently". Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis

In contrast, I believe Latin is really liberal in its sentence structure, especially in poetry.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#96

Post by corey_moncure »

unscaled wrote: post #24
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 never had the pleasure of taking them myself, butI'm pretty sure Japanese grammar classes are not so fun as you imagine. Putting aside that the norm in Japanese school is rote memorization and pedantic attention to details (e.g. you'd memorize dates of historical events), the Japanese grammar that is taught in class is traditional Japanese grammar. It's pretty streamlined compared to the abomination that is medieva…

>And of course Japanese wasn't "designed" any more than English was.

On the contrary, the Ministry of Education historically took many steps to redefine modern Japanese grammar, orthography, and what kanji are to be used and in what order to be learned. There was a concerted, synthetic effort beginning before the turn of the 20th century where researchers considered which forms, spellings, and dialect would constitute a reformed language, so they could do away with the inefficient classical grammar and kanbun. Modern Japanese certainly did not arise organically.

Search for "japanese grammar reform" to read more about this history.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#97

Post by akssri »

monster_group wrote: post #75
akssri wrote: post #44

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 a…

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…

That's the story that's told in introductory texts, but the genitive generally forbids such permutations (depending on the flavor of usage in the geographical area).

There are actually only 7 kinds of सुप्s (x 3 numbers); there are about 10 तिङ्s, but only about 3-4 are in general usage. Then there are other sentence transformations outside these.

The relational modifiers "stick" to the roots, so moving words around the sentence is quite easy - this is particularly useful to poets who need to satisfy certain mathematical rules in their compositions. Much of this is also true for languages like Kannada/Hindi. There was also a paper about a KR scheme inspired by something of this kind.

Sanskrit is generally easy to pick up with the right teachers, in an immersive environment; the grammar-technique, esp. in a "sterile" environment, is rather terrible IMO.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#98

Post by akssri »

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…

It is for the most part (see answer above).

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#99

Post by akssri »

Arnavion wrote: post #77
akssri wrote: post #44

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 a…

>The genitive (eqv. の) is not a karaka, since it has no relation to the verb. Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, Hindi's sambandh kaarak (ka-ke-ki-ra-re-ri-na-ne-ni) is the genitive case. watashi no hon meri pustak, etc

It is indeed the सम्बन्ध; it's not a कारक technically. The canonical defn. of कारक is that which relates a noun to the verb. सम्बन्ध relates relations between nouns (you can't have sentences with only a verb and a noun in genitive).

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#100

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…

Oh, I just remembered another fun feature of Japanese verb conjugation.

Can you conjugate the (regular) verb "へる" (heru)? There happen to be two verbs that are pronounced "heru" but with completely different conjugations! Do you remember which one is which? In fact any verb that ends with -eru or -aru can be potentially conjugated like an ichidan verb or a godan verb. For each such verb you have to remember its conjugation class, lest you conjugate it completely wrong. So these aren't so regular after all.

Also a related topic is intransitive/transitive verb pairs. These are also heavily irregular, and you must use the correct one in a sentence or it will be ungrammatical.

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