December 12, 2006

Things I would have liked to know about Japanese

I'm gonna do a post about Japanese, just cause I've been collecting mental short cuts for a while now. I may expand upon this. So here is some general info and musings to get you started.

Japanese has no plurals of a proper sort. Sometimes a word is made plural by repeating it (though the first syllable of the repeated word often changes, ex:ひとびと) sometimes one can indicate a group exists with a postfix.

There is no future tense to worry about. Just context.

Japanese sounds come in little beats called moras, one mora for each kana usually. This makes haikus a breeze in Japanese. Sometimes they add onomatopoeic emphasis by lengthening a mora noticeably.

は and が Seem related but they are not. は is for topics and specificity. が is for "subjects" (fishy terminolgy, but what can you do) and introducing new information.

へ is usually "towards". In the same manner に is often "to". で is likely "at" or "by means of" .で differs from に in that it indicates a location at which action takes place (mnemonic: "I did it at de place").

I-adjectives can conjugate like verbs, cause they secretly are verbs. Verbs in their tai and nai forms become essentially adjectives (i-adjectives). So あそこに行きたい means "I want to go there" in Japanese and English, but also sort of means, "there is a want-to-go-type of place" in Japanese. This sort of thing is an weird difference between the two languages.
Also, when describing feelings and the like (in the sense of "this makes me happy") it is usually i-adjectives that seem to be used, as opposed to how English speakers personalize their feelings, making the speaker the subject. Essentially you say "this is a happy ~" instead.

All you need for a correct Japanese sentence is a verb. The verb always comes last, and everything before it can be in any order as long as all words are still attached to their particles.
The copula (read: linguistic equal sign) is also a verb Japanese, and it conjugates like one (with some irregularity), and can function like one at the end of a sentence. It's a word that indicates existence. です is "=".
ある and いる are used for existence. Verbs don't need copulas behind them (compare to English: "I run"), which is why a verb alone is a complete sentence.

The masu form is already polite and a verb, so it doesn't need desu to the point where desu isn't even used in masu using sentences--excepting the past negative (ありませんでした which is a caveat necessitated by masu not having a negative past tense cogitation).

I-adjectives don't need copulas (because they are verbs) but you can add です behind them to be polite. Copulas are often tacked on to add politeness (in these situations they have no grammatical function). だ is not polite, so it doesn't get attached to i-adjectives. If you add でございます、you have to conjugate the i-adjective a little (as in おはようございます).

If you wanna sound pissed, ad な to the end of a dictionary form of a verb (this means ”don't do that verb!").
Men use ぜ and ぞ instead of よ, while women use わ before よ. This wa and the honorific o are actually elegant, beautifying speech, and for some reason they are considered polite, and mainly used by women. Men can use わ, if they are really rich princes, or speaking kansai-ben.

Japanese people learn their own language in very different terms and have a hard time explaining it to foreigners. Perhaps this is why they think their language is the hardest on earth. But in actuality, Japanese is a very simple language. Learn verb and adjective conjugation, especially the te form and you are in for smooth sailing. Consult with the marked language resources linked on the right menu bar of this blog for more info and elucidation; I especially recommend Tae Kim's guide. I also recommend downloading Firefox and adding the Rikaichan plugin. Also, get a nintendo DS and buy 漢字そのまま.
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I edit this post from time to time --Jan 23rd, 2009

8 comments:

  1. We study Japanese in diffierent ways.

    Sometimes I can get the simple meanings though I don't know Japanese completely.
    BUT ,I CAN'T speak it out ,and I also don't know their precise meanings.
    Because there are so many Chinese characters in Japanese...

    Some of my friends who is study in Japan,they communicate with local people by written Chinese characters...

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  2. ah yes I imagine if you are not a native English speaker this entry is hard to follow and you have your own challenges. がんばってね

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  3. がんばれ

    どうぞ よろしく お願いします。

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  4. Just a trivial question: What font are you using for Japanese? I like the way it looks...

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  5. Hmmm. Actually, I don't have any influence over that as far as I know. I made this post both at school and home. And my page is only set up to show Georgia, but that's just for English.

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  6. Of course, fixed that name.

    Yeah, kansai-ben is definitely more polite and "feminine". I think we wouldn't have keigo if it wasn't for kansai; least that's what I hear.

    My studies have only been in earnest for the last year.

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  7. I think the native-language difficulty is almost universal. Once I started to have language exchanges w/ Japanese people looking to learn English, my understanding of English usage and grammar exploded! I was surprised by how little I didn't know and how much was just "well... it's just that way." or "it just sounds right." I've been shocked by the difficulty of English to be honest.

    I've been self-studying for about two years and I've honestly been surprised to find out just how difficult Japanese isn't. All the patterns make it relatively easy. All you need is the wetware to memorize patterns and you're off and running. Sure there are the parts of the language that are mystifying to lots of people, but I'm finding that there's simply a direct correlation to the amount of time you put in to it and the seriousness of your studies. It's very rewarding in that sense.

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  8. Indeed. I had no idea what a past participle was before I started teaching English here!

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