I'd really like to improve my reading comprehension so thought I'd whip on out A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and went to the appropriate section near the back entitled: Improving Reading Skill by Identifying an 'Extended Sentential Unit'. A short bit of reading shows me a lot of my difficulties stem from the very basics of Japanese grammar (I've discovered a lot of particles have functions I never even knew about) so I've been laying on these extra sheets (pushing for the advanced section of Tae Kim's guide) yet the ones at the bottom have been creased the whole time. I knew something was there and tried to ignore it but it made things uncomfortable for sure, so I'm glad the problem's been found and can hopefully now try to iron out these kinks.

But enough about linen, the book tells me a vital thing for a student is to identify modifiers and their followed modifiees. Together, the 2 make an ESU (Extended Sentential Unit). As far as I knew, pretty much everything was modified by the preceding word. I have difficulty spotting the M.E.s (modified elements) in the first place. How am I meant to know what's modifying what?



Here the boxed word is the M.E, the underlined is the modifier all of which make the ESU.

I find that very confusing. Normally I'd just look at that and consider the "today" to be modifying "Class" to make (drum roll) "today's class" but apparently KYOU is modifying "said", and "Juugyou" modifying the quote mark "to". Can a mere quote mark even be modified?

Please can anybody help?

And another thing, particles have different functions depending on context right? How are you meant to know when it means what?

Thanks (I'm kind of down about this).

Don't get down on yourself about grammar! Part of the problem here is you not only have to know about wa, ga, and to, but mainly that in order for it to be "today's class" it would have to be kyou NO jugyou 今日の授業。So the more you learn about all of the grammatical constructions, the easier it will be to interpret the context correctly.

Don't be down Virtua_Leaf, it's OK!

I'm making some assumptions below and if I'm wrong, I apologise.

I think your biggest problem is that you're always trying to understand Japanese rather than produce it. I don't recommend analysing issues like this in such depth unless sentences like the above are ones that you've already been frequently producing yourself.

I would be willing to take a bet that your reading skills are actually pretty good and it's your productive skills (writing and speaking) that need the work. The quotation that you copied is only interesting if you've been using と言った regularly and hadn't thought fully about the consequences of usage. It's a bit like a learner of English studying the intricacies of definite and indefinite articles before producing lots of sentences containing 'the' and 'a'.

So my advice is to speak as much Japanese as you can and work your way through text books that coach you in how to produce Japanese. I'm very sorry if I'm being rude and you're already doing this.

As for your question, sorry about the delay. If 今日 was modifying 授業 then you would say 今日の授業. This makes it explicit that it's today's class, 今日の授業 becomes one element that is part of the larger element 今日の授業がない. The element 今日の授業がない then modifies と.

As it is, it doesn't say 今日の授業. Therefore, in my opinion, whether 今日 modifies "said" or whether it modifies "class" is ambiguous. If quotation marks were inserted, it wouldn't be. eg. ジョンは今日「授業がない」と言った. If the dictionaries authors disagree with me then I'm probably wrong but does it really matter? The meaning doesn't change. Just move on and don't go so deep.

Thank you everyone!

tuuli Wrote:Part of the problem here is you not only have to know about wa, ga, and to

I think you're right, I should go over these just to make sure I have them fully.

wrightak Wrote:I think your biggest problem is that you're always trying to understand Japanese rather than produce it. I don't recommend analysing issues like this in such depth unless sentences like the above are ones that you've already been frequently producing yourself.

That seems like a good way of going about it. These ultra technical analysis' never seem to work with me to be honest.

tuuli Wrote:I would be willing to take a bet that your reading skills are actually pretty good and it's your productive skills (writing and speaking) that need the work. The quotation that you copied is only interesting if you've been using と言った regularly and hadn't thought fully about the consequences of usage.

Writing and speaking are definitely weaker points for me. So I should only really stress about grammar if I've been spouting it out myself without really knowing it's meaning, and that I shouldn't worry too much if I've only read it in, say, a random sentence?

So the vibe I'm getting is to just sort of feel the sentence instead of dissecting it, but that I should go back and double-check I know what the basic particles mean. In that case, I think I'll stick with Tae Kim for general grammar study and use ADoBJG for the particles.

Thanks again! I'll try going into it with this new mentality.

I recommend taking the example sentences of grammar that you don't know (Dictionary of Japanese grammar is wonderful for this) and throwing them into an SRS after you study them and then just reviewing.

You'll get it

Go through the entires for に、と、が、は、を、か、で、 and の in the grammar dictionary.

There are LOTS of topics related to those and you can learn a lot. Some particle related grammar is simply and easy to grasp, while others just take time getting used (For example, getting a feeling of when to us "ha" and "ga"). I suggest pouring over all the examples and translations and trying to "get a feel" for the function of them. As long as you're in the same topic (Ie, "ni" as destination), they should be used in similar manners.

Grammar wise, I think there are three important topics that once understood will enable the student to understand most Japanese quickly and competently:
1) All the particles and their functions.
2) Morphological changes for verbs/adjectives/copula (tense, passive, conditionals etc)
3) The ESU stuff your post touched on. Though your example isn't one, that generally means relative clauses. But understanding this is key because (written, at least) Japanese really functions by modifying a word with a huge clause behind it.

Get those down, and grasping most written/non-casual/non-idiomatic Japanese should be possible.


For this example, I would say drop the idea that we have one phrase "modifying" some other word/particle. I think it makes more sense to say we are identifying what the phrase belongs to. In this case, it seems likely the sentence should be: John said, "Today there isn't any class". Given that, since と marks what is being said, the whole "kyou jugyou ga nai" 'belongs' to the と.


Also, today isn't modifying class because there is no possession, as mentioned earlier. Nouns can only modify things by using の. If you keep in mind that a noun will only modify things by using の, it shouldn't be too hard to avoid this mistake.

Firstly, analysing sentences in this way is really something to be reserved for the cases where you don't understand at first glance what it's saying: you take some complicated monster of a sentence you found in a novel or an article and pin all the bits down on a board so you can work out what the writer was actually saying. For this to work properly you have to already know the grammar underlying it (ie if the sentence was shorter or in several bits you'd not have had trouble with it). So it's supposed to be an aid for cases where your natural understanding has failed and you're trying to bridge the gap with an intellectual, logical analysis.

You might be interested in also reading the bit in Jay Rubin's book 'Making Sense of Japanese' about sentence analysis. (It's the last chapter.) He says that he used to have students analyse sentences in the way suggested by the DBJG, but now prefers a method which starts at the front of the sentence and works forwards, anticipating what comes next. (Kind of assembling the sentence from its individual pieces, rather than starting with the whole thing and dissecting it.) He has a big example with commentary. I'll try to see if I can do something similar with the much shorter sentence ジョンは今日授業がないと言った。

Quote:ジョンは

OK, we have the topic for this sentence, ie "John". This is modifying a verb, or maybe an adjective or the copula, which will be the main predicate of the sentence.

Quote:今日

"today". This is a noun; in fact it's what EDICT codes as 'n-t', a noun-temporal, which means that what we're looking at here might be a noun (in which case it will need a particle after it), or it could be modifying a verb/adjective to come (in which case it won't).

Quote:授業が

"lesson". Since 今日授業 isn't a compound noun, 今日 must have been the temporal thingy. So at this point we still have 今日 waiting for its verb (something happened today, but what?), and now we also have 授業, which the が tells us is the subject of some verb (maybe the same verb, maybe not).

Quote:ない

Ah, a verb, we can get rid of some of these modifiers by attaching them to it. At least 授業が (giving us "there is no lesson"), and perhaps also 今日 (as wrightak notes, the sentence is ambiguous). So a chunk of the sentence so far collapses down into a single verb phrase:
授業がない (or perhaps 今日授業がない) -- and from now on we can think of that as a single unit.

Quote:と

Quote. The preceding verb phrase (not just the verb!) attaches to this. So we expect some sort of 'saying' kind of a verb, and indeed:

Quote:言った。

"said", and the end of the sentence. Anything we haven't already managed to deal with must be modifying this -- so ジョンは (remember that?) is modifying this verb. And this is the other place we could attach 今日 to.

Well, that was seriously overkill for such a short sentence, but hopefully you get the general idea -- gather up bits of the sentence until you find things they could be modifying, and when you have modifier+modified, you can treat that as a complete unit (what DBJG is calling an ESU). Really, you should go out and buy a copy of Rubin's book, though :-)

The main thing to remember is that things like 今日, 明日, etc don't take particles (except sometimes は I guess).

[ファブリス]

I liked reading that part of DBJG. However I wouldn't worry about what is the modifer or what is modified or whatever names they give to it.

I don't think it was mentioned yet, but from my understanding, temporal "words" can often have the particle は removed. So in this case if you put the particle back in :

ジョンは今日は授業がないと言った。

Jon, today, said "there is no class".

EDIT: what Ryuujin just said

PPS: regarding the sentence units and sentence order, also see Japanese for nerds.

The sentence is ambiguous with 3 possible interpretations
ジョンは今日授業がないと言った
a) John said "today, there is no class"
b) John said "Today's class is cancelled" (can't transliterate it naturally)
c) Today John said "there is no class"

c is the interpretation that is in the book. b is an interpretation produced by assuming that the speaker is dropping particles (in this case a の after 今日), which happens very commonly in casual speech, but strictly speaking isn't grammatical. a is the temporal business pm215 talked about. if you wanted to you could insert は between the temporal noun and 授業 without changing the meaning (but adding emphasis on the fact that it's TODAY that has no class).

It is actually ambiguous in more ways if you consider the fact that the ジョンは part could also conceivably be part of the quote (<unnamed subject> said that John has no class today).

Language is naturally ambiguous and you have to follow context to determine the concrete meaning.

Jarvik7 Wrote:the ジョンは part could also conceivably be part of the quote

My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like having all those は-clauses inside what is in some ways a subordinate clause (Japanese not making much distinction between direct and indirect speech). Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

pm215 Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:the ジョンは part could also conceivably be part of the quote

My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like having all those は-clauses inside what is in some ways a subordinate clause (Japanese not making much distinction between direct and indirect speech). Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

Quotation marks (「」) are a Meiji era adoption and are still very seldomly used in written Japanese. If you are repeating what a person said, you can say it exactly as they did, particles and all. Understanding quotations properly is very context heavy. In the interpretation you quoted, the unnamed subject would have to already be established in a previous sentence to be understandable. You might also have context with something like the addressee previously saying something like "John can't make it cause he has class", to which the speaker replies with "<Bob/whoever> said John doesn't have class". Although it would still be ambiguous if Bob/whoever or John did the saying in the end. A speaker might explicate the subject for clarity's sake.

Both interpretations are clearly written on the image:

Quote:(Today John said that there wasn't any class

Quote:John said that there isn't class today

.

pm215 Wrote:My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like (...)

Languages are the way they are whether you like it or not (specially if you aren't a native speaker). I think you are not really trying to understand the sentence. Rather, you are trying to create your own image about what the sentence "should" mean.

Jarvik7 Wrote:It is actually ambiguous in more ways if you consider the fact that the ジョンは part could also conceivably be part of the quote (<unnamed subject> said that John has no class today).

pm215 Wrote:Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

I think that the following sentence may be taken as an example:

ジョンはスサンは目がきれいだと言った。

John ha Susan ha eye(s) ga nice da to told

John told that [Susan has nice eyes / Susan's eyes are nice]

To make the interpretations a bit clearer, here is some formatting.
[] represents a clause and gray kana represent optional particles:

A) ジョンは[今日は授業がない]と言った
B) ジョンは[今日の授業がない]と言った
C) ジョンは今日[授業がない]と言った
D) [ジョンは今日授業がない]と言った

A) John said "Today, there is no class."
B) John said "Today's class was cancelled." (approx.)
C) Today John said "There is no class."
D) <unnamed subject> said "John has no class today."

Transtic Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like (...)

Languages are the way they are whether you like it or not (specially if you aren't a native speaker).

Well, obviously. Perhaps I was a bit unclear; I'll try to rephrase and expand. I think that part of trying to acquire a second language is building up an internal subconscious model of what is and isn't 'correct', so that as you speak you say the things which "feel right" and they are correct. You can't stop to think logically about it all. I certainly don't claim that my gut feeling outranks that of a native speaker, but on the other hand I do listen to it because it's quite often right. What I was trying to say was "I feel like this is wrong (and when I look more analytically at it this is why it feels wrong) but I'm not totally sure, so can anybody say one way or the other?" (You have to try to update your gut feelings when they're wrong, too, since the whole point is to try to improve that internal model...)

Transtic Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

I think that the following sentence may be taken as an example:

ジョンはスサンは目がきれいだと言った。

By "real" there I meant "genuine Japanese produced by a native speaker (and not as a created example sentence)". (Er, I guess "real" was a bit cryptic too; sorry.) Example sentences are tricky things because by nature they're lacking context and can be a bit artificial. And a reading which might be obvious in the right context can look odd if you take the sentence standing alone.

pm215 Wrote:

Transtic Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:My gut feeling on that one is that it's a very unnatural reading, because I don't like (...)

Languages are the way they are whether you like it or not (specially if you aren't a native speaker).

Well, obviously. Perhaps I was a bit unclear; I'll try to rephrase and expand. I think that part of trying to acquire a second language is building up an internal subconscious model of what is and isn't 'correct', so that as you speak you say the things which "feel right" and they are correct. You can't stop to think logically about it all. I certainly don't claim that my gut feeling outranks that of a native speaker, but on the other hand I do listen to it because it's quite often right. What I was trying to say was "I feel like this is wrong (and when I look more analytically at it this is why it feels wrong) but I'm not totally sure, so can anybody say one way or the other?" (You have to try to update your gut feelings when they're wrong, too, since the whole point is to try to improve that internal model...)

Transtic Wrote:

pm215 Wrote:Does anybody have a real example of a は-clause clearly binding to the quote and not to the outer scope? (My guess is that if you do it will have quote marks in it.)

I think that the following sentence may be taken as an example:

ジョンはスサンは目がきれいだと言った。

By "real" there I meant "genuine Japanese produced by a native speaker (and not as a created example sentence)". (Er, I guess "real" was a bit cryptic too; sorry.) Example sentences are tricky things because by nature they're lacking context and can be a bit artificial. And a reading which might be obvious in the right context can look odd if you take the sentence standing alone.

What's not real about the above example. if he said his name was 山田太郎 would that have made it more real for you?　失礼な

Transtic Wrote:ジョンはスサンは目がきれいだと言った。

John ha Susan ha eye(s) ga nice da to told

Am I the only one thinking this should be　「ジョンはスサンの目がきれいだと言った。」?

EDIT: Looking at my Kenkyusha it seems not...

彼は目が充血している.
and
彼女は目が窪んでいた.

it could be either. you are not wrong.

は is used here to pull Suzanne out of the crowd as the one with the nice eyes.

Wow, just... wow this is the site that keeps on giving! Thank you all for your help and advice. I've taken on board what's been said and am currently trying to put them in motion. I already feel a lot more confident just for going over the core particles again.