I realize there is no perfect English equivalent but then, can I really learn Japanese effectively by not fully understanding everything I read?. I just don't like so much the idea of skipping stuff here and there.

turvy Wrote:Thanks but these explanations seem too vague, I realize there is no perfect English equivalent but then what should I do? Can I really learn Japanese effectively by not fully understanding everything I read?. I just don't like so much the idea of skipping stuff here and there.

Understand how the word or grammar piece works perfectly in Japanese then see the many ways it can be translated into English. Bakari threw me off with this.

I think that once you reach a certain stage intuition will kick in - if you read through this thread you will see that there is stuff I didn't know.

Do you live in Japan or are you in touch with native speakers every day?

My advice to you would be to study grammar more than anything else.

Textbooks provide a relatively systematic approach to learning Japanese, and there are plenty of materials that cover grammar points in-depth, if that's what you want. Responses in this thread will vary in how generous they are in the completeness of their explanation, and some grammar points are easier to understand than others. Writing a full explanation of a grammar point could take a considerable amout of time, so people aren't going to be willing to do that for each grammar point. (For example, Jay Rubin gives more than ten pages to the は・が explanation in "Making Sense of Japanese")

I guess I'd recommend A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar for full explanations on many grammar topics.

Your brain sort of creates theories about how best to interpret a piece of grammar. As you hear the grammar in context more often you modify or change your theory until you have a concept that fits the grammar point well. So you will basically never have a very good idea of a grammar point the first time you hear it--it's always a process.

Even a word/sentence like 飲む contains a lot of complex concepts that we don't have in English. For one, it's in neither present or future tense--rather, it's in a non-past aspect. Another example is that 飲む is not just a verb, it's also a sentence with an implied subject and object. Even the meaning of the word itself is not 'drink' but something like 'ingest without chewing'--you 飲む both water and pills. You can't easily grasp everything about 飲む the first time you hear it; it's probably explained as simply 'to drink.'

@Turvy all this advice from experts may seem daunting but your goal is defo obtainable. I got my degree without going to Japan and a Japanese business leader thought I misunderstood him when I replied i had lived in Japan for ten days. I had serious issues with Japanese grammar and due to hard work got to the stage of ****ing up a patent translation trial .

Yudantaiteki is one of the people on here who impresses me the most and I think he got where he is through hard work and determination.

I think if you really got your head down and mastered the two books Tzadeck mentioned you would be flying in a years time.

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:Japanese grammatical terms often don't really match to the English - the ta isn't the past tense it is the perfect aspect, ie it means COMPLETED. I fell into this trap till Yudantaiteki pointed it out.

Saying た　is not past tense might be a bit strong. The various analyses of た　fall on a continuum from pure aspect marker to pure tense marker. (JSL, which ydtt uses, might be in the aspect camp.) I think it's more likely that た functions as both since linguists provide examples which are difficult to explain any other way. (Incidentally, the existence of absolute and relative tense isn't evidence that た　can only be an aspect marker.)

But, yes, for translation, we need to remember that it doesn't have a 1:1 relationship. た can be simple past, present, past/present/future perfect, etc. in English.

btw, ydtt usually calls た　"perfective" (rather than perfect - which is different) and says it means completed or realized (the event isn't always completed.)

　

@Thora all good points that expose my own ignorance - as for perfect/perfective there are so many different terms for grammar I don't know where I stand. Halliday who I like uses different terms to Saeed etc and stuff like gerund and present participle are mixed up. There is no real consistency amongst theorists with regards to grammatical terminology imho.

The point I was trying to reinforce is that a 1:1 relationship is a fallacy as I think a lot of people believe this.

@Turvy if you are reading Thora's post don't be put off if you don't understand it. I am a sad, sad man. You need to know that ta does not JUST mean past and that there is no 1:1 correlation between Japanese and English.

what/who are ydtt and jsl?

@HonyakuJoshua I live in Japan but my current strategy is to just read books. I reached a level in which I can actually read basic stuff, although painfully and with a dictionary at hand.

that's awesome. The dictionaries are available online for free in Pdf Form should you wish to download them.

@HonyakyJoshua: It's not at all about exposing ignorance. There are often different views and the grammar jargon isn't consistent. 'Perfect' and 'perfective', in particular, aren't used consistently.

ydtt (yudantaiteki) had stated that た　isn't a tense marker a number of times. I meant to mention earlier that there are other views, so I just took the opportunity now. :-)

JSL is _Japanese the Spoken Language_ by Eleanor Hart. It uses some unique jargon and has a few idiosyncratic grammar explanations. ydtt often includes the more standard terminology as well when he describes grammar.

I'm not convinced "perfective" is a particularly useful term for (English speaking) Japanese learners. English doesn't have it so it can be a vague concept to grasp. It's also too easily confused with "perfect". And it sounds a bit intimidating.

What seems to work fairly well is to understand relative tense (and later how J and E differ in that regard) and learn about aspect with each relevant grammar form (which highlights the importance of duration, endpoint and result.)

You don't have to know or understand english (or japanese for that matter) grammar terms in order to understand and speak japanese at a very high level. For learning purposes it's generally more useful to have a quick easily comprehensible explanation that exists to be disposed of later. 飲んだ＝drank. Is it 100% accurate? No. But it should give you enough of a hint that you can recognize it and understand it the next time you encounter it. And when you do, you'll be unconsciously absorbing all sorts of contextual information that will improve your understanding.

I think it's easy to read grammar explanations, and think yeah that's true, that matches my experience, and then conclude that it's an important point that people ought to learn, while ignoring the fact that you only recognize the accuracy of the explanation after the fact, after you've already come to that understanding sans any grammar explanation.

edit: I should also add, that one you recognize that the amount of grammar you learned (or more accurately first read about) by studying is dwarfed in comparison to that which you absorb without any deliberate effort, you'll realize just how unnecessary formal grammar study really is.

@Thora yeah I know you weren't TRYING to. People on here have accused me of being egotistical and that just ain't true - I have always admitted my grammar is embarassing and always try and improve my many weak points and hope to encourage others to do so. Airing my weaknesses in public helps me to do this.

I dont think vague is the right term

we dont have the semelfactive in English but that doesnt make it vague to grasp.

thanks for telling me the abbriviations.

@Nadiatims I think we differ in that I have only spent 10 days in Japan. When i was a child I was so poor I often went to the airport for a day out and never dreamed of getting on a plane. I learnt entirely from grammar books but think immersion is very good but that grammar should be taught.

How awesome is yudantaiteki that he/she gets his/her own acronym.

nadiatims Wrote:For learning purposes it's generally more useful to have a quick easily comprehensible explanation that exists to be disposed of later. 飲んだ＝drank. Is it 100% accurate? No. But it should give you enough of a hint that you can recognize it and understand it the next time you encounter it. And when you do, you'll be unconsciously absorbing all sorts of contextual information that will improve your understanding.

I completely agree with this, but unlike you I'd use it as an example of why you should study grammar. The grammar explanations give you a basic understanding, which makes it so much easier to get a feel for what is actually going on. Of course, reading/listening lots is more important.

Maybe it's just because it's the middle of the night, but I can't work out what で is doing on this sentence.

　トートは五歳年下とししたの女の子で、俺が十歳の時、家に引き取られた。

The first and second half seem like unrelated clauses, so in English it would be:

Touto is a girl who's five years younger than me, and when I was ten she moved in with us.

But does で　do that?

Thanks for any help.

Splatted Wrote:Maybe it's just because it's the middle of the night, but I can't work out what で is doing on this sentence.

　トートは五歳年下とししたの女の子で、俺が十歳の時、家に引き取られた。

The first and second half seem like unrelated clauses, so in English it would be:

Touto is a girl who's five years younger than me, and when I was ten she moved in with us.

But does で　do that?

Thanks for any help.

It's the "and" i think.

Yes. To add to what zigmonty said, it's 'and' because it's the て form of the copula. It's the same as if the first sentence ended in だ・です・である, except there's an implied connection by making it one sentence ... but no explicit meaning to that connection.

これらの人は日本でも人気があると言って、私はそれいけない問題­、この曲を愛してビートがこの曲は素晴らしいです悪いお尻の方法­ボーカルに音がすべてですか？

what the hell is this guy saying??

especially 悪いお尻の方法­ボーカルに音がすべてですか??

What does that mean?? It makes no sense to me. This looks like google translate and not real native Japanese.

Where are you getting it from?

悪いお尻 only makes sense to me as a bad translation of "bad-ass."

it is a comment on this video

the guy who owns the channel is jason78price and I don't think he speaks Japanese and that he has just looked up bad and ass up in a dictionary and came up with 悪いお尻. it isn't native japanese.

Thora Wrote:ydtt (yudantaiteki) had stated that た　isn't a tense marker a number of times. I meant to mention earlier that there are other views, so I just took the opportunity now. :-)

JSL is _Japanese the Spoken Language_ by Eleanor Hart. It uses some unique jargon and has a few idiosyncratic grammar explanations. ydtt often includes the more standard terminology as well when he describes grammar.

I'm not convinced "perfective" is a particularly useful term for (English speaking) Japanese learners. English doesn't have it so it can be a vague concept to grasp. It's also too easily confused with "perfect". And it sounds a bit intimidating.

What seems to work fairly well is to understand relative tense (and later how J and E differ in that regard) and learn about aspect with each relevant grammar form (which highlights the importance of duration, endpoint and result.)

When I say that it isn't a tense marker, I don't mean that it cannot express tense, just that "perfective" is a better description -- sometimes the function of the perfective is to show something that happened in the past.

Generally I try to stick to normal grammatical explanations but I personally think that the perfective/imperfective distinction is so important that I try to "teach" that instead of past/present/future. It's a little tricky at first, but once you understand it, it makes a lot of things clearer. Relative tense is another way to explain it, but I think it's also important to use "imperfective" to see why the same conjugation can express both present and future tense.

I just think it's odd to call it "past tense" when even in Japanese 101 you're already learning uses of it that aren't past tense -- something as simple as 分かりました in response to someone's explanation does not express past tense. In the courses I taught in, that was introduced in week 1.

Now, if people don't find my explanations useful or helpful they're always welcome to ignore them or look at other explanations they prefer. Unless you take one of my classes some day, it's not required.

Yudantaiteki's explanation defo helped me, though on balance it must be said that my grammatical knowledge is appalling. I think it is useful to think of it as perfective and was (sort of) aware that one of the functions of the perfective is to show an action completed in the past.

honestly, I never learned words like "perfective" or "perfect tense." I also never had some one explain to me that there is no future tense in japanese and I still understand how the different verb forms are used.
You could just explain:
分かりました →　(It)'s clear now. → It became clear. → Got it.

When I was still teaching, it used to annoy when some teachers insisted on translating english future tense to ~するつもりです。 or ~でしょう。

Simple translations demonstrate grammar best:
What are going to do now? 今から何する？
I'm going to play tennis. テニスをする。

but how long have you spent in japan?

yudantaiteki Wrote:I just think it's odd to call it "past tense" when even in Japanese 101 you're already learning uses of it that aren't past tense -- something as simple as 分かりました in response to someone's explanation does not express past tense. In the courses I taught in, that was introduced in week 1.

Damn... i was having a conversation with a guy at work just this week about why you say 分かります in some circumstances and 分かりました in others. I couldn't explain it except to say "because!". The use feels pretty natural to me because of the number of times i've heard it used, but i'm not sure i get it grammatically.

日本語が分かります (why isn't this a completed action? Because you keep understanding it in the future too? As opposed to a simple once off command which is now finished?)
分かりました (simple "understood" like when someone tells you to do something)
分かっていますよ (has a nuance of "shut up about it already", right?)

Is there a way to explain the nuance of these grammatically or is treating them as expressions pretty much the only way?

re: 分かっていますよ

it is the よ bit that might add the shut up about it nuance in certain contexts. Because it adds an "I'm letting you know" sense to the sentence.
(It) has already become clear (I'm letting you know because apparently you don't realize it)　→ I already know that...

本焼く女囚婀 Wrote:but how long have you spent in japan?

> 4.5 years. But my point is that the amount of things that I have learnt effortlessly that someone somewhere would consider worth putting in a grammar resource massively outweigh that which I learned from grammar resources. think about it. People use thousands and thousands of words. They can combined in an enormous amount of ways, representing an enormous range of expression. A grammar text book is only going to ever teach you like 2% of that. I mean you have to recognize that if there are people out there becoming highly fluent (and there are perhaps billions) in foreign languages then they must be capable of figuring this stuff out on their own. Grammar books only cover a tiny fraction of the knowledge required to be highly expressive.