I really would need help then as I am technoligically stupid. Thank you for that information. I will try to see what I can do. I would like to get the inside links and directories done first before i consider that though.

I think I know how to do what you want. I just hope there isn't a size restriction. Thank you for the advice.

I think the new name meta tags will take a while to be functional. I have been adding directory links and making it toward people can easily go to the next lesson at the end of a page.

It will have to be continued once I return from lunch.

This is looking like it's going to take hours to implement. At least it will be even more navigable.

Last edited by imabi (2011 November 27, 2:11 pm)

yudantaiteki wrote:

Thora wrote:

How about starting out with a resource for general learners which explains classical forms still existing in modern Japanese? When learners encounter classical forms that aren't easily searchable in their dictionaries or grammar books, such an online resource would be really helpful. I'm thinking of idioms, holdover grammar and "weird" archaic language in period dramas or games. Some folks might be interested in explanations of the classical derivation of current forms even if they have no intention of learning classical Japanese.

I would agree with this.  I've seen this a lot; fairly recently in the "what's this word/phrase" thread someone was asking about 愛せど and got some total nonsense responses due to people not being familiar with the classical form.

I've been developing some classical lessons based on the 百人一首 for future teaching, maybe I should start posting them here.

As for the classical lessons, a few things I noticed:
- It is not typical to romanize classical Japanese into modern, Hepburn romanization, except maybe for very general resources.  It's true that for the title of a work, like Man'yoshu, it will be done, but if you're romanizing actual text, the standard way to do it is to use straight transcription of the kana, in kun-reishiki form.  The reason for this is that it avoids any assumptions about how the syllables were actually pronounced in the various historical time periods.  (Although I'm not sure romanization is necessary in classical lessons anyway...)
- "Classical Japanese" is a vague term, and sometimes you make statements that only apply to particular types of writing (i.e. your claim that few sino-Japanese words are used in "classical Japanese" is only true of certain genres, like 物語 and 和歌)
- "Punctuation is virtually nonexistant" once again, depends on the age of the text and the genre, and punctuation started to be added to old Japanese texts very early on (Kamakura period or earlier). (I'm also not sure what the answer to the "why is there no punctuation" is supposed to be)
- "A space between segments" is something I have never seen in a classical text; most of the time everything is written as one long flowing text with no spaces, although sometimes a new line was started in certain cases -- once again this
depends on the age and genre of the text.

- "Actions are in the present if and only if there is not a temporal noun that tells otherwise." This is misleading; stories are often told with bare shuushikei forms where we would use a "narrative past" in English.

- A very important use of the rentaikei form is to nominalize a phrase (i.e. the Classical equivalent of modern の or こと)

It's 愛すれど. ど follows the 已然形 of all verbal classes.

Oh, well in that case it's just 愛す being used as a 五段活用動詞. You would be right then.

I realize that how one teaches the vowels will vary according to where they're from (for what it's worth I'm Australian), but might I suggest the following:

A     like the u in "but".    
I     Like the ea in "eat" but short.
U     Like the u in "put".
E     Like the e in "elephant".
O     Like the o in "hot".

I think using "father" for A and "Sue" for U is less accurate than you can be because these sounds are long. And in particular pronouncing O like "oak" as you suggest is something I associate with the typical anglo-gaijin accent.

I think vowel devoicing is not necessary to teach right at the start, just bring it up when teaching masu and desu.

The difference in spelling rules for long vowels in Native Words, Sino-Japanese Words and Foreign Words doesn't need to be taught. Also I'm not so sure you can generalize like that.

Likewise, pitch is should be mentioned briefly if at all. Maybe you could put that in a later lesson or in a special pronunciation section. If I were a beginner learner, this would just be confusing and boring, I'd just want to learn some Japanese already.

regarding consonants, where they are the same they need not be mentioned. For T,D,CH,TSU,J, SH the sounds are not articulated by the tip of the tongue curling, instead the tongue is very static in Japanese and these sounds come from contact between the front top of the tongue and the alveolar ridge and/or contact between the top of the tongue and hard palate.

In general I think you're going into too much detail about pronunciation in a way that will be boring to beginners and much of this can be picked up naturally with listening practice or corrected later. Thorough explanation isn't really that useful without accompanying audio to demonstrate it. Also why not use hiragana?

lesson 2:
SVO, SOV distinction is not necessary, because it mostly doesn't apply to japanese anyway. Japanese is more like Xa,Yb,Zc,...,V where abc represent particles and X,Y and Z are optional, can come in any order and can be subjects, objects or any other number of things (depending on particles).

Macro-micro, belongs in a wikipedia article or linguistics book, not a textbook. No-one cares.

parts of speech, belongs in an appendix.

The rest of this lesson is more information that belongs in an appendix or wikipedia article. A beginner who can't even read hiragana yet, doesn't need to know words like komejirushi, joutaigo and setsuzokujoshi. Seriously introduce this stuff as it becomes useful, not as a mass of information to be remembered right at the start.

I'll write some more suggestions later. If you want to see an example of well written and explained japanese lessons look up tae-kim. You need to seriously edit. Teach less to teach more.

For pronunciation, how about adding some short sound clips (or link to some)? There are many different kinds of English, and if there's one thing I've learned from using British language learning materials, is that even though it's the same language, and  I've probably watched every episode of Monty Python, or just about, trying to imagine how a British person would pronounce a certain word can be surprisingly hard.

Last edited by Bokusenou (2011 November 28, 9:33 pm)

I have to admit, I didn't look at it as much as I thought I would -- I got caught up and had to fix some work-related things and didn't really get a chance.

First off, links to other lessons as well as at the end of the lesson: great addition! It's super helpful to go straight back to something that I need to know. I'd like to see more of it -- maybe look into some software that has some sort of wiki-syntax, it can do a lot of things for you.

It's very dense and grammar term-iffic. Maybe it's because I didn't read the required lessons you said were required, but you also said that you didn't have to be a linguist -- just have a good grasp of modern Japanese. I understand modern Japanese well, but I had no idea what "agglutinative" meant, or what the difference was between 連用形 and 連体形.

Then you go and throw in a lot of explanations, and then examples thrown in the end. The examples are just sentences or poems with a translation (I'm assuming your own?) thrown in.

I would like to see it where you make an example after the point you are illustrating. Instead of "here's all the rules you need to know, it's pretty dense, and you should know what this grammar means......aaand here's tons of examples with words you probably don't know," it would be easier to digest if it were like "here's how these words work...short, unrealistic examples to illustrate the point...and then you can do this too....more unrealistic examples...then go on to show the 'real life' examples." It was frustrating to be reading example sentences with words that I didn't know and conjugations or particles that I wasn't sure how they working were in there.

And instead of having kanji/kana/romaji/translation, ditch the romaji and maybe put in word-by-word translations, or at least rare words and the words that are displaying the grammar point the lesson is about.


But again, I didn't give it the concentration it probably deserved, so I might just be missing something.

lesson 3

Again a case of way too much information. The historical information may be interesting if it's accurate. I couldn't be bothered reading it. But again beginners don't need to wade through tables outlining words like hentaigana, jinmeiyougana, nanorigana etc. If you really feel it necessary then link to an appendix or a wiki article or something.

The chart of 167 additional katakana is unnecessary as most of it is never used. For example I have never ever seen ラ゜and カ゜or テァ etc. I suspect the vast majority of Japanese people have also never seen these.

Yotsugana bit is too long and mostly unnecessary. Just say that for standard Japanese ず／づ and じ／ぢ are pronounced the same in standard Japanese but vary in some dialects.

支持 does not mean instruction...

Your explanation of sokuon is difficult to understand. And this bit is unnecessary "A Sokuon is never used with n, m, r, w, and y and is only used in foreign words with g, z, d, h, and b. When a Sokuon is more audible at the end of a word, it will be left in Kana as a っ. ".

Kana duplication is almost never used in modern Japanese.

lesson 4

Again too much information.

心得 doesn't mean hint.

引数 seems to mean 'argument' in the programming sense, not 'subtraction' which is 引き算.

暖 doesn't mean spring and isn't pronounced はる. It's 春.

マジ is not written 本気. If you see 本気 it's pronounced ほんき unless there is furigana above it specifying something different like リーリ. I'm guessing you read this in a manga or something. Sometimes different words are written above kanji for effect.

the character for Autumn is 秋.

I have never heard the word "offing" in my entire life.

It's generally not important to even recognize what type of reading something is. Kunyomi, onyomi and 'other' is pretty much enough.

No one wants to learn a nonstandard romanisation system. It could be annoying when typing...Using all sorts of pitch marks etc won't result in correct pronunciation, only a lot of listening will.

in your exercises section:
"10. Illustrate the rules of the IMABI version of Romanization."
seriously? just teach standard romanisation used for typing.

Last edited by nadiatims (2011 November 28, 11:43 pm)

I've seen 大臣 read as おとど in Genji (although it can also be read 大臣 in compounds like 左大臣).  The word is pretty rare in modern Japanese, though.

"offing" is an accurate translation of 沖, but it's not the best word to use there since it's a relatively rare word that even most native English speakers will not be familiar with.

I was saying you should put in more unrealistic examples to illustrate the points better, instead of having pieces that include things that the reader hasn't learned yet.

I'm not certain whether this is in reference to the classical lessons or not, but if it is, you really have no choice with classical.  Making up your own sentences in teaching materials is not a good idea since nobody is a native speaker of classical Japanese, so you have no way of knowing whether your example is accurate or not.  This is especially problematic for things like けり where the usage is still not fully understood even by specialists.

For classical I tend to think the best thing to do is memorize the basic conjugations and get a chart of conjugations and suffixes, and then just dive into a text and ask questions. 

(If enough people are interested in classical I may start posting the 百人一首 materials I've been developing...)

Asriel wrote:

I was saying you should put in more unrealistic examples to illustrate the points better, instead of having pieces that include things that the reader hasn't learned yet. That way if something is uncertain in the real examples, they know that they understand the grammar and can then parse out the vocabulary.

Lesson 132 wrote:

父はなほ人にて　母なん藤原なりける
ちちはなほびとにて　ははなんふじはらなりける
The father was a normal person, and the mother was a Fujiwara.
From the Ise Monogatari.

Notes: In this sentence, nite is the ni Ren'youkei of the copula nari with the conjunctive particle te and narikeru is the nari Ren'youkei of the copula nari with the recollective auxiliary verb keri in the Rentaikei keru. Although sentences should end in the Shuushikei. There was always a constant tilt to using the Rentaikei for special emphasis which eventually fused the two bases as one.

Here's one example (the first example sentence in lesson 133) is like "yeah, and so as you can see, this is keri" which isn't taught until 9 lessons later.

These next two...

Lesson 139 wrote:

死なむ薬も何かはせむ。
しなむくすりもなにかはせむ。
What would I do with death preventing medicine?
From the Taketori Monogatari.

Lesson 137 wrote:

月な見給ひそ。
つきなみたまひそ。
Don't look at the moon.

Where are the verb endings given? I couldn't find anything where む is a negative (or a question?) or that そ indicated a negative command. It's nice that you have the conjugations of the verbs/adjectives/etc, but I can't seem to find endings. I'm probably missing them.
edit: i realized this sounded like "wtf man, where's this info??" I'm actually asking because I couldn't find verb endings.

Actually, I've taken a better look at it now. All the information is there, even if I did have to go back and search other lessons for the information. I guess I wanted to be spoonfed all the information I needed to understand it right there instead of looking in other lessons. That's one reason I like the names of the lessons and links in the lessons to the other lessons being referenced.

There's also a lot of words that I didn't know, but that's a vocab issue. I'd be nice if it was there, but that would take a lot of revision.

む has been mentioned before as being the equivalent of ～よう.

Items of concern have been addressed. Thank you.

As to Asriel: I can help you aside from here with Classical Japanese and see where I may need to add grammar notes. I'm trying to wait a bit so I have most of the course made so that I can just make directories.

To Jarvik 7: Thank you, some of these were very careless mistakes. Some things I just do want to keep because I think they're important. And, my romanization style is only a more qualified outline of the Hepburn style.

To nadiatims: Please look up Gikun, 心得, offing, nanori (because it's not called nanorigana). Also, note that a lot of the stuff you point out are merely mentioned. I would rather know they exist than not know at all and then find out they do after I think I'm already confident in what I know. Thank you for calling it an information overload. I'm making you actually use your brain, so that is a good thing.