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Japanese grammar exceptionally versatile? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| dairwolf Newbie Germany Joined 5164 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: German* | Message 1 of 4 09 October 2010 at 2:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hey everyone, just a quick question if anyone else feels or has felt like I do at the Moment. It´s the beginning of my third year learning Japanese now an I was lucky enough to get the chance to spend a year as an exchange student at Chiba University.
For some reason I feel really frustrated about the Japanese grammar. I already spent so much time learning it, but when I look at the material that is yet to come (from the books of the Japanese classes, from other grammar books or from JLPT-lists) it feels like it´s never going to end. There seem to be a zillion ways to say almost the same thing, and what makes it especially frustrating is that in some grammar or text books you´ll find expressions that are treated as grammatical expressions that you won´t find in e.g. the "A dictionary of ... Japanese grammar". So, is it just me or is the Japanese grammar exceptionally versatile and it´s normal it takes longer to learn it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5784 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 2 of 4 09 October 2010 at 4:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There will be some people who will tell you Japanese grammar isn't hard, but in my
experience most of those people are either beginners and don't know what they are talking about or advanced enough and been at it long enough that they've forgotten what it was really like. I'm here to tell you that yes, Japanese grammar is hard, but no, it's not that hard. I flipped through the "A dictionary of..." series at the bookstore a few years ago when the Advanced level came out but I've never used them so I don't know what they cover. I can tell you that a lot of the grammar on the JLPT lists, however, while not completely useless, isn't all that common. You won't need a lot of it for conversational Japanese, business Japanese, or reading fiction. Another thing I'll point out is that a lot of the grammar that makes these lists is just new ways to nominalize verbals. If you've got a good grasp on the fundamentals of modifying nouns (e.g., する事), a lot of it is just learning the meaning of the new noun. really just vocabulary. That's not to say there isn't a lot of them and it won't take time to sort them all out, but the hardest part is over. You'll also come across words you learned in the beginning (the ことs, ものs, までs, etc) used in a new way. Just chalk it up to idiomatic speech - something you'll encounter in any language - and go through a little bit at a time. And if nothing else helps, you can always be thankful you're not studying Korean. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dairwolf Newbie Germany Joined 5164 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: German* | Message 3 of 4 09 October 2010 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thank you very much! I just needed those kind of cheering up words. So I guess I´m not alone at all! How far did you get with your Japanese? Oh and yeah, I also already thought that a lot of that grammar of JLPT isn´t often used in colloquial speech.
Can you recommend me some books about Japanese grammar that cover a lot of things that go beyond the basics? The "Dictionary of ... Japanese grammar" are very good in my opinion because they list each grammatical phenomenon with the forms that connect to it in a very easy to understand way. Once you get the hang of it you might not want to give it away anymore, but I guess that´s just my opinion. Like with anything, there´s probably going to be people who think the books are bad, useless or whatever. Haha, now I´m curious! I never took a look at Korean grammar, can you tell me what is difficult about it? Doesn´t Japanese and Korean Grammar have a lot in common? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5784 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 4 of 4 09 October 2010 at 8:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
For what it's worth, I work in Japanese.
I really like books by ALC. They seem to have solid resources in all four languages (CJK and English) they do. Notably, I used どんな時どう使う日本語表現文型500 which covers old JLPT 1級 and ２級 grammar.
It is similar but Japanese could be considered a streamlined version of Korean. One example would be in Japanese the 終止形 (sentence ending conjugation) has merged into the 連体形 (modifying conjunction), while in Korean they remain separate for the past, present, and future tenses (i.e., 2 Japanese forms → 6 Korean forms). Edited by ericspinelli on 09 October 2010 at 8:28am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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