I have seen a lot of Japanese written by learners at daily thread and r/WriteStreakJP. There is something that I have always felt, and I would like to share it with you. It’s about conjunctions.
When I look at learners’ Japanese, I find that in a great many cases, when they write a sentence, they don’t show any connection to the previous sentence. In other words, there are very few conjunctions.
I don’t know if this is due to unfamiliarity with Japanese, or if English writing originally has a nature that doesn’t emphasize the relationship between the sentences before and after. But at least in Japanese, the relationship between the previous and following sentences is very important. I think you always experience that the subject, object, and many other things are omitted in Japanese, but it’s the back-and-forth relationship that makes it possible.
And that relationship is often expressed by conjunctions. If you pay attention to placing conjunctions at the beginning of sentences, you will be able to write more natural Japanese.
I hope this will be helpful to all of you. Thank you.
6 comments
English also has conjunctions. We can drop conjunctions. Dropping conjunctions can be stylistic. Emphatic.
Japanese writing, I would argue, also takes the perspective of who we’re supposed to empathize with.
猫が死んでいるから仁美さんは悲しいです。”Hitomi was sad because her cat died.”
Normally a private emotion like 悲しい is reserved for the speaker, but we’re empathizing with the character or Hitomi and assuming her POV. We could also use the passive for this:
猫が死なれたから、仁美さんは悲しいです。
Can you give some examples?
I think this is a symptom of a bigger failure of focusing on words and isolated sentences rather than fuller contexts. You don’t see how the conjunctions/transition words work if you are just studying each sentence out of context, by itself.
what are your go-to conjunctions? I like
それに
それとも
それでは
最後に
初めて
初めは
but I have limited speaking abilities
I think most people are just not experienced or skilled writers and that’s going to carry over. Japanese composition has some very different rules (an English teacher would slap you for writing things like “it is thought” as often as is considered normal in Japanese writing, since being assertive and authoritative is considered very important), but a lot of the hurdle is just the general skill imo.
There are a lot of Japanese connectors and sentence endings to learn; the definitions and usages can be a bit fuzzy (or confusing) for westerners. Especially at the beginner and intermediate levels.
Japanese vocabulary, kanji, sentence order, particles, and verb endings all are a real challenge for Westerners as everything is so different. So I can see how the beginnings and endings, “Get the short end of the stick”.
In formal English, beginning sentences with conjunctions such as “And” or “But” may be discouraged. Regardless, they can be very useful IMHO.
In any case, thank you for your comment. I think it is a helpful tip everyone can keep in mind. In fact, good English writing makes good use of connectors too.