I’ve been learning Japanese intensively (+4 hours per day) for six months now, and I’ve come across a few concepts that, due to the way they were explained, have acted as potholes along the road to fluency. I’m sharing them here in the hopes that others can avoid them, and maybe people will comment with other issues they’ve had too.
# い-adjectives and な-adjectives
な-adjectives are actually nouns (adjectival nouns), that can be used as pre-noun adjectivals when appended with な. On the other hand, い-adjectives are simply just adjectives.
Referring to adjectival nouns as adjectives causes a lot of confusion when discussing tenses, て-form, and polite/impolite use of the copula (だ/です). I regularly come across examples where the author says something like *”…as for adjectives, い-adjectives do this, and な-adjectives behave like nouns in this case…”*. Well, of course they do, because they *are* nouns. The idea that adjectival nouns are a strange kind of adjective that sometimes behave like nouns is not a helpful concept.
# が particle and を particle
The sentence “日本語が分かります” (“nihongo ga wakarimasu”) is usually the first example used when learning about verbs, and is translated as “I understand Japanese”.
Then we have sentences like “猫が好きです” (“neko ga suki desu”) which is translated as “I like cats”.
Then we come across a sentence like “魚を食べます” (“sakana wo tabemasu”) which means “I eat fish”.
Suddenly, we have no idea if we should be using が or を, and why is there a です at the end of “like”?
It seems that few teaching resources take time to explain the reasons why these particles are used and what the literal meanings of the sentences are, creating confusion around the roles が and を play in the language.
が marks the grammatical subject of the sentence, the thing that is doing the verb, or being the noun/adjective.
を marks the grammatical direct object of the sentence, the thing that the verb is being done to.
Once you know this, sentences will make more sense:
“分かります” (“wakarimasu”) doesn’t actually mean “to understand”, but in fact means “to be understood”, as in, Japanese is understood. Hence we use the が (ga) particle to mark “Japanese language”. It is the Japanese language that is the subject *doing* the action (being understood).
“好き” (“suki”) doesn’t actually mean “to like”, but in fact means “liked”, as in, cats have the property of being liked. Hence we attach the copula and the sentence becomes “cats are liked”. Once again, we use が (ga) because “cats” are the subject of the sentence (the thing *being* the noun/adjective).
“魚を食べます” is the only one of the above three sentences that maintains its literal meaning when translated into English, and does in fact mean “I eat fish”. Hence we use the を (wo) particle to indicate that “fish” is the direct object of the verb “to eat” (eating is being done *to* the fish).
# Polite forms being taught first
Learning polite verb forms (e.g. 食べます) before the dictionary forms (e.g. 食べる) makes it much more difficult to conjugate the verb into its other forms. It’s less confusing to learn the dictionary form first, and treat the polite form as what it is, one of the many conjugations of the verb.
This especially causes confusion around the copula (だ vs です) because if you learn that everything ends in です unless it’s a verb, when you try to use plain language with friends, you’ll likely end up converting polite adjective forms such as “暑いです” (“atsui desu”) (“It’s hot.”) into the incorrect plain form “暑いだ” (“atsui da”). In fact, adjectives have the concept of “is” built into them. The correct plain form would simply be “暑い” (“atsui”). The です is added for politeness, but not grammatically necessary with adjectives. Grammatically speaking, only nouns require the copula, therefore “猫です” (“neko desu”) (“It’s a cat”) would become “猫だ” (“neko da”) in plain form.
# Negative verb conjugations
Negative verbs being taught as if they’re still verbs is unhelpful. It’s often written that “ない” at the end of a verb is an “auxiliary verb”, but it’s not, it’s an adjective. Negating a verb actually changes the whole verb into an adjective.
Compare the adjective and verb endings in the following example:
adjective: ある (exists) -> ない (does not exist) -> なかった (did not exist)
verb: 食べる (eats) -> 食べない (does not eat) -> 食べなかった (did not eat)
When we negate a verb, we are actually saying that the action did not exist.
Approaching negative verbs in this way means that once you’ve learn how to conjugate adjectives, you know how to conjugate negative verbs too.
# Japanese being taught using English concepts
Japanese is a vastly different language than English, which makes it very difficult to explain Japanese using an English-language oriented approach. Even the terms “adjective”, “verb”, “conjugation”, “pronoun”, etc… don’t really have the same definition in Japanese as they do in English.
Approaching the language like this means concepts that are simple from a Japanese point of view, get squashed and twisted and become highly complex and unintuitive, just so they can be observed from an English point of view. Subsequently, you then often have to remember lots of silly grammatical nuances and exceptions, and this is likely the reason why many of the “gotcha”s listed above have proliferated through the learning community.
“…*you just have to memorize it…*”
No, a better way is to approach the language from a Japanese point of view. Doing so often makes things simpler, even if initially you’re made to question some of the concepts you’ve taken for granted as an English-centric human being.
Hopefully this post helps someone, and makes it a little easier to learn Japanese.
14 comments
As someone who is a rookie, this was extremely helpful. Tysm!
Wow, OK. I’ll confess to a little tl:dr, but I appreciate your good intentions and conclusions. I guess I’m just glad I learned to speak, read, and write Japanese organically when I lived in Sapporo in the early 1970s (not that it was easy), waaay before there was this whole industrial complex for learning the language that apparently exists now. 😬
Now this, this is helpful.
We need to find a way to learn language and other subjects via context not definitions. Knowing “when someone says this, you say that” vs. the definition is a lot more useful. Learning how to use something vs what something is. Elon said in a video “you teach someone how to use a screwdriver and its purpose by asking them to take something apart and showing them what it’s used for. Not by making them read a book on the definition of a screwdriver”
This is fantastic and encompasses a lot of the thoughts I’ve had as well about how japanese is taught as I’ve gone through my own studies (roughly the same pace as you but for about 9 months). Just a point about な-adjectives. They are very similar to nouns but they don’t *always* act like nouns. They are their own little group and in a lot of grammatical constructions when nouns would use の, な-adjectives use な instead. And you can’t just add な to any noun and make it a な-adjective. I’m sure you know this, just wanted to clarify for any beginners reading this.
I’m a HS Japanese teacher, and me telling my rural school to take ‘a japanese approach’ would be nearly impossible 😂 I like to think I explain and teach in a way that encompasses a lot of different type of learners and I will definitely keep these in mind!
This is a near guide for beginners though. Really brought me back to my beginning steps and frustrations!
This is one of those deeper dives into learning the language that many textbooks and language learning apps do not go into.
As they are all written as for businessmen from the 1980s.
I am glad to have gone to a sort of Japanese class and the guy who was teaching us was using dictionary forms onto which we added what was needed.
When Duolingo rolled out their Japanese learning option, I was so excited and solved a lot on it, rushed through it and got the achievement of completing 100 lessons without getting anything wrong.
(Which is quite interesting as I’ve mostly been watching anime and reading fandom translated manga, but never took Japanese classes)
Our teacher told us to do it like this because if you learn the polite form and informal form, you’d basically be learning double, as in you’d be learning many things as separate, instead of just it all being endings of the dictionary form.
If you can post more such great examples, that’d be awesome.
Shame it didn’t get as much attention as it should, but hopefully it will.
Strictly speaking, い-adjectives are descriptive verbs. I personally would consider な adjectives as adjectival nouns, but it is also true that there are some ways in which they are not like ordinary nouns.
In any case many scholars, most likely *most* scholars classify な-adjectives as ‘true adjectives’ and い-adjectives as a class of verbs.
I think this is academically interesting but how we categorize these things doesn’t make a difference in how they actually behave and shouldn’t affect your learning too much. The usage pattern is the important thing to learn.
Anyway, because い-adjectives are a class of verb, negative plain verbs are also verbs (たい form verbs too).
There is nothing special going on with negative forms turning into adjectives here. If さかなを食べた is “I ate the fish” then さかなを食べなかった is “I didn’t eat the fish”. It’s just the negative conjugation, it’s still a verb.
FWIW, ‘An Introduction to Modern Japanese’ teaches about adjectives differently, going a bit more into their nature. Similarly it has what I found to be pretty insightful discussion of a lot of grammar points. Of course, it’s not cheap, the exercises are all in a separate volume, and it’s getting a bit dated now, but if you can afford it (or find a cheap used copy) it might be interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Japanese-Book/dp/052154887X/ref=sr_1_11?crid=1EIYX8UGZIWLH
Very nice. This might be the second time I’ve seen some criticism about the mainstream way of learning Japanese that makes it much harder than it should, since reading the Tae Kim’s Guide to learning Japanese. The explanation on は, が and を are suddenly much clearer and easy to remember
The reason why polite forms are taught first is so you can start speaking right away. If you start speaking in plain form then you’re just going to be rude/awkward to everyone around you.
And all the other stuff you realize as you learn or it’s explained to you in an advanced Japanese class. For most beginners, coming out with all that up front would be TMI and overwhelm them.
Japanese really isn’t that hard, just time consuming. Once you get the basic grammar down, ひらがな, カタカナ, and you figure out a way to learn Kanji that works for you, as long as you stick to it, eventually you’ll get there. I learned 2,000 Kanji in 8 months, can’t recommend that for everyone but it worked for me, that was the easiest part for me honestly, nothing hard about it, just memory.
The textbooks are trash is a big reason why it’s so hard to learn.
Textbooks have a ton of problems, but probably the biggest ones are that they only teach you the ‘classroom most-correct way’ without telling you Japanese people don’t actually talk like that and leave out a lot of nuance by just giving you direct translations.
When I flip through textbooks and see the polite speech「丁寧語」 they teach, it’s sound so stiff and robotic, nobody talks like that. Yes, it’s good to know, but they should also teach you the phrases people actually use.
And did you know くれる is only used for favors you didn’t ask for and もらう is favors you asked someone to do and they did? I’ve been studying for 6 years and I didn’t know until yesterday, you won’t find that in any textbook. How are you supposed tell synonyms apart「熱い、暑い、厚い」when just given a single English word description without being told the difference? And also, did you notice how insanely different spoken Japanese is from written Japanese? Yet to see anyone else bring that up. Being able to understand one won’t help you understand the other.
The only textbook I like is ‘A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar’ from The Japan Times, amazing life saver.
I don’t doubt some of these explanations are helpful for learners who think in terms of hard grammar concepts – but in reality, many learners don’t. I can tell you I certainly wasn’t sweating too much what part of speech a certain adjective was – I was just learning how to wield Japanese based on patterns and examples of its usage. I wouldn’t have classified any of these concepts as significant barriers to fluency.
And hard disagree on the “polite forms first” thing though – there are multiple good reasons why this is a good place to start. For one it makes the classifying of verbs into the three verb groups easier.
Other than that, nice work – definitely a good resource for grammar-heads.
Here’s something that I find incredibly frustrating, I was bad at conceptual English. Explaining and describing the English sentence structure was something I struggled with in high school. Even though I can write decent papers, a Japanese lesson about something like “adjectival-nouns” is effectively impossible to understand exactly what the author means unless it is immediately obvious in context.
So maybe it’s just me, but I’d love to relearn sentence structure in a new language via the method of instruction for that particular language. I just haven’t really found any particular English based Japanese lesson that doesn’t explicitly use English methods of explaining Japanese sentence structure.
You are [Cure Dolly](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj), and I claim my $5.