In learning Basic Japanese Grammar, you will use standard texts like Genki or Tae Kim. And you should. They are very useful and thorough.
However, there are a number of things they don’t explain. They tend to treat Japanese grammar as if it were West European grammar. With the same categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives. This is helpful for grasping the concepts. I do recommend reading the “classic” explanations (if you haven’t already) along with our articles.
But…
The “classic” Western-grammar-based explanations do falsify Japanese to some extent and this makes it much harder to get an intuitive grasp of the language.
In many cases, because Japanese is presented in terms of European grammar and English uses, it is turned upside down and becomes near impossible to understand correctly.
Simple explanations like
コーヒーが好きです
(watashi wa) koohii ga suki desu
X I like coffee
日本語ができます
(watashi wa) nihongo ga dekimasu
X (I) can speak/understand Japanese
are unfortunately just plain wrong and confusing. They do not represent what the Japanese is actually saying. They represent what an English speaker would be saying in a similar situation.
If we were translating an anime for an English audience, this would be fine. But when students are told that this is what the Japanese means, it lays the ground for confusion and difficulty, especially at a later stage when things get more complicated.
For example, it sows complete confusion about how the ga-particle works. And the ga-particle is the single most fundamental element in Japanese. There is a “ga” in every Japanese sentence whether we can see it or not. Ga is always there, either implicitly or explicitly, or else it is not a sentence.
If we are confused from the beginning about what ga actually does (and the “translations” above create exactly that confusion), the very clear and simple structure of Japanese – one of the most regular and logical languages in the world – becomes obscured.
So how do we turn Japanese the right way up in our minds?
We just need to learn a few simple facts about the language that the textbooks never teach.
Because there is such a need for this information, we have put these facts into a very short concise little book called Unlocking Japanese. It isn’t another heavy task to add to your study schedule – it is a simple, clearly written book that you can read in an evening (though you will probably want to go on referring to it for years).
It takes you in a clear step-by-step way through the “hidden” basics of Japanese that the schools don’t teach.
If you don’t know any Japanese grammar this isn’t the book for you, but if you know even the very beginnings you should read this, because it is going to make every step easier and much clearer.
If you have been studying Japanese for years, Unlocking Japanese will make a lot of things fall into place. Intermediate Japanese learners report that the book is full of “Aha!” moments.
We apply the knowledge contained in Unlocking Japanese throughout this website, but we highly recommend reading the book first because it prepares you in a systematic way for so much of what we have to tell you here.
I’ve lived in Japan for decades, and know Japanese reasonably well, but this was nonetheless a very useful article.
It’s a point that I never really thought about explicitly, but really does make sense in hindsight….
Perhaps I have somehow missed the gist of the article, but don’t we still have to memorize a list of “exceptions” in order to know which verbs we have to use が instead of を with? And if we do, is there a list of such exceptions somewhere?
I do find this article very useful, and thank you for writing it, Cure Dolly. It does help us to understand written or spoken Japanese sentences like these a lot better. But can it help us to choose the right particle (が or を) when we are trying to form a correct Japanese sentence of this kind ourselves? My best guess is that you were trying to say that we should use our “feeling of Japanese” in order to do this, but I still don’t understand how it is possible. Could you please explain it? Thanks!
Hello,
May I ask why does your title say:
Upside-Down Japanese: how the textbooks are teaching you *wrong*
Don’t get me wrong,
But I feel that it feels better if you say “incorrectly” or “wrongly”
I feel that when you say “wrong” without “-ly” would be …are teaching you (to be) wrong.
Well, in casual setting, that’s the first thing my mind came up for this construction.
Source: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15966/did-she-judge-him-wrong-or-wrongly
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/144737/when-to-use-wrong-or-wrongly-as-adverbs
Feel free to have a chat with me. I love Japanese and English too! (I’m learning Japanese Literatures right now in a college and your blog sometimes shed some new perspective to me) – thanks!
You are right. “how the textbooks are teaching you *wrong*” is “slangy” English and not grammatically correct.
Actually this sort of thing is used so often that some people justify it as correct since it is a common usage. Personally I am not inclined to do so. I believe that it is overcolloquial or substandard English and I consciously used it in that way. I have also on occasion been guilty of using common ungrammatical phrases like すごい上手 (it should of course be すごく上手) in Japanese.
I wouldn’t write like that on this site because it is confusing to people learning Japanese. I do occasionally use over-colloquial English though. ごめんなさい。
I am always happy to chat about Japanese (or other things), though I prefer to do it in Japanese.
Very well explained, thanks for the insight! However, the Spanish example you use is grammatically incorrect, the correct sentence is: “Me gusta el tequila”
Thank you for the correction. My Spanish is shameful I am afraid!
I have corrected it in the article.
I know this is almost comically late, but I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your article. While I am not yet fluent in Japanese (lack of practice, mainly), I do hold a bachelor’s degree in Japanese Language, Culture, and Literature from OSU. And what you say here is very much what I learned.
They used their own text (JSL/JWL), and were always very careful to ensure that we understood that Japanese / English grammatical structures don’t exactly correspond. Our texts didn’t even call the Japanese parts of speech ‘nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.’ What in English would be Nouns were referred to as nominals (names for things), similarly verbs were called verbals. (i-adjectives were basically called that, but na-adjectives were actually called adjectival nominals.) It was a constant reminder that Japanese just did not work the same way as English.
I recall vividly having many conversations with other non-Japanese speakers, and trying to explain to them that Japanese was very logical and comparatively easy as a foreign language compared to, say, English. (Only six irregular verbals. Whee!)
Anyway, got your book. Going to read it. So interesting.
Thank you so much! I am also happy to hear that at least some places are teaching Japanese as it really is. I think the only thing that makes Japanese “hard” apart from the mis-explanations is the fact that it really is a foreign language. West European languages are so closely related that one could almost call them “very distant dialects”. One knows a very large part of the vocabulary and at least the basis of the grammar before one begins. But as an entity Japanese is fundamentally very logical and regular. I had certainly far rather be based in English learning Japanese than be based in Japanese trying to learn English!