Talk:Japanese grammar

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Great Minds?

Coincidence - I have been working in my sandbox on expanding the Japanese language entry - adding more information on the particles. I was also thinking how best to incorporate it, as that is only a small fraction of the language. Maybe this page can incorporate elements from that page - maybe expand more on the subject-object-verb structure, then serve as a launching pad for main grammar articles - pronouns, honourifics, participles, adjectives and verbs (and their conjugation) to start with, which are all probably long enough to warrant their own pages. --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 07:58, 7 December 2008 (EST)

The only great mind here is you. I saw your sandbox in Recent Changes. Unlike you, I do not have even a working knowledge of Japanese. I merely took a two-semester course in it when I was trying to go back to college. But I don't think there is any really good explanation of Japanese grammar available on the web.

I'm mostly interested in how people can use this knowledge. And being somewhat America-centric, I'm especially interested in how speakers of American English can learn Japanese. Same goes for Korean, by the way. --Ed Poor ^Talk 08:08, 7 December 2008 (EST)

• blush* I think the one advantage is that Japanese is very much a language where "this" belongs "here" in a sentence and nowhere else, and "if x happens, then y". In that respect it is probably easy to explain how a sentence is constructed, how adjectives are formed (without having to learn a whole list of words) and how verbs are conjugated. There are clear rules for those, that do not change the underlying word, only what is appended to it. There are exceptions of course, which have to be learnt by heart, because they do not conform to the usual rules, but they are relatively few.

As for actually learning the language? Short of creating a dictionary on here, I am not sure what would be the best way. Maybe an external link to the JLPT vocabulary lists could be start? --KotomiT^{ohayougozaimasu} 08:29, 7 December 2008 (EST)