[aDoIJG] Special Topics […] #4 + To the Reader 💮 A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar

Special Topics […] #4 + To the Reader


A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar :white_flower: Home Thread

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#3 Jan 20 Special Topics […] #4 + To the Reader [55] - [77] & [8] - [9] 25

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3 Likes

The sentence analysis described in this section is a very “chop the sentence up into little pieces” style. I think I’ve said before when we read a similar section in the Basic dictionary that I prefer the approach described in the last chapter of Making Sense of Japanese, where you start at the beginning of the sentence and as you go along you identify the blocks of it and what connects to what and which causes are still waiting for something to connect up to further on in the sentence.

On to the first actual entry next week!

6 Likes

Yep! Another very technical section. Not that we’re surprised.
I have to admit, this was a little challenging to read. I got through it but it took a few tries. It reminded me of how when I first started reading manga, for instance, it was really hard to parse sentences because many pieces are in fact dropped. I appreciate the idea, though. It took me back to grade school grammar classes.

I watched these videos from Cure Dolly to reinforce identification of clauses and complex sentence structure:

Anything after the first video is (IMO) overkill, but it did help with the concept.

2 Likes

The charts in A. Structure of Simple Sentences remind me a bit of some conversations we had in a past thread on this forum with regards to sentence mapping. If I remember correctly, は placement in those diagrams was controversial, which makes sense considering the footnote on page [56] here…

I don’t know if I have a lot of specific comments on the section as a whole! A lot of this stuff is stuff I feel like I’ve picked up just from exposure over time, haha, so by the time I read this section, I feel like I was already sort of beyond what it’s teaching… I’m also not really a sentence diagram kind of person, so this exercise isn’t the most helpful to me, unfortunately.

It was fun seeing all the references back to entries in the basic volume and remembering some of the specific details from those entries, though!

1 Like