I never thought about it logically but in such instances I found myself instinctively creating very minor and intuitive mnemonics that would help me differentiate, I don’t have examples now but I’m sure you get what I mean.
I consider my english comprehension (but not production) a C2 lv. too so our situations are somewhat comparable
100% agree, I think it’s very limiting, even though I end up doing so instinctively again and again
I would add a note about something I think is very interesting on the matter.
There is an increasingly widely accepted thesis that says that we as newborns must have incredible neural plasticity toward all possible types of human language structures, but soon after out of the womb we start soaking up and tuning into the specifics of the languages we are exposed to.
Thanks, your answers are always good food for thoughts!
True enough, but I’ve also seen plenty of oversimplifications inside and outside class, especially for beginners. Since quite a lot of people are moving away from textbooks and other traditional methods of learning in the hope of finding ‘more efficient’ systems, I just thought I’d mention why I think the explanations are important too.
Speaking of which, to this day, I’m not as confident about my use of tenses in Japanese as in other languages, because Japanese tenses were too often explained via very simple translations/equivalents (e.g. dictionary form = present tense; 〜ている form = present continuous), only for me to discover exceptions to those rules (e.g. 〜ている meaning the same thing as the present perfect) and to have to hunt for usage patterns on my own and draw my own conclusions (and I still don’t know if they’re correct). For example, I’m still not completely sure if a Japanese person would find テニスをします or テニスをしています more appropriate to describe a habitual action (‘I play tennis’) in response to, say, ‘Are there any sports you like?’ I would pick something like 実はよくテニスをします, I guess? I think the present tense in Japanese is appropriate for stating simple, consistent facts, whereas 〜ている tends to be used for consistent/continuous actions that relate to a temporary state. However, I can’t be sure because I was never taught that, and I don’t know what I need to search in order to check. In contrast, I can confidently explain the French subjunctive even though the subjunctive is almost completely dead in English, because I know the rules, the meaning and the usage patterns. Why? Textbooks are written that way, and more importantly, there are tons of French grammatical treatises clearly describing the history of language use and the ‘value’ (i.e. the implications and connotations) of the subjunctive as a grammatical mood, and they’re even available for free on the Internet. I can’t seem to find an equivalent for that in Japanese, unfortunately.
You’re welcome! And yeah, that does seem likely, because after all, we all speak our native languages fairly comfortably in general. I think it’s really just a matter of what we get used to over time. However, it does seem like our native languages are stored separately from the other languages we know, which is why people who suffer brain damage in that area of the brain sometimes suddenly start speaking other languages.
I believe things like that are explained, for example, in the A Dictionary of _ Japanese Grammar series.
For -ている in particular, I think many people initially think it means the same thing as the present continuous in English, but that’s not exactly true, as it depends on the type of verb - and for punctual verbs, it’s more like the present perfect. But even Genki I explains that (maybe not with all the precision, but in principle), I think it’s more that it’s hard to get used to the fact that this one Japanese construction is equivalent to two English constructions.
And, of course, grammar is always full of intricate subtleties that are probably best learned through usage, but there’s always also entire papers written about specific grammar points that try to uncover all these nuances. They tend to be rather dense though.
This isn’t easy, of course. I just finished reading ことばの発達の謎を解く which is a pop-science book about language acquisition in children, which the author describes as being about building up a web of meanings where the ‘definition’ of a word depends on what other similar words exist (for instance 着る’s meaning is defined partly by the fact that 履く exists and thus restricts it to a smaller scope than English ‘to wear’). It doesn’t talk much about second language acquisition, but there’s a short section on it. The author says that because (unlike newborns) we already have a language web for our L1 we tend inevitably to reuse and relabel nodes in it for L2 words. So in a test of Japanese students of English, they didn’t reject sentences like “Go and wear your clothes at once!”, because Japanese doesn’t make the ‘put on / wear’ distinction, and it’s not easy to notice and internalise that an L2 word has a smaller scope than an L1 word it seems to be the same as.
By the way, as a non-native English speaker I find the present perfect in English as maddening and hard to use as the Japanese ている! Maybe these tenses are inherently difficult in both languages…
Not sure I really got what this means, but, sort of (eg.) a kid that learns the big word “have” and then learns the other, smaller (more specific) word “possess” and starts making a web of meanings basing on correlation and specificity?
In all fairness, it’s possible that I missed something along the way while studying Japanese as a beginner, because I was really trying to speed-run the textbook with whatever time I had, and I very rapidly started to ignore/skim through the explanatory remarks when I started to feel like I could understand the Japanese without help. Even reading the translations became something I only did to confirm my understanding. Add to that the fact that I was studying Japanese in French, which doesn’t distinguish concepts like ‘present’ and ‘present continuous’ or ‘present perfect’ in the same way as English… yeah, maybe that meant I just didn’t notice the problem in French because it wasn’t the same.
It’s a personal preference (and I’m probably being unfairly biased here), but I tend to try my best to refer to explanations in the target language as much as possible once I’m capable of understanding them. They’re usually more complete and nuanced, in my experience, though I haven’t tried the Do_JG series myself.
I have actually read a few papers on grammar points (notably for the purpose of learning how to use ば), and yes, they can make for rather heavy reading. I also rarely read them in full. However, I have to say that they tend to be quite instructive.
I think what I meant was more that it can be quite difficult to find a Japanese resource that cleanly lists and summarises common verb forms and what they mean, whereas I was able to find those quite easily in French. Still, perhaps I just wasn’t advanced enough at the time to go check. Now though… well, I managed to find this, which confirms that the dictionary form is fine for habitual actions (though it can just refer to a current state for verbs like いる and ある):
and something that goes into more detail on 〜ている, and shows me that I’m not wrong in thinking that there is some overlap with the dictionary form:
Therefore, to be fair, with enough digging, I’ll probably be able to find the information I need now that I’m fluent enough to understand most of these papers. It’s just that I find that French textbooks tend to be much more willing to get technical and throw grammatical terms at students, which allows us to find information more easily in the long run (caveat: all my French textbooks were in French, and it definitely was a struggle to understand everything in the beginning), whereas a lot of Japanese teaching (unfortunately) seems to aim to dumb things down for students. Still, I mean, maybe my experience would have been different if I had been given a textbook that aimed to do the equivalent of what I experienced for French (immediate immersion with teacher-guided learning, along with native grammatical terms). The only way I can really know is to study how Japanese students learn Japanese, seeing as foreign learners are taught in a very different way.
Yup, I guess, along with accounting for where certain similar words overlap and and where only one works while the others don’t.
As someone who grew up in Singapore, I have to say that ‘go and wear…’ didn’t sound that wrong to me I know that ‘put on’ sounds more natural, but I’d never really thought about the difference until I saw that example. A lot of distinctions that exist in standard English didn’t exist in the everyday conversations I was used to, and so in order to accommodate both varieties of English, well, I had to get good at approximating, spotting differences and drawing links, and fast. Might have helped with learning other languages later on.
I use JPDB and feel it’s almost it’s own thing… and kind of also an immature beta product. Kitsun is a pretty user friendly drop in for Anki that’s excellent for more mining centric workflows (built in reader and subtitle tools) or sharing and collaborating on decks. Like Anki it also has a native mobile application, which is a bit of a nice to have. Sure, jpdb can be used through the mobile browser, but I don’t feel like the mobile interface was particularly great.
I’m not trying to bash on JPDB, but its configuration is not user friendly. A lot of things only make sense if a user knows SRS tools well beforehand. I didn’t even know it support Jisho like tag searches until I stumbled into the announcements/labs sections of the discord (there’s a whole fucking website, use that too ffs!).
JPDB’s kanji/radical functionality is great, but will clash keywords for users that have done WK. In that sense I think it’s actually better for people that want WK, but free and faster. For users that have WK and just want to mine… probably not the best.
Really, I feel like JPDB satisfies the following situations best:
WK is too slow
WK teaches irrelevant kanji/vocab
Core decks are too broad/generalized
I want to spend more time immersing
I want to quickly and easily SRS native material
I don’t mind tool errors (misparsing, bad edict definitions)
I’m of the opinion that studying with target language material should be done as soon as it can be done (and of course the when varies from person to person), because there is no way to avoid being forced into a different language structure that will of course be limiting in some degree, it’s like putting a circle into a square… to kill the beast you need to think like the beast
What I think of as jpdb’s “killer feature” is its massive set of pre-built decks for different books. As a paper-book reader there’s no way I could set up tooling to do that in Anki. You’re absolutely right that you need to be sufficiently aware of its limitations with parsing errors and the like so as to be able to blacklist the dubious cards it sometimes gives you.
I guess so, but I personally see it as another opportunity to understand how native speakers think about their language, and to practise being relatively independent of other languages when understanding/expressing things in the target language. There’s no need to rush into ‘target language only’ study, because understanding can be challenging, but I think integrating as much of it as possible at each stage is very helpful. That’s how you get to see how ideas link up in the target language.
Yes, but as well as ‘general vs specific’, also in defining the boundaries between adjacent words: the meaning of ‘have’ is restricted by the existence of words like ‘carry’ and ‘hold’ and the phrases and situations where one word is used instead of another. Conversely the meanings of ‘carry’, ‘hold’ etc are defined partly by the existence of ‘have’ and the way ‘have’ is used.
For example, all babies can distinguish l from r, but as soon as six weeks old, babies lose the ability to distinguish sounds if they do not hear them in their native environment. Hence native Japanese speakers difficulty.
This is not unique to Japanese or to these sounds. Many languages have sound distinctions that native English speakers cannot make.
What is surprising to me is how quickly this happens.
That’s understandable and doing so probably gives you certain insights that might otherwise be missed, but there’s two caveats to that:
Grammar explanations in the target language address speakers who already understand (at least to a certain extent) said language, and especially native speakers can be rather oblivious to how complicated a certain grammar point is to non-natives because for them, it’s just “natural”. Try asking (or even looking up) what the difference between the definite and the indefinite article is in English (or many other European languages) for comparison, something that is very hard to explain and yet rather difficult for speakers of languages without that distinction. The explanations tend to be fairly shallow.
As with all other scientific fields, English is the lingua franca of linguistics. Research papers in Japanese are possibly still common enough (I know that there’s no lack of German linguistics done in German for example), but especially when you want to do comparative linguistics, i.e. trying to see how Japanese grammar relates to grammar of other languages (not just European ones, but more broadly), you’ll run into English fairly quickly.
Funny, because I agree with you in that jpdb feels like a beta product, but I think it’s a joke that Kitsun charges people for a fraction of the functionality you get with jpdb, which itself has a fraction of the functionality you get with Anki.
At the end of the day it’s good to have options to encourage people to move on from WaniKani, I guess.
No, devs should not put all effort in for free. Anki provides all functionality for free, but earns money through its iPhone app. jpdb provides core functionality for free, but gates bonus functionality behind its patreon. Kitsun locks everything behind a paywall, and I don’t believe it provides any functionality that you can’t already do with Anki or jpdb (and established workflows using Yomichan, mpv, etc). What am I missing?
As an aside, devaluing community-made extensions, especially when platforms are built to support them, is a bit silly. On top of Anki’s huge list of addons, one of WaniKani’s strengths is its strong scripting community, too. jpdb will also have a public API available soon, and users on its Discord have already made some awesome tools during the closed beta. It might not be native functionality, but it matters when you’re choosing/recommending a service to use.
E: Ah, are you Kitsun’s creator? That is the wrong attitude to have when people criticise your platform, I think …
I know that ‘put on’ sounds more natural, but I’d never really thought about the difference until I saw that example. A lot of distinctions that exist in standard English didn’t exist in the everyday conversations I was used to, and so in order to accommodate both varieties of English, well, I had to get good at approximating, spotting differences and drawing links, and fast. Might have helped with learning other languages later on. 
