I don’t really know the order of words and phrases in sentences too well in Japanese, or what marks a complete sentence, or what I should be using formally and casually especially when they’re kind of mixed as I have to use short/casual forms when using と思います etc. I sort of have an idea but I’m just really confused what the order of stuff should go in.
Something which confused me just now actually while doing lessons was this example, それ以上、川に近づくな!Don’t get any closer to the river! I recently learned that grammar point, but the part which confused me was the way それ and 以上 for example. I think I can recognize this stuff and try to form the sentence in my head, but if I ever want to recall, I wouldn’t know a thing about what order to put stuff in.
I also have Problems with the sentence Order. Maybe this will get better when we know more Grammar Points. Unfortunately I don’t remember anymore how it felt learning english and when The Sentence Order Made Sense. But I assume japanese Grammar will be worse.
For Casual and polite the second half of the sentence is important
The one really important word order rule is “words and phrases modifying something always go before the thing they modify”. There’s a certain amount of flexibility to the order of clauses in a sentence, both in formal sentences and even more so in casual speech where you can flip sentences around to add a trailing thought. Eventually with enough exposure to the language you’ll pick up what’s normal and what’s possible. Until then, I think that thinking in terms of “there are sentence patterns I know” is probably a good way to think about it (e.g. for some very basic ones, subjectがobjectをverb, or thingはadjectiveです).
On what makes a complete sentence, in Japanese you have three basic complete sentences:
(optional stuff) VERB – e.g. ご飯を食べる
(optional stuff) I-ADJECTIVE – e.g. 寒い
(optional stuff) NOUN/NA-ADJ だ/だった – e.g. ペンだ
(and their polite variants).
Every more complicated sentence is a more complicated version of one of those three, and the most minimal complete sentences are just a verb, or just an adjective or just a noun+copula, with everything else omitted because it’s obvious from context. (In casual speech you will also get genuine sentence fragments, of course.)
On polite vs formal, the basic rule is “the main predicate carries the politeness marker”, i.e. desu/masu goes at the end of the sentence. Subordinate clauses in complex sentences are always plain form. (Corner cases: directly quoting what somebody else said with a verb like いう; when you combine two independent sentences using が or a similar conjunction.)
Thank you both for the very helpful replies! Exposure will definitely make me more comfortable with the sentence structure after a while, but this advice is really great.
Wait till you get to phrases with three って in succession… that’s a whole new world of fun (not!)
(sorry, not helpful I know, but today’s JP reading session was harsh )
The example sentence is confusing because there are simpler ways to express the same idea. Keeping sentences simple usually improves clarity.
In an emergency, a native speaker would likely skip “それ 以上” and just use the negative form of the verb, like “近づかないで.” They might also reorder the words, placing “それ 以上” after “川に.” Books like Japanese Intermediate Grammar can be really helpful for reinforcing simple, clear sentence structures. You should check them out!
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