How do I start to piece it all together?

I don’t think any of these recent comments are helpful at all for OP, especially as (s)he already said (s)he doesn’t have a background in linguistics or language learning.

So I’ll echo what was said before the thread went off topic to answer OP’s question:

Start with grammar as soon as possible. Whether you use an online resource like Tae Kim/Japanese Ammo/Cure Dolly or an offline resource like Genki.

BunPro is a good way of supplementing those resources (especially the resources it has “paths” for).

I think the hard part is building up that short term memory space. Like, I have to store the objects until I get to the part where the stuff happens.

While they’re not helpful right now, I think they’re good to have here for the OP to come back to later as their Japanese gets better.

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Just a little technicality: ~おう is the volitional form (意志形). (I used to mix them up too.) ~たい is just… a suffix? I don’t think there’s even a technical term for it. Also, I think we can safely think of the ~たい forms as adjectives because we can say things like アイスが食べたい. Of course, I’m probably over-simplifying a little, but it definitely acts like an adjective.

It gets easier with time, but I think the key thing is to learn to turn things into blocks and to stop translating into a European language mentally. If at all possible, every time I come to the end of an attributive phrase, I attempt to vaguely attach its meaning to the noun it’s describing (like a sort of mental summary), even if that noun is the object of a verb in another attributive phrase. Attempting to hold absolutely all of it in your head at once is probably going to be impossible. I have a feeling Japanese people don’t do it either.

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I think (mostly) I get it, although I don’t know what a phrase marking is…

So the final auxiliary becomes the head in every case? I’m also no clear on the distinction between free and bound. Is it just that free gets attached to the て form?

Luckily for me, I was already really comfortable with it from Turkish :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s always felt way around for me (at least for things like ad-positions). “The house in the forest on the hill” goes from detail out to context.

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This is where I’m at now. And things like—nounが placeに thingを verb—are not too bad. But when you get to:

  • redのdressのgirlが marketで (I) met が called (me)

The blocks start adding up even as I have the mental models in place. Honestly, I think it just takes time since I feel like I’m getting better at it.

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oh, yeah im already at the point where its intuitive so i kinda botched the terminology.
It’s like the more language proficiency is attained the more i throw theoretical understanding of grammar out the window.

(Don’t ask me about grammar for either my native language or English, i’ll be clueless)

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compared to “The girl I met in the red dress called me” (or should it be "The girl in the red dress I met called me?)…

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Probably a bad example.

Although, in everyday conversation it would be:

  • You know that girl I met at the market? The one in the red dress?
  • Yeah
  • She called me.

But that’s probably more for dramatic effect than linguistics. :wink:

Although I did read some fascinating stuff on why English uses the specific order that it does for adjectives and why in the above example the process was to name the place first and then get more detailed.

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For OP: Japanese is a “lego language”. It works by adding bits to the ends of its words to add extra context, like whether something is the doer of an action or having an action done to it, or whether a verb is happening now or in the past. The alterations almost always happen at the ends of words, because that’s how Japanese rolls.

So… marking is where you alter a word to indicate some signifying change or another. Thinking in terms of all world languages, heads of the phrase tend to be what gets marked because it makes the marking easier to find - and sometimes there’s redundant marking - German marks adjectives and nouns for redundancy. This is not a universal rule and let’s relate it back to Japanese.

Japanese tends to do its marking at the end of the word being marked like with ない・たい・すぎる, or after the word like with particles.

Verb phrases might get marked for tense (past/present), aspect (done/in progress), mood (I forget what grammatical mood is sorry haha), evidentiality, etc by making changes to the verb. ない and たい and すぎる we already mentioned.

Nouns tend to get marked for case which is the role those nouns play relative to the verb - subject, direct object, indirect object. In English we use word order and prepositions, and in Japanese the “case marking” is done by particles like は/が/を/に/で… they take a noun and say “this is what role the noun plays”. :slight_smile:

Yes, that’s what auxiliaries tend to do - they get promoted to the head of the phrase (and thus get the head’s position and inflection responsibilities) for syntax/marking purposes even though they’re not meanigful without the verb they just deposed.

Not quite. Free auxiliary verbs do their work next to the verb as a separate word, but bound auxiliaries become part of the original word that they’re marking. Again this whole notion of “wordness” is less than set in stone when it comes to verbs sometimes but that’s the gist.

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You don’t have a link do you?

Summary

That reminded me of this. Apparently it’s the longest word in Turkish to appear in print… muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine
Which means…As though you are from those whom we may not be able to easily make into a maker of unsuccessful ones
The article here has a breakdown of how you arrive at that monster, along with an explanation of my favourite bit of recursive conjugation…
Longest word in Turkish - Wikipedia
Also note that single “word” verbs are written with spaces for some conjugations in Turkish :joy:

You don’t have to convince me that words don’t make a lot of sense as a universal building blocks of sentences!

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Here’s one but it doesn’t go into why:

The fascinating part is that it’s not taught. It’s just part of the language. I feel like there things in Japanese that are like this that I just haven’t understood yet.

It was a while ago so I don’t have much more than that, sorry. I should have bookmarked it.

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Uh… do you happen to have a textbook? It’s true that grammar only feels useful/fulfilling when you have vocabulary to use with it, but you often won’t be able to acquire new vocabulary in context without grammatical knowledge. Textbooks help you to acquire both at the same time, ideally with a decent amount of context so that what you learn is meaningful. If you don’t have a textbook or don’t intend to get one… well, you can try to cobble together a free/almost free DIY Japanese learning system. I don’t recommend it, because progress will be slow and probably painful, but it might still work. (It could even be better than a boring textbook, so who knows?)

For grammar, the closest things to textbooks on the internet are Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese and Imabi. If you want lots of information on a particular structure in an easy-to-understand article full of example sentences (which is probably going to be good for your vocabulary as well), then you might want to check out Maggie Sensei’s site. The easiest way to find a specific article is to search ‘[grammatical structure] maggie sensei’. If she’s written something about it, it should show up.

As for acquiring vocabulary… in my opinion, you need a source for new words, and you need to practice output in some way. It’s not about disproving the ‘input hypothesis’ or ‘output makes perfect’ or whatnot… it’s just that output is retrieval practice, which is always good for memory. How can you do this on your own? For input… there are free online courses from NHK, along with NHK News Web Easy, which is for slightly more advanced beginners. Duolingo is another way you can pick up new words. (Side note: I hate Duolingo’s approach with a passion, even though it’s a good way to start a new language if you want to do it for free. Sure, it’s about repetition and translation exercises, turning it into a glorified flashcard system… but it’s super rigid and offers you no context whatsoever. The strongest proof of this is how much users complain in the comment section for each sentence, asking why their perfectly reasonable translation is ‘wrong’. However, precisely because it’s a glorified set of flashcards, you can use it for vocabulary if you can tolerate the mechanical nature of the system.) Other helpful input sources are podcasts aimed at learners, like things from JapanesePod101 and Nihongo con Teppei (or something like that). For output/retrieval practice, I strongly suggest you write Japanese characters (kana and kanji) after learning the correct stroke order. It’s not just about deciphering weird signs, though it does help with that: it’s about using muscle memory to help your brain absorb new structures. You can try something like glancing at a vocabulary word and reading it aloud before covering it, repeating its pronunciation, and writing it in kana before writing it with kanji (if it has a kanji form).

More motivating ways for you to pick up new words and practise output will come up once you know a little grammar: you can try reading children’s books or watching anime (with basic grammatical knowledge, you’ll be able to pick up simple catchphrases, at the least). You can also join book clubs on the forums. I’m personally part of a group on the forums that translates simple NHK articles in order to understand them, with more advanced members helping those with less experience. (It’s here: NHK Easy News reading group) We used to tackle a manga as well, but that’s on hiatus. All these attempts to understand Japanese sentences and to use the words you’ve acquired will help you to figure all these structures out and understand what’s going on.

As a final thought, I understand that it’s not easy to have to deal with technical terms when you’re not used to handling them in your native language: picking up my third language, French, was confusing at first because I didn’t know what all the technical terms meant. However, to learn Japanese, you need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of these terms. That means you need to find a resource that clearly explains these concepts, or which at least gives you their equivalents in English. The reason these concepts are important is because Japanese tends to signal changes in function/role using suffixes and particles that are tagged onto the end of an existing word or sentence, and so you’ll need to be able to decode these things. A few weeks ago, I caught myself mentally changing the class/type of a verb in my head while watching an anime as I heard the suffix change. As for how to take apart Japanese sentences… think of onions. Here’s a link to a post in which I take apart a fairly complicated-looking sentence in order to illustrate what I mean by the idea that Japanese starts from a core and adds layers of meaning to it.

Finally, all the best! I strongly believe that everyone on these forums will be willing to help you and give you whatever advice they can. :slight_smile:

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Ah no, I already knew about adjectival order. The why seemed really interesting though.

I don’t know the formal definition, but it’s stuff like ‘indicative’ and ‘subjunctive’. It’s about the way in which the action is envisaged… relative to reality, I suppose? The indicative is about real actions that are situated in the time stream, whereas subjunctive verbs indicate that an action is being considered on its own for the purpose of passing some sort of judgement (usually emotional) or in the context of a request/order. It’s called the ‘subjunctive’ because it’s used in subordinate clauses in European languages like English and French, and is usually used to ‘irreal’ actions that don’t actually have to occur in the time stream, although tenses exist for it as well because the actions often need to be situated relative to the action in the main clause.

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When I say “i forget” it’s more “I’m too lazy to go and look it up on Wikipedia” haha but you’re absolutely right - indicative, subjunctive (“if i were you…” and “should you wish to speak with me…” - somewhat covered by -(e)ba in Japanese), imperative (command)… also stuff like “i hope/wish that…” と祈っている…

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:rofl:
Noted for future reference. Hahaha. My way of handling things when I’m too lazy to look them up (or just don’t want to because my computer is being laggy and it’ll only get worse if I do) is to start from whatever I know and try to make my deductions sound as believable as possible. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I had forgotten that the imperative was a mood, actually. Hahaha.

tense = the when
aspect = the “duration”
mood = meh, we’ll chuck everything else in a pile over there.

Right?

Hahaha. Don’t ask me. I’m not a linguist; I just love languages. I think the Wiki article says it best: ‘attitude of the speaker’. I’m pretty sure there’s at least one other classification somewhere based on which verbs can be marked. Verbs in Arabic are marked for gender, for instance. Mood is almost definitely the broadest categorisation though, because each mood can have many functions, so it’s frankly pretty crazy. The other ‘properties’ of a verb are much simpler to describe.

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Wow I completely missed that this topic blew up into a huge long thread since in last looked at it. This could turn out to be a useful resource in and of itself!

I’m pretty busy for the next few weeks, so I’ll probably read through this slowly, but already some stuff has been helpful.

I started to try to watch the Cure Dolly videos, and while the presentation is weird, I could deal with it. The thing that got to me though was she spends sooo much time talking about how great her method is and how broken everything else is, that it almost feels like she spends more time on that than explaining useful applicable information. I’ve noticed many resources try to pump themselves up by putting down everything else, and that’s kind of a turn-off for me. Not everyone will have the same path toward having a concept click with them. It’s valuable to have many approaches for different people.

My favorite that I’ve been watching so far is Japanese Ammo. She explains things in a very natural way that feels actually applicable, repeats things enough, and gives you enough time to think. Plus she kinda goes through different levels of formality and says stuff like, “but I never really hear anyone actually say it this way.” I’m planning to watch her “New Absolute Beginner” playlist a few times to help it click and then try writing some sentences of my own.

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