This is How to Japanese, a monthly newsletter with something about Japan/Japanese and a dash of いろいろ.
ポッドキャスト: How to Japanese on Translation Chat
Jenn O’Donnell launched her new translation podcast Translation Chat, and I spoke with her about “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” for the first episode. This was a ton of fun, so please give it a listen. I’ve also updated my Hard-Boiled Wonderland Project page with a new post taking into account everything I learned from David Karashima’s book. And don’t forget to check out Jenn’s appearance on the How to Japanese Podcast.
日本・日本語: 『入門 日本語の文法』
Sometimes in life we encounter books we’re not prepared to read, for various reasons. Maybe we don’t have the patience, the time, or the intellectual capacity. I lacked the first and the third when I bought 『入門 日本語の文法』 (にゅうもん にほんごのぶんぽう, An Introduction - Japanese Grammar).
I don’t remember when and where I made the purchase, but I vividly remember trying to sort through it in my six-mat room in Tokyo. I got frustrated with the pace, flipped around to some of the sections I was keen to learn more about (complex sentences, apparently), and then tossed it aside.
Fortunately for me, it survived a trip across the Pacific, the great culling of books in New Orleans, a move to Chicago, another move within the city here, and finally the great pandemic KonMari. In August, I was pleasantly surprised to find I still had it when I was starting to prepare for IUC and thought it might be helpful to read. This ended up being a good idea; we finished the grammar section of the program a few weeks ago, and it felt like I had a graduate-level preview of nearly every topic we covered. I got through it at a pace of about 10-15 pages a day and tried to reinforce everything by taking notes.
Now that I sit down to write about what made reading this book so great, it’s difficult to put my finger on. I initially considered listing all the terms that were helpful to know, but my brain started to fog as the list got longer and longer. I’m not sure I could tie it all together in a cohesive way.
I will say that knowing the vocabulary below feels absolutely central to me, in terms of being able to discuss in Japanese how a Japanese sentence is working:
述語 (じゅつご, predicate)
節 (せつ, clause)
主節 (しゅせつ, main clause)
従属節 (じゅうぞくせつ, subordinate clause)
連体修飾 (れんたいしゅうしょく, rentai-style modification, i.e. modifying a noun that isn’t the predicate)
連用修飾 (れんようしゅうしょく, renyō-style modification, i.e. modifying the predicate)
活用 (かつよう, conjugation/inflection)
But beyond this, I think it might be most helpful to give a short example of just one of the things I learned by reading the book.
First, let’s take a look at the Japanese parts of speech as noted in this book. Many have more or less similar equivalents in English, so I won’t look at them too closely (although I will say I wanted more information about how 助動詞 work and are defined in Japanese):
名詞 (めいし) - noun
副詞 (ふくし) - adverb
指示詞 (しじし) - demonstrative - i.e. これ, それ, あれ
接続詞 (せつぞくし) - conjunction
感動詞 (かんどうし) - interjection
動詞 (どうし) - verb
形容詞 (けいようし) - adjective
助動詞 (じょどうし) - auxiliary verb
There are three additional parts of speech—助詞 (じょし), 連体詞 (れんたいし), and 判定詞 (はんていし)—that I found lacked expedient English translations: translations that served as “enough” to help me understand the grammatical role. For example, 助詞 (じょし). I think many will be familiar with the translation “particle,” but what does that mean? Even the translation from Jisho.org is not immediately helpful: “post-positional word that functions as an auxiliary to a main word.”
This is where the book comes in handy. It provides definitions in Japanese for these parts of speech. Here’s the very simple explanation of 助詞 more broadly before it introduces the different varieties:
助詞は、形を変えずにいろいろな要素について、要素同士の関係を示します。助詞が語につくときは、必ず後につきます
Particles attach to many different elements (without changing form) and indicate the relationship between elements. When a particle attaches to a word, it always attaches to the end.
(For a more extensive explanation, check the definition on Kotobank: 日本語の品詞の一つ。辞のうち、活用がなく、単独で用いられることのないもの。それ自身は実質的観念をもたず、上接語句の指し示す客体的な事物・事態に対する言語主体のかかわり方や、聞き手に対する言語主体のかかわり方などを示す。)
Now “post-positional word that functions as an auxiliary to a main word” makes a bit more sense, right?
Let’s take a look at the other two words.
連体詞 (れんたいし) - This gets defined as “pre-noun adjectival” or “adnominal adjective,” which don’t do much for me unfortunately. The book provides this:
連体詞とは、「例の話」「あくる朝」のように、連体修飾の機能しか持たない語をいいます
連体詞 are words that function only as a 連体-style modifiers, such as 例の話 and あくる朝.
(Note: 例の and あくる are underlined in the original version. That formatting isn’t available here.) Easy enough. It seems to be a category that covers a small set of adjective-like words that don’t form predicates.
And finally, 判定詞 (はんていし) - There don’t seem to be many English translations of this term. The book provides:
「(名詞+)だ」と略記されるように、判定詞は、名詞に接続して名詞(述語)文を作ります。名詞文は、「XはYだ」または「XがYだ」という形をとります
判定詞 connect with nouns to form noun (predicate) sentences, as noted by their abbreviation (名詞+)だ. Noun sentences take the form XはYだ or XがYだ.
So basically 判定詞 are だ, である, and です. But why is any of this interesting?
Well, the book goes on to explain that when 判定詞 are conjugated to modify a noun (i.e. when they help do 連体修飾), they turn into の. This helps explain how we can have two interpretations of the phrase 作家の友人 (さっかのゆうじん). If the の is 判定詞 then this phrase is actually 作家である友人 (さっかであるゆうじん, the/a friend who is a writer), whereas if the の is just a 助詞, then it expresses ownership and is 作家の友人 (さっかのゆうじん, the friend of the/a writer).
Two example sentences provided in the book help make this more concrete:
私には作家の友人がいます。
作家と、その作家の友人が雑誌に出ていた。
I’m sure this was mentioned as some point in my early Japanese studies, but seeing it written in Japanese—and being able to understand it!—cemented it in a way that had not been apparent for me earlier.
One thing I realized as I started writing more often (and better) in English is that I needed to do work on both the macro and micro levels. Not only did I need to think about what it was I was trying to say and how best to relay that message, I needed to do the sentence level work to support that message. I only just recently sorted out the difference between “awhile” and “a while,” to provide one example. I think this book has opened up different ways to look at sentence-level Japanese that could be helpful going forward.
That being said, this book will not teach you Japanese. It provides a lot of information about Japanese sentences and how they work, but it will not write sentences for me or do the revision necessary to make sure that those sentences relay what I’m trying to say.
There are a number of things you could do to improve your Japanese that I think would probably be of higher priority than reading this book, but if you’re going to read it, this is what I would recommend:
1. You have to read it in order.
2. You have to read all the example sentences.
3. You don’t have to do all the practice problems, but it can be helpful to think through them and then read the answers provided.
I may come back to this book at look at some other sections in the future. For now, I hope that was at least interesting and helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!
いろいろ
Murakami Fest 2021 is complete! Check out all five posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The five chapters I look at from 遠い太鼓 (とおいたいこ, Distant Drumming) cover the period when Murakami was making final revisions to Norwegian Wood.
申し訳ないくらい is a new favorite phrase, and when I was looking for examples I turned up this fun tweet.
Also, Kevin Harlan is the GOAT: