What is "Grammar"?
Very loosely,
grammar is the set of rules that govern how
language is structured. To better understand this, let's break grammar
down into its components.
Syntax, or sentence structure, deals with how words
of different types are put together to make a grammatical sentence.
Japanese syntax is fairly different from English syntax, but the basic
principles are extremely straightforward, so this is where we'll be
starting.
Next is
morphology, or word structure, which describes how
morphemes,
the smallest units of meaning in a given language, are put together to
create words. This is the part of Japanese grammar that is
very different from English, as Japanese relies much more heavily on verb conjugation than English does.
Linguists also include
phonology, or sound structure
(including intonation), under the term "grammar", but for our purposes
we'll use the common understanding of the term: word structure plus
sentence structure.
In learning a second language, you're inevitably going to learn a bit
about language in general; that is, you're going to be learning
linguistics.
The difference is that in our case, we're not as concerned with the
theory behind it all as we are with the practical side of things – just
enough information to understand the differences between Japanese and
English.
We'll start by examining the differences between simple sentences in English and Japanese.
Basic Word Order
One way of categorizing languages is based on the word order of a
simple sentence. Japanese is known as an SOV (subject-object-verb)
language: the
subject comes first, the
verb comes last, and if the verb takes an
object, it comes in the middle. English, in comparison, is a SVO language.
Example : "The dog chased the cat."
In such a simple sentence, it's easy to see which words make up the subject, object, and verb.
| The dog |
chased |
the cat. |
| Subject |
Verb |
Object |
Intuitively, we know that "the dog" is the one doing the chasing, and
"the cat" is the one being chased. We also know the second "the" is
more closely related to "cat" than "chased", so it gets included with
the object.
Although these kinds of terms are very difficult to define (a major failing of traditional grammar), the
subject is often the entity who "does" or "experiences" the verb and the
object tends to be the entity that has the verb "done" to it.
In reality, the
thematic role (the role of the noun with
respect to the event represented by the verb) of both subject and object
is somewhat arbitrary, and depends on the verb in question. Keep this
in the back of your mind, because it's not uncommon for the object of an
English verb to be the subject of the equivalent Japanese verb. As
you'll see below, "subject" and "object" aren't themselves thematic
roles, but sentence
positions, in other words, slots
with a particular placement.
Word Categories
It's basically impossible to give satisfactory descriptive definitions to word categories like
noun, verb, and
adjective
(linguists define them instead by the positions they can take in a
sentence) but to make sure you have at least an intuitive understanding
of what these categories are, let's look at some examples.
| Category |
"Definition" |
Examples |
| Noun |
A "person, place, thing, or idea" |
Hayao Miyazaki, desert, sledgehammer, linguistics |
| Adjective |
"Describes" a noun |
blue, happy, ridiculous |
| Verb |
An "action" or "state of being" |
eat, contemplate, live, fear |
| Determiner |
??? |
a/an, the, this, that, some, every |
Determiners are undoubtedly the group you've never heard of. This category includes the
articles "a/an" and "the", as well as similar words that can appear in front of a
noun phrase,
which can contain any number of adjectives or other modifiers in
addition to the noun. What makes determiners special is there can
(usually) only be one per noun phrase, and (in English at least) they're
often required.
You've probably heard of other word categories as well: pronouns,
adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc., but what we have here is fine
for now.
Subjects, Objects, and Adjuncts
Many verbs can take more than one object, and some don't take any at all. When there is just one object, it is usually a
direct object (usually the thing that "is
verbed"), and when there are two, the other is an
indirect object (the usually the destination of the direct object). Both are included in the
object part of the SVO/SOV scheme.
| Bill |
gave |
his old computer |
to me. |
| Subject |
Verb |
Direct Object |
Indirect Object |
|
|
<———-Objects———-> |
Note: English also allows indirect objects to come without a preposition, as in "Bill gave me his old computer".
Together, subjects and both kinds of objects are known as
arguments,
and are tied together by the fact that they receive their
interpretations from the particular verb they appear with. Most optional
pieces, such as expressions for the time and location of the event, are
also thrown in on the same side of the verb as the object. We call
these extra pieces of information
adjuncts.
| Bill |
gave |
his old computer |
to me |
last year. |
| Subject |
Verb |
Direct Object |
Indirect Object |
Adjunct |
This is true in Japanese as well.
| 先生は |
授業の後で |
生徒に |
成績を |
出した。 |
| The teacher |
after class |
to the students |
grades |
passed out. |
| Subject |
Adjunct |
Indirect Object |
Direct Object |
Verb |
I know you can't read the Japanese yet, but you should still be able
to understand what this sentence means by converting the partial
translation to English word order
.
Aside: Dropping Subjects and Objects
Japanese is interesting in that basically anything other than the verb can be omitted if understood from context.
| いただきます。 |
Itadakimasu. |
(I'll) receive [= eat] (the delicious slice of cake you just gave me). |
This is by no means a unique feature among the world's languages (the
Romance languages are well known for dropping subjects), but it can be
discomforting to English speakers, who expect pronouns in such places.
You'll soon get a feel for what words tend to be dropped.
Variability in Word Order
Although each language has a basic word order, they differ in how strictly they adhere to that pattern.
English has a relatively fixed word order. Movement from the default
position is used in questions and sometimes as a means of emphasis, but
never in simple declarative sentences. For example, the verb "chased"
takes a subject and one object, the subject is the chaser, and the
object is the chasee. Thus "The dog chased the cat" and "The cat chased
the dog" can under no circumstances have the same meaning.
Japanese is much more flexible. Anything to the left of the verb can
be rearranged without changing the basic meaning of the sentence, though
as you'll learn, there is still a preferred order. The object can even
be moved in front of the subject without risk of mixing them up. How is
this possible?
Particles
English relies heavily on its fixed word order to convey meaning –
the slots for "subject" and "object" are basically unmoveable. Japanese,
on the other hand, relies on
particles to specify the function of each noun or noun phrase. Here are two that you should understand perfectly:
| が |
ga |
Subject marker |
| を |
o |
Direct object marker |
Note: In case you haven't learned Hiragana yet, this is the particle "o" that is written with the Hiragana "wo".
Particles are sometimes called
postpositions (parallel to English
prepositions)
because they directly follow the word they are attached to. So while in
English we would say "to Tokyo", in Japanese you would say "Toukyou
ni".
With that, we have our first Japanese sentence that you can completely understand.
| こどもが |
テレビを |
みた。 |
| Kodomo ga |
terebi o |
mita. |
| Child SUB |
TV OBJ |
watched. |
Note: some people attach particles to their nouns with a hyphen
when using romanization. While they are suffixes in terms of
pronunciation, I'm treating them as separate words since grammatically
they're little different from prepositions.
Kodomo is followed by
ga, so we know that "(the) child" is the subject, and
terebi is followed by
o, so "TV" is the object. The verb
mita is the past tense form of
miru
"to watch" (you'll learn about verb conjugation later on). So, "The
child watched TV." If we had reversed the subject and the object…
| テレビを |
こどもが |
みた。 |
| Terebi o |
kodomo ga |
mita. |
| TV OBJ |
child SUB |
watched. |
This kind of inverted sentence is less common than default ordering, but it's completely grammatical.
Note: a more likely version of the above sentence is "Terebi wa kodomo ga mita".
Omissions
Did you notice any problems with the example above? Yep, Japanese
doesn't have an equivalent for the English "a" or "the". Plurals aren't
explicitly marked either; both must be inferred from context.
You may not believe it at the moment, but this is almost completely a
non-issue. When there is a real need to specify such things, Japanese
can do it, but otherwise they are left out. This brings up two concepts
that we'll soon explore in greater depth:
- Japanese nouns do not inflect for anything. This is in
sharp contrast to the mess of gender, number, and case (grammatical
function) found in many European and other languages (though ga, o, and similar particles can be considered case markers)
- Japanese leaves a lot up to the listener. Anything that can be
inferred is often left out, making "incomplete" sentences the norm.
Both of these facts actually make your job a lot easier. With fewer
irrelevant details to worry about, you'll be able to focus on the parts
that affect your being understood.
Noun Modifiers
So far, we haven't used any adjectives or possessives (
my house,
his family,
Japan's tallest mountain) to modify our nouns. But this is an easy addition to our grammar as both follow one simple rule:
modifier before modified.
| あかい くるま |
akai kuruma |
(a/the) red car |
| わたしの くるま |
watashi no kuruma |
my car |
| にほんの くるま |
Nihon no kuruma |
(a) Japanese car/cars |
The "no" here is a particle that turns the preceding noun into a modifier. You'll learn more about this modifying particle later on, but for now you can consider it to be the equivalent of the English possessive suffix
-s/-es.
Note: Although Japanese text doesn't normally include spaces,
they can be added to make the word boundaries more clear. In Kana/Kanji,
particles are left connected to the nouns they are attached to, while
in Romaji it's common to write the particles as independent words.
You can also have multiple modifiers for a single noun. Simply add each additional modifier to the front of the noun phrase.
| わたしの |
あかい |
にほんの |
くるま |
| Watashi no |
akai |
Nihon no |
kuruma |
| My |
red |
Japanese |
car |
Because English adjectives and possessives also follow the rule of
"modifier before modified", this particular noun phrase has the same
word order in both English and Japanese.
In English, however,
prepositional phrases (at the store,
under the sea, etc.) follow the nouns that they modify, just like they
follow the verbs that they modify, so any pre-/postpositional phrases
have to be shuffled around when translating between English and
Japanese.
Summary
Are you starting to get the idea of how to put together a Japanese
sentence? As we saw, the most fundamental components are essentially the
same as English, with some systematic differences in word order.
|
English |
Japanese |
| Sentence |
[Subject] [Verb] [Objects] [Adjuncts] |
[Subject] [Adjuncts] [Objects] [Verb] |
| Noun Phrase |
[Adjectives/Possess.] [Noun] [Prep. Phrases] |
[Adjectives/Possess./Prep. Phrases] [Noun] |
| Pre./Post. Phrase |
[Preposition] [Noun] |
[Noun] [Postposition] |
We also saw that there are a few key differences between English and Japanese nouns:
|
English |
Japanese |
| Grammatical function determined by: |
Strict word order |
Case particles |
| Inflection on nouns: |
Minimal |
None |
| Articles with nouns? |
Yes |
No |
| Nouns known from context are… |
Replaced by pronouns |
Dropped |
Things get more interesting when we start talking about verb
conjugation and other more complex issues – this is where the big
differences between Japanese and English emerge.
Nanka kawatta-koto atta?
What's up? / Well, what's up?