UNLOCKING JAPANESE

by Cure Dolly

© 2016 Sun Daughter Press

CONTENTS

1.  The Accidental Conspiracy

2.  I Am Not an Eel!

The mysteries of invisible Japanese pronouns and the real meaning of the wa particle

3.  The Ga Is Always With Us

The fundamental structure of Japanese

4.  Upside-Down Japanese

How the textbooks are teaching Eihongo

5.  Understanding the Ga and Wo Particles

by Cure Tadashiku

Make Japanese grammar work for you instead of against you

6.  Logical vs. Non-Logical Particles

Meet the Queen and King of Japanese

7.  The Point about the Passive

(It isn’t really passive at all)

8.  The Simple Secret of Sou

9.  Japanese Grammar: The Golden Key

Mighty Morphin’ Modularity

10.  Japanese Adjectives Really Aren’t Indescribable

11.  It’s Not Over

A link to the non-past

Chapter One

The Accidental Conspiracy

Is there a dark conspiracy among schools and textbooks to make Japanese seem far more complicated than it really is?

Of course not. But there might as well be.

Because the standard English textbook explanations of Japanese grammar do in practice make it far more complicated than it needs to be.

Once you know a few basic secrets, you can see that Japanese grammar is actually very straightforward, far more regular than English or other European grammar systems, and not all that difficult to grasp.

So why don’t the standard texts tell you these secrets?

Of course there isn’t any conspiracy. They aren’t deliberately concealing anything. The problem is that grammar is not in fact a set of rules by which language works. It is an attempt to describe how language works.

And the descriptions offered by the standard English-language texts on Japanese use the concepts of European grammar – verb, adjective, conjugation, passive etc.

But Japanese is not a European language. It works differently from European languages. So none of these terms really fits Japanese properly. They leave an impression that there are all kinds of difficulties and exceptions and irregular things that you “just have to remember”.

But there aren’t.

Japanese is a remarkably regular and simple language compared to European languages.

But you have to treat Japanese as Japanese, not deal with it as if it were English that didn’t quite work correctly.

And that is the problem.

Not some conspiracy to make a simple language unnecessarily complicated, but the fact that it is always described in terms that don’t really fit it and modeled in ways that were made to describe a different kind of language.

That is the problem this book is going to fix.

A big claim, but I believe that if you read this book you will come to the conclusion that it is justified.

Fortunately, it isn’t a case of learning a new and strange terminology to describe a completely alien language.

It is really just a matter of adjusting the way we look at Japanese. We will use simple, common-sense descriptions of what is going on in the language. We will continue to use some of the borrowed terms from European grammar, but making it clear in what ways they actually fit Japanese and in what ways they don’t.

I can’t take all the credit for this book. In the first place I owe an incalculable debt to Dr. Jay Rubin, whose groundbreaking book Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You first set me off on this path.

In particular, his exposition of the Japanese no-pronoun and the fact that the wa particle never marks the grammatical subject laid the foundation for several of the things I have to say. Once you fully understand these points, various other things logically follow from them that progressively build into a model that simplifies Japanese and allows it to be understood naturally on its own terms.

I am also indebted to Japanese elementary school textbooks, which explain Japanese to Japanese children using Japanese terminology – naturally, in Japanese.

This last part is important, because one might think that native Japanese writers of textbooks in English would get closer to the way Japanese really works than foreign writers do. But this does not turn out to be the case. Crossing the language barrier is not as simple as it seems, and in trying to explain matters in terms that make sense to an English audience, they tend to fall into the same traps as native English writers (by whose work, of course, they are also influenced).

Because there is no model in English for how Japanese really works, the problem of explaining it has been difficult for anyone to overcome, regardless of her native language.

It is precisely that model that this book aims to provide.

I also gratefully acknowledge the very considerable help given to me by Cure Tadashiku (Annalinde Matichei) and Cure Yasashiku. Over several years, we have engaged in endless discussions in both Japanese and English that have helped to refine the ideas in this book. Cure Tadashiku has contributed a chapter to the book, and in Chapter Seven I explain how Cure Yasashiku supplied me with the final piece to a large puzzle. It was in fact the solution of this puzzle that led me to feel that the time was right to publish this book.

This particular puzzle piece involves the Japanese so-called “passive” and the ga particle, but it affects a number of other things because the Japanese language is an interlocking whole.

Indeed, looking over the table of contents, some readers may think that half this book is about particles. However, that is only partly true. The book is about how Japanese works, and since particles are the lynchpins of the language I talk about them quite a lot. However, in talking about them I am also talking about many other aspects of Japanese. Because of their fundamental nature, the easiest way to get a handle on many a question in Japanese is to seize it by the particles!

To a small extent I will be taking you on my voyage of discovery by presenting, alongside new material written specially for this book, some of the things that I have written along the way, though amended and expanded in the light of later discoveries.

We’ll begin with the first serious essay I wrote on this subject, which includes a recap of those parts of Dr. Rubin’s work that led to the underlying thesis of this book. We will then build out from there.

Chapter Two

I Am Not an Eel!

The mysteries of invisible Japanese pronouns and the real meaning of the wa particle

Using the ancient koan of the eel and the diner, the mysteries of invisible Japanese pronouns and the wa particle are about to be finally unveiled.

Enlightenment commences in 3… 2…

私はウナギです

Watashi wa unagi desu

is a common joke among Japanese learners. It is a kind of expression Japanese people often use and the idea is that it literally means “I am an eel”.

After all, Watashi wa gakusei desu means “I am a student”, doesn’t it?

What Watashi wa unagi desu really means, of course, when said in context (probably in a restaurant) is “I will have eel”. The common Western impression is that the speaker has literally said “I am an eel”, but by a sort of colloquial contraction it is understood in context to mean “I will have eel”. Even the scholarly and usually excellent Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar says that “I am an eel” is the literal meaning (an example of how explaining Japanese in English can be a problem even for Japanese people).

So what is the real solution to the eel conundrum?

First of all, let’s look at the way nouns and pronouns are dropped (this is important to our eel, as you’ll see in a minute). This is sometimes considered very obscure and confusing. It isn’t. It is really only doing what all languages do but in a slightly different (and rather more efficient) way. Consider this English passage:

As Mary was going upstairs, Mary heard a noise. Mary turned and came back down. At the bottom of the stairs, Mary saw a tiny kitten.

Is that grammatically correct? Of course it is. Just as correct as saying watashi wa all the time when it isn’t necessary. Would any native speaker ever say it? Of course not.

Why not? Because having established Mary as the topic we don’t keep using her name. We refer to her as “she”. Japanese refers to her as ∅. That is to say, the Japanese equivalent of an English pronoun is what I arbitrarily refer to as ∅. In other words, nothing at all. But that doesn’t mean that the pronoun isn’t there. Only that you can’t see or hear it. It is crucially important to realize that it does in fact exist.

The absence of a visible/audible pronoun is slightly startling to the Anglophone mind, but actually it is scarcely more ambiguous than English. The words she, he and it could refer respectively to any female person, any male person and any thing in the world. They only have any useful meaning from context. Once the thing or person is established, we no longer name it but replace it with a catch-all marker that actually catches what the context tells it to catch.

Japanese works almost exactly the same but without the marker, which is actually not semantically necessary. If a small child says

Mary was going upstairs. Heard noise. Came back down. At bottom of stairs saw tiny kitten.

we are still in no doubt as to what she means. That is how Japanese works. Putting the unnecessary “she” marker in every fresh clause is actually a slight linguistic inefficiency.

What is the sound of no-pronoun?

But – and here is the very important point – there is a pronoun in Japanese. It is a no-pronoun. The vital point to understand is that the invisible no-pronoun works in very much the same way that English visible pronouns work.

If we don’t realize this, we will continue to think that “watashi wa unagi desu” means literally “I am an eel”. And that is going to make life difficult for us later in our Japanese adventure.

However, in order to reach complete enlightenment on the unagi koan, we need one more piece of understanding. The particle wa.

In beginners’ texts it is often said that the wa particle means “as for” or “speaking of”. And it literally does. The best translation is probably “as for” (which accounts for the differentiating function of wa too – but that is another question).

So

花子ちゃんは学生です

Hanako-chan wa gakusei desu

literally means “As for Hanako-chan, she is a student”:

Note that there is both a noun and a pronoun in that English sentence. The proper noun “Hanako-chan” and the pronoun “she”. It is the same in Japanese. Except, of course, that the pronoun is ∅.

Hanako-chan wa, (∅ ga) gakusei desu

Understand this and you will be a long way toward feeling how Japanese really works.

Here is the golden rule. Always remember it:

The wa particle never marks the grammatical subject of a sentence.

Taking the wa-marked noun as the grammatical subject is what leads to the belief that the diner is calling herself an eel. It turns Japanese inside out in our minds.

The grammatical subject of “As for Hanako-chan, she is a student” is not “Hanako-chan” – it is “she”. “As for Hanako-chan” merely defines who “she” is.

Similarly, the grammatical subject of Hanako-chan wa gakusei desu is not Hanako-chan, it is ∅. Hanako-chan wa merely defines who ∅ is.

Understand this in simple sentences, and much more complex Japanese will begin to form a correct pattern in your mind.

One may think this is splitting hairs, since in this case (and in a large number of cases) the no-pronoun grammatical subject and the wa-marked topic happen to refer to the same thing, and indeed one defines the other. But that is not always the case. And that is the cause of the unagi confusion.

So let us finally return to the eel that has been so patiently awaiting us.

私はウナギです

Watashi wa unagi desu

is often spoken by a member of a party of diners. It means “As for me, it (=the thing I will have) is eel (as opposed to Hanako-chan who is having omuraisu)”. When spoken by a single diner it still means literally (if you want the literal meaning – which is certainly not “I am an eel”) “As for me (as opposed to any other customer), it (= the thing I will have) is eel”.

You see the desu does not refer to watashi, which, being marked with wa, cannot be the grammatical subject of the sentence. It refers to the actual subject of the sentence, which is the no-pronoun ∅. The no-pronoun – just like English pronouns – is determined by context.

Literally the sentence means

Watashi wa, (∅ ga) unagi desu

As for me, (it is) an eel

What we are talking about here is “what I will eat”. Therefore that is the “it”, the ∅ or no-pronoun, of this statement.

There is no doubt whatever about what ∅/“it” is since either it is the subject of an actual conversation (Hanako-chan has just ordered omuraisu or the waitress has asked “what will you have?”) or it is obvious from the fact that the waitress is a waitress and has approached your table. She has not come to ask you for a stock-market tip. Or if she has, she will say so. If she doesn’t, it can be safely assumed that the unspoken question is “what will you have?”, which determines the ∅ or “it” of the reply. The watashi wa (which can very well be omitted, especially when the diner is not one of a party) is merely distinguishing the person (as distinct from other persons) to whom the ∅/“it” pertains.

Really, it is as simple as that.

Did you know what “it” was in that last sentence? Of course you did – even though it was quite abstract: “the gist of this article, the subject I am trying to explain”.

In Japanese I would have said

こんなに簡単です

Konna ni kantan desu (= ∅ ga konna ni kantan desu)

No written “it”, but just as clear.

Chapter Three

The Ga Is Always With Us

The fundamental structure of Japanese

The previous chapter was my first foray into the area of Japanese structure, and as I said it was largely a recap of what I had learned from Dr. Rubin.

One important point that Dr. Rubin did not make is this:

As we have seen, literally, the sentence

私はウナギです

Watashi wa unagi desu

means

Watashi wa, ∅ ga unagi desu.

As for me, it is an eel

Wa never marks the subject of a sentence for one simple reason.

Ga always does that job. Every Japanese sentence has a subject. And the subject is always marked by ga.

Always.

Now of course you have seen hundreds of sentences with no ga in them. But we already know the reason for that.

When the subject is ∅, the Japanese equivalent of “it”, since the pronoun is invisible, its accompanying ga is invisible too. But it is still there.

We can call this the “logical ga”.

So what does ga actually do?

It marks the grammatical subject.

Another way to put this is to say that it marks the doer of an action (like walking) or the manifester of a quality (like being red). This is not quite the same thing as being the subject in English, but as we will see later, in Japanese, it is.

As you know, a correct Japanese sentence can only end in one of three ways (aside from any sentence-ender particles).

1. A verb, or doing word

さくらが歩く

Sakura ga aruku

Sakura walks

2. The copula (da/desu), which is a being word. It tells us that A is B.

私はアメリカ人です

Watashi wa Amerikajin desu (=watashi wa, ∅ ga Amerikajin desu)

I am an American

花がきれいだ

Hana ga kirei da

A flower is pretty

3. A verb-like i-adjective (the other kind of being word)

鉛筆が赤い

Enpitsu ga akai

A pencil is red

I-adjectives, as we will see later, contain the da-element, so they can end a sentence on their own, even though desu can be added to indicate formality.

All valid Japanese sentences are of one of these three types. In all cases something is either doing or being something.

And the thing that is doing or being must be marked (either visibly or invisibly) by ga.

To make this clearer, we may note that ga actually does have a counterpart in English, though it only applies to people:

“I” = watashi ga (“me” = watashi wo, watashi ni or any particle other than ga)

“She” = kanojo ga (“her” = kanojo wo etc.)

“He” = kare ga (“him” = kare wo etc.)

So, when we say that

私はアメリカ人です

Watashi wa Amerikajin desu (=watashi wa, ∅ ga Amerikajin desu)

can be most literally translated as “as for me, I am an American”, we have already answered the question as to what logical particle the ∅ invisible pronoun must take. “I” in English can only ever be watashi ga in Japanese.

If we assume any logical particle other than ga after the no-pronoun in

Watashi wa, ∅? Amerikajin desu

then the translation becomes

“As for me, me am an American”

Indeed, we can use this to check whether a particle should be ga. Just “personify” the noun and make it a pronoun. For example:

“The pencil is red”

What is the correct particle? Well, let’s make the pencil a girl. We have to say “she is red”, not “her is red”, so we know that the Japanese must be

鉛筆が赤い

Enpitsu ga akai

The pencil is the doer, and what she is doing is being red. We can use this in much more complex situations too.

So, to recap, every Japanese sentence must have two things:

1. A doing or being word (verb, copula or i-adjective)

2. A ga-marked subject (visible or invisible) that is the do-er or be-er of 1

There are no exceptions. If it doesn’t have those two things, it isn’t a sentence. It may have a lot of other things, but it must have those two.

The being or doing word is always visible, and it can be the only visible thing. For example:

疲れた

Tsukareta (=watashi ga tsukareta)

Became tired (= I became [i.e., am] tired)

This all seems very simple, but it does appear to throw up some problems. I say “appear” advisedly because they are problems in appearance only.

The most commonly perceived problems come with sentences like

（私は）ケーキが好きです

(Watashi wa) keeki ga suki desu

usually “translated” as “(I) like cake”

and

（私は）クレープが食べたい

(Watashi wa) creepu ga tabetai

usually “translated” as “(I) want to eat crepes”

In fact, the crepe example has been specifically used by a very prominent writer on Japanese to “prove” that there is no grammatical subject in Japanese(!)

The problem, however, lies not with the Japanese subject.

It lies with the practice of not translating the sentences.

Neither of the “translations” given above is really a translation at all. At least not a literal translation. It is what the French call a version – that is, rather than translating what is actually written, they are saying something similar that an English speaker is more likely to have said.

Now if we were in the business of translating (or rather localizing) a novel or an anime there would be nothing wrong with that. We are putting the Japanese into natural, understandable English.

But when textbooks pretend that this is actually a translation, it leads to serious problems. They probably think they are making life easier for the students. Or perhaps they really believe it is a translation. I don’t know. But while it may make life marginally easier in the very short term, it leads to frustration and misunderstanding, not even in the long term. Very likely by the next lesson.

It leads students to think that Japanese is full of inexplicable exceptions. That ga does not always mark the subject, because the subject of “I want to eat crepes” is obviously “I”, and not the ga-marked crepes. It leads people who really know a lot about Japanese to declare absurdities like “Japanese has no subject”.

And why does all this happen? Because textbook writers and others insist on treating Japanese as if it worked like English.

Japanese is not an inherently difficult language. But (surprisingly enough) it is not English. It is Japanese, and Japanese does not always have the same idea about what or who can act as a subject or “doer”.

The Japanese ideas on these matters are not difficult to understand. But we do need to acknowledge them and take the trouble to know what they are. Something most textbooks seem incapable of doing.

Let’s do it now.

End note for adventurers

Before proceeding to the next chapter, I would just like to offer an aside. In case anyone thinks I am stressing the ga-marked subject too much, let me respond that one can’t stress it too much!

The modular nature of Japanese means that in the later, more complex, sentence-dungeons in your Japanese adventure, various subject-predicate pairs may be stacked up as part of the overall subject. It can feel daunting, but there is no cause for panic. It is all very logical and manageable, provided you keep a clear head.

Most of the time, the key to breaking down the bigger monsters is to identify the ga-marked subject of the whole sentence and then to identify which of several possible doing/manifesting words is actually the target of this “primary ga”.

It isn’t as daunting as it looks at first, but it is very difficult unless you are completely clear-headed about the existence and function of the ga-marked subject. If you are, the apparent puzzles are usually quite easily solved.

It is therefore extremely important to clear away the mental fuzz that surrounds the subject in traditional English explanations, which (to mix the metaphor shamelessly) start you off on completely the wrong foot.

All right. Curtain. Next chapter.

Chapter Four

Upside-Down Japanese

How the textbooks are teaching Eihongo

The term “Japlish” is used to describe the phenomenon of Japanese speakers writing “English” that is still structured as if it were Japanese. It always looks kind of cute. The counterpart of this is “Eihongo”, Japanese written by English speakers but still structured like English.

The standard textbooks do not actually teach students to write Eihongo, but unfortunately they do, almost without exception, teach them to understand Japanese in an Eihongo manner.

This matters because understanding Japanese through an Eihongo lens often means not correctly understanding it at all.

In learning basic Japanese grammar, we all used standard texts like Genki or Tae Kim. We learned a lot from them. They are very useful and thorough.

However, there are a number of things that they don’t explain. They tend to treat Japanese grammar as if it were West European grammar. With the same categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.

This is helpful for grasping the concepts.

But…

The “classic” Western-grammar-based explanations do falsify Japanese to some extent and this makes it much harder to get an intuitive grasp of the language.

So let’s look at the concepts of “doing” and “being” and how they can get turned upside down in textbook translations.

English, which is a very “ego-based” language, draws a strong distinction between doing and being. Japanese does so much less and very differently.

Elsewhere I have pointed out how the -tai (“want to”) form of a verb essentially turns it into an i-adjective, and how it can in many cases now be used either like a verb or like an adjective. I wrote:

アンパンが食べたい

Anpan ga tabetai

(I want to eat anpan, or literally, anpan is making-me-want-to-eat-it)

and

アンパンを食べたい

Anpan wo tabetai (I want to eat anpan)

are both grammatically correct and frequently used.

The first treats tabetai like an “adjective”, as in

えんぴつが赤い

Enpitsu ga akai

The pencil is red

The second treats it more like a “verb” as in

ミルクを飲む

Miruku wo nomu

I drink milk

Now, thinking in English, some people may say: “That’s nonsense. Anpan ga tabetai means ‘I want to eat anpan’. Clearly it is a verb, not an adjective.”

But note that the ga particle marks the doer. So if tabetai is a verb, the anpan is the one that is doing it!

Does that seem very odd? It shouldn’t. You have already seen many similar things.

For example, in your very early lessons you came across sentences like

私はケーキが好きです。

Watashi wa keeki ga suki desu

usually translated as “I like cake”

Now note that suki is a na-adjective (adjectival noun). And its target is not watashi, it is keeki. Grammatically speaking, it is the cake that does the “being-liked”.

So, when I said that

アンパンが食べたい

Anpan ga tabetai

usually translated as “I want to eat anpan”

is treating tabetai like an adjective, I meant precisely that. It works in exactly the same way here as the adjective suki in the cake example.

This may be hard to grasp at first, but understanding it will make many more complex Japanese sentences that seem impenetrable suddenly fall into place.

The thing to realize is that while this may seem strange to the English mind, it is quite simple and natural. In fact, it is not even specifically “Japanese”.

In the Spanish sentence

Me gusta el tequila

usually translated as “I like tequila”

the target of the verb gusta (like) is not me (to me), it is tequila. English speakers have trouble with this one too. It is the tequila that does the being-liked!

I mention the Spanish only to show that there is nothing oriental and strange about these Japanese expressions. They are a very natural human form of communication. We just need to adjust our minds to them.

The key to the apparent oddness of these forms of speech really lies in the Western, and particularly Anglo-Saxon, idea that only the human ego can actually “do” things. The Japanese (and even vestigially the Spanish) usage reflects a more “animist” notion that “doing” is something that takes place on many levels, often with “things” as the “doer”.

This mergence of what we think of as “adjective” and “verb” works the other way too. Verbs in Japanese can do the work that adjectives normally do in English. Again, Japanese tends to reflect the idea that it isn’t only the human ego that “does” things.

For example, in English we say “That is too big”. “Too big” is an adjectival phrase, similar to saying “That is red”.

But in Japanese we say

それが大きすぎる。

Sore ga ookisugiru

That is too big

Ookisugiru is not an adjective. It is a verb. Ookii is an adjective, but by adding sugiru we have morphed it (see the chapter on “morphin’ modularity”) into a verb. The thing (whatever it is) is doing the act of being too big.

Similarly, in Japanese we are rather more prone than in English to say that a thing “became lost” rather than that we lost it. We are attributing the action of becoming lost to the thing itself.

This last point is interesting because it is an expression that does exist in English. We can say “it got lost”, but it is considered childish and discouraged.

In this case there is a quasi-moral reason, about “taking responsibility”, but in fact it goes much deeper than that. The passive voice exists in English grammar, but it is currently strongly discouraged. This is a cultural prejudice, and the prejudice is: that there should always be a human agent, a human ego, at the forefront of every action.

This cultural prejudice has shaped the English language for centuries and helped to make it what it is. It continues to shape the language today. The passive voice may eventually disappear altogether, or be deemed “ungrammatical”.

Of course, I am not saying that Japanese people really think that cake does the being-liked or a hat actively does the being-too-big. But they are perfectly happy with that way of putting things. If we can loosen our English prejudice and become happy with this form of expression too, Japanese will become much easier. We are not constantly trying to turn sentences inside out to make them fit what they would be in English.

Let us take another very common example. Let’s look at the word wakaru, which in English is usually translated as “understand” or “know”.

Again, this translation requires turning Japanese sentences inside out in our heads.

私の言う意味が分かりますか

Watashi no iuimi ga wakarimasu ka?

gets translated as “Do you understand what I mean?” However, the ga-marked target of wakarimasu is not “you” (which isn’t even explicitly there as a word), it is iuimi (meaning).

Now this is honestly not difficult. The sentence actually means

“Is my meaning clear (to you)?”

Why isn’t it translated that way? Because English has such a strong prejudice for bringing the human “doer” (in this case the understander) to the forefront. Therefore the literal translation above sounds a bit odd and rather more forceful than the original Japanese.

In English, people nearly always opt for “do you understand?” when asking such questions. So the “do you understand” translation is the most natural.

But when we are thinking in Japanese, we need to get rid of that translation and think “Japanesely”. Otherwise we are inverting things in our heads and making them harder to understand, especially when we get to more complex sentences using the same concepts.

A famous older Japanese textbook was called Japanese Is Possible. While that seems rather a modest claim, I think the title is in fact a subtle joke:

（私は）日本語ができる

(Watashi wa) nihongo ga dekiru

would normally be translated as “I can (speak) Japanese”.

However, notice that the ga (doer) particle is actually attaching dekiru to nihongo, not to watashi. What the sentence literally means is

“(In relation to me) Japanese is possible”

Hence, I think, the somewhat curious title of the book.

Again we can see why the usual translation is “I can speak Japanese”. The literal meaning, while – uh – possible in English, sounds very strange and unnatural.

The thing to understand here is that while I have argued before that anime translations can never be accurate, the phenomenon in fact goes much deeper than that. Even the simple textbook explanations of what basic things mean are not accurate.

In many cases, they do not tell us what the Japanese words actually say. They tell us how we would say a similar thing in English.

I am sure many people go through life thinking wakaru means “understand” and suki means “like” and wondering why Japanese sentences are constructed so mysteriously.

This is one reason, for example, why many people find Japanese particles so difficult. If the adjective suki were really somehow functioning as a verb meaning “like”, then surely

ケーキが好きです

Keeki ga suki desu

should be

ケーキを好きです

Keeki wo suki desu

because ga marks the doer (including the manifester of an adjectival quality) and wo marks the thing being done-to.

Many people, I am sure, just decide that Japanese particles are “inscrutable” and there are a lot of “exceptions” to learn.

Actually there is nothing inscrutable about them at all, and there are very few exceptions in Japanese.

But we do have to start thinking in Japanese. Just as we need to wean ourselves off Romaji early on (and break the ingrained Romaji-link in our minds) and start thinking in kana/kanji, so we also need to wean ourselves off “translation Japanese” like “I like coffee” and “Do you understand my meaning?”

In order to immerse ourselves in Japanese we need to think in Japanese.

Chapter Five

Understanding the Ga and Wo Particles

Make Japanese grammar work for you instead of against you

by Cure Tadashiku

Cure Dolly once wrote “In a conjuring act you watch the magician’s hands. In a Japanese sentence, you watch the particles”.

Best advice ever. Once you understand what the particles really mean, it will never let you down.

So let us look at ga vs. wo. These two particles are really the very basis of Japanese grammar.

If you can understand them properly, they will work for you and make Japanese grammar relatively easy. If you understand them improperly, they will work against you and make the grammar seem like a vague guessing game or a list of meaningless “exceptions” that you have to learn.

Unfortunately, the way the particles are taught in schools and in the standard textbooks tends to leave them working against you at least some of the time. And if they seem confusing and contradictory some of the time, then we tend to lack full confidence in them all the time.

If we are confused between ga and wa we will speak somewhat unnatural-sounding Japanese and miss some of the finer nuances of what we read and hear.

But if we are confused between ga and wo we will speak nonsense-Japanese and have very little idea of what we are hearing and reading. Unfortunately, confusing ga and wo is precisely what the standard textbook explanations lead us to do in a number of cases.

As Cure Dolly pointed out, the “problem” English speakers (and textbooks) have with ga vs. wo is closely akin to a similar problem that they have in Spanish.

When I attended Spanish class, people had terrible trouble with sentences like

Me gusta el tequila (usually translated as “I like tequila”)

I politely suggested that “gusta” should be translated as “pleasing” rather than “like”. Because that is what it means: “Tequila is pleasing to me”.

The doer, the agent, the subject – call it what you will – is “el tequila”. What it is doing is pleasing the speaker (who is therefore the object of its action).

This is exactly what is going on in Japanese when the ga and wo particles seem to be reversed in meaning. They aren’t. They never are.

My Spanish teacher and class (plus, of course, the textbook) were so locked into seeing Spanish through English eyes that they never took my advice and continued to believe that “gusta” meant “like”, with the implication that Spanish “me” means English “I” (=watashi ga) in this instance, when in fact it can only ever mean English “(to) me”. Naturally, the students continued to find that piece of grammar unfathomable and as a result were vaguer and more uncertain about Spanish grammar as a whole.

In Japanese, problems like that are much more common than in Spanish, and the solution is not quite the same.

Because in Japanese, the particle is what makes the difference.

There are various cases where the particles seem to the English mind to have “changed places” – potential verbs, the -tai form, verbs like wakaru etc. These are cases where the supposed object, rather than the subject, takes the ga particle. And just to make things even more confusing, very often it can also take wo, even though ga is more usual.

This leaves many people who have learned standard textbook grammar feeling that the situation is hopeless and you might as well just pick a particle out of a hat and hope for the best.

But there is nothing random or confusing about this, once one understands that the ga and wo particles are always consistent. They are like the speed of light in astrophysics. By realizing that they have a constant value, you can measure everything else by them.

If ga is marking something, then that something must be the subject of the sentence. If wo is marking it, then it is the object.

Let’s take an example of the potential form:

鳥が聞こえる

Tori ga kikoeru

The bird is audible / A bird can be heard

鳥を聞こえる

Tori wo kikoeru

(I) can hear a bird

As you see, there is a subtle difference, and that difference is marked by the use of either ga or wo. It is precisely because their function is stable and unchanging that Japanese can express each nuance so economically.

In the case of -tai form, Cure Dolly points out that both anpan ga tabetai and anpan wo tabetai are grammatically correct and commonly used (though the ga-form is much more usual). I would add that they don’t mean precisely the same thing, although the meaning is close.

アンパンを食べたい

Anpan wo tabetai

means literally

“(I) want to eat anpan”

This is what an English speaker would expect. The anpan is the wo-marked object (the wanted), and the implied “I” is therefore the ga-marked subject (the wanter).

However, this is not the usual way of saying it. Much more common is

アンパンが食べたい

Anpan ga tabetai

This is the one that confounds English speakers. Its literal meaning is something like

“Anpan is making (me) want to eat it”

Anpan is the ga-marked subject, so the implied “me” must be the wo-marked object.

To the English-speaking mind this is a very unnatural way of putting it (though not actually impossible even in English). A Spanish speaker would probably find it somewhat more comfortable.

Is there a difference in meaning? Yes, a subtle difference. The second and more natural form puts the emphasis on the anpan. Anpan is so delicious that it makes me want to eat it.

Anpan wo tabetai puts more emphasis on one’s own feeling. I really want to eat anpan. And since it is the more unusual construction, it is really stressing that desire to eat it.

I suspect that “ga tabetai” also feels somewhat more civil since one is not putting oneself so much at the center, which may be partly why that form is so much preferred.

The difference is subtle and it is certainly not necessary to master it at an early stage. I very likely haven’t mastered it fully yet myself.

What is necessary is to understand that the ga and wo particles, rather than being odd adjuncts that behave erratically, are central.

They are not just being slapped in at random or changing their function without notice. They always do the same thing.

Usually the particles radically affect the sentence. The difference between “I ate the cake” and “the cake ate me” is significant, and it is the particles that tell us which of the two things happened.

Sometimes the difference is only subtle. The difference between “anpan is making me want to eat it” and “I want to eat anpan” is very subtle.

But it is the same difference. Wherever they are, the ga and wo particles are always doing the same job. Day in, day out.

Like the speed of light, they are absolutely constant, and you can gauge everything else by them.

Chapter Six

Logical vs. Non-Logical Particles

Meet the Queen and King of Japanese

There are only a small number of one-character in-sentence (as opposed to sentence-ender or conjunction) particles, and they fall into two distinct types: logical and non-logical particles.

They can be seen as two groups or families, and at the head of these groups are the Queen and the King of Japanese. You already know them well. Queen Wa, the head of non-logical connections, and King Ga, the head of the logical particles.

We have already discussed the way they both work and how that is a little different from what people sometimes assume. We are now going to look at the nature of logical particles and the contrast between them and non-logical connections.

The Logical Particles

One could call this group the “grammatical particles”, because they are the ones that essentially do what Europeans call “grammar”. However, I prefer the term “logical” because the topic-comment structure governed by Queen Wa is just as much grammar as the subject-object structure governed by King Ga. It is just that it barely exists (at least structurally) in European languages.

You probably know why we consider ga as the king. Ga is the one logical particle that no sentence can be without. A sentence can have nothing but a ga-marked subject (visible or invisible) and a doing/manifesting word, but without those two things it isn’t a sentence. Ga is thus the only necessary particle to a sentence.

The logical particles correspond quite closely to the case system used in Latin, Greek and German. They mark the functions performed by the nouns to which they are attached.

Old English also used the case system, and there are still a few remnants of it left in modern English. As we have noted, I, he and she (as opposed to me, him and her) mean respectively watashi ga, kare ga and kanojo ga. Also, who (as opposed to whom) means dare ga, but since most people now use who when they mean whom, that may not be very helpful! Whom seems to be going the way of all the older case modifications. Of course, this is only the tiny remnant of a case system because it only has two cases and only applies to a few pronouns.

The full case system is very useful. It makes language much more precise and economical. The disadvantage of the European case system is that it is very complex and full of bothersome exceptions. One writer described classical Latin and Greek as “a maze of case endings” and wondered that everyday people on the farm and in the market could really use them.

Well, they stopped doing that pretty soon. Just as English dropped the Germanic case system, French, Italian and Spanish dropped the Latin case system. It was very useful and very precise, but it was just more trouble than it was worth!

Japanese packs all the advantages of the case system into a format that is ridiculously simple and (as we have shown), if you don’t mix it up with concepts from other languages, absolutely regular.

You don’t have to modify each noun in a variety of confusing ways. You just have to pop a one-character particle after the noun. And that character never changes its form or its function. As Apple used to say, “It just works”.

The Japanese logical particles are the case system done right!

Interestingly, the only case to survive fully in the English language also uses a particle, which makes it simple enough even for people who can no longer understand whom.

It is the genitive, or possessive, case and it is marked by the particle ’s, which works just like the Japanese particle no. All you do is pop the particle on the end of a word and you have the possessive case:

メアリーの本

Mearii no hon

Mary ’s book

If all the Old English cases had been marked by particles instead of using the ridiculously complicated Indo-European declension-based system, English would probably still have a fully functioning case system.

The main logical particles are ga, wo, ni, no, de and he. I won’t go into their functions here as you probably already know them, and for the most part the textbooks don’t tell you confusing things about them beyond what we clear up in this book.

For case-wonks, I will just mention the interesting fact that the less common particle yo marks what in Latin is the vocative case. The one that got translated into English as “O King” or “O table”. A little obscure but useful if you like magical stories.

水よ、レモネードになれ！

Mizu yo, remoneedo ni nare!

O water, become lemonade!

Logical vs. Non-Logical Particles

The true non-logical particle is wa, and she is as important to Japanese as ga is. That is why we call her the Queen.

What I mean by non-logical is that she does not tell us anything about the logical relation of one noun to another. She does not tell us if the noun is doing something, having something done to it, is a destination or a place where we are doing something, or anything of that sort. That is the work of the logical particles.

As we have already discussed at length, wa can conceal logical particles. In

私はアメリカ人です

Watashi wa Amerikajin desu (=watashi wa, ∅ ga Amerikajin desu)

wa is concealing ga. She can also conceal wo, ni or other particles. And it is always clear from context what she is concealing. We need to know that she can conceal particles and be aware of what she is concealing, or we will misunderstand the sentence.

However, we also need to understand – and this is the main reason for the present chapter – that wa is not just a particle concealer. She is a particle in her own right.

The structure

Wa-marked topic + comment

is fundamental to Japanese. This is why we call wa the Queen. It is a non-logical structure for the reason stated above. It does not tell us the precise relation between the topic noun and what is going on in the rest of the sentence. That is the job of the logical particles, whether they are explicit or implicit (hidden).

However, wa does not always hide a logical particle. Take the sentence

私はケーキが好きです

Watashi wa keeki ga suki desu

In relation to me, cake is likeable (or is manifesting the quality of being liked)

Here the cake is the ga-marked actor, but watashi wa is not implying a ∅ no-pronoun and therefore is not concealing a logical particle. The relation is a non-logical one, but no less precise for that.

Now it could be argued that since the cake’s action is affecting the speaker maybe the speaker should take ni as the affected party. But this isn’t how Japanese works. Neither, interestingly, can it be paraphrased at all sensibly in English.

“In relation to me, the cake is being likeable to me”

unlike

“As for me, I am an American”

sounds like an unnecessary and clumsy redundancy. And it is. “In relation to me the cake is being likeable” is sufficient. It tells us all we need to know without invoking the subject-object pattern that English so much prefers.

In this sentence there is a subject (which there must always be), and the subject is affecting the speaker. But the speaker, watashi, is not the object logically or grammatically. She is the topic, on which the likeability of the cake is a comment.

To put it in subject-predicate terms, keeki is the subject, and its predicate (the thing that is telling us something about the subject) is suki desu (=is like-making), but watashi is not part of the subject or part of the predicate. Neither is it a separate subject or predicate in itself. It is the topic on which the subject-predicate sentence is a comment.

We also need to understand that

私はアメリカ人です

Watashi wa Amerikajin desu (=watashi wa, ∅ ga Amerikajin desu)

is also a topic-comment sentence. We can also say watashi ga Amerikajin desu, and that isn’t a topic-comment sentence. Discussing the difference in implication between the two isn’t what we are doing here. It has been well done elsewhere, notably by Dr. Rubin. The point here is simply that every sentence with wa in it is a topic-comment sentence and that what we have said in the earlier chapters does not (and cannot) reduce Queen Wa to a mere logical-particle concealer.

In a sentence like

私はケーキを食べた

Watashi wa keeki wo tabeta (=watashi wa ∅ ga keeki wo tabeta)

As for me, I ate the cake

we have a subject-object sentence with the ∅ no-pronoun as the ga-marked subject. However, we should not forget that this is not only a subject-object sentence. It is also a topic-comment sentence.

We need to understand the logic of the sentence or we will fall into eel-errors and get very confused by Japanese at a later and more complex stage. But we also need to avoid the opposite mistake of thinking that the sentence can or should be reduced to its logical structure.

The reason I put Queen before King in the title of this chapter is that I feel (and this is just a kind of instinct that I won’t try to argue for) that the wa-sentence is the archetypal Japanese sentence.

In any case, while we must understand the underlying logic, we must also understand the non-logical “right-brain” conjunction formed by wa, and understand that the primary “feel” and structure of a wa-sentence is topic-comment. Otherwise we will lose the nuance.

The Queen and King can work together in harmony in the same sentence with neither one trying to conquer the other’s territory.

The Mysteries of Mo

The Queen does not have as big a retinue as the King, but we should note that the mo particle, whom we might fancifully call the Queen’s handmaiden, also functions like a non-logical particle and can conceal a logical particle:

私もアメリカ人です

Watashi mo (+ga) Amerikajin desu

I also am an American

Note that while watashi mo does not mean “as for me” and does not imply a ∅ no-pronoun, it does force us to use “I” and “am” in English. Which means that the ga-function is being invoked.

In

私はケーキも食べた

Watashi wa keeki mo tabeta (=watashi wa ∅ ga keeki mo+wo tabeta)

As for me, I ate cake too (i.e., as well as other things)

mo is concealing or implying the wo particle. It is not the topic, because watashi is the wa-marked topic as well as implying the ga-marked ∅ no-pronoun subject.

However, mo can also function as the pure non-logical topic marker, as in

私もケーキが好きです

Watashi mo keeki ga suki desu

In relation to me also, cake is likeable (or is manifesting the quality of being liked)

As with the wa version, there is no implied logical particle and mo has become the topic marker.

To recap: In order to correctly understand Japanese, we need to:

- 1.  Know that the topic-comment structure often conceals a logical particle and that in order to understand the logic of the sentence we need to be aware of what the concealed logical particle is.

- 2.  Be alive to the fact that the topic-comment structure is valid Japanese grammar and does not need to conceal a logical particle.

- 3. Be aware that even when the topic-comment structure does conceal a logical particle, that does not replace the topic-comment structure. Topic-comment sentences are always topic-comment sentences, even when they are also subject-predicate sentences.* All sentences with wa in are topic-comment sentences.

* Of course, every sentence must contain a subject and a predicate, but I am speaking here of those sentences where subject-predicate is the logical relation between the wa-marked topic-noun and the rest of the sentence (i.e., sentences where the ga is “hidden” behind ∅).

Chapter Seven

The Point about the Passive

(It isn’t really passive at all)

The statement that Japanese has no subject – unfortunately made by some people who really ought to know better – is not only, in my submission, incorrect, it is also rather ironic.

I say this because of all the European grammatical terms used to describe Japanese, “grammatical subject” is among the few that we can wholeheartedly apply without hesitation or caveats.

Terms like noun, verb and adjective (as we shall soon see) require some qualification. Adjective in particular is a word I only use for convenience, in the knowledge that the European adjective is really a different animal from the various things that can go by that name in Japanese. The term “conjugation” is often a misnomer. Conjugation does happen in Japanese, but very often what is termed a “conjugation” is really a transformation of one word into a new and different word – an entirely different thing from European conjugation. We will be discussing this very shortly.

However, the grammatical subject, as we have shown, not only exists in Japanese, it exists in every single Japanese sentence. If there is no subject, there is no sentence – only an exclamation.

And the subject of a sentence is always the ga-marked doer of an action or the manifester of a quality (like largeness or yellowness). I tend to put it this way, rather than using the subject-predicate model, because I think it is clearer. But the two always coincide in Japanese. In English, however, they do not always coincide.

Most notably they do not coincide in what English calls the passive voice. For example:

“I was hit by Mary”

The subject of this sentence is “I”, but the agent – the doer of the action – is Mary.

A critic of my statement that every Japanese sentence has a ga-marked doer or manifester pointed out that in the passive the receiver of an action, not the doer, is marked by ga and therefore I was talking through my hat.

Now as a matter of fact I had specifically stated that the passive was an exception to this rule, so the criticism was rather unjustified.

I in fact went as far as to say that in the passive things seem to be reversed. While we must say that every sentence has a ga-marked doer or manifester, the passive appears to be an exception to this rule, because in passive sentences ga does not mark the doer.

But I was wrong.

And the reason I was wrong is that I was doing precisely what I set out to avoid – looking at Japanese as if it were English and becoming befuddled by European grammatical terms into thinking that the same thing is happening in Japanese as in European languages.

In English, as we have just seen, the subject and the doer part company in the passive. But in Japanese they never part company. And every Japanese sentence has a ga-marked doer or manifester, either explicit or implicit.

Now since you may still be seeing the Japanese “passive” through European lenses (as most people do and I did until I learned better), let me explain.

When I made an exception of the “passive”, it was always with a certain hesitation. I would say things like “the passive seems to be an exception”. Because in my heart of hearts I felt it somehow wasn’t. When I heard or used the “passive” myself, the ga always seemed to be in the right place, just the same as in any other sentence. But I couldn’t understand clearly enough why.

It was after, in replying to my critic, I pointed out that I had made an exception of the passive, that my dear friend Cure Yasashiku put her finger on the thing that had been nagging me all along.

She wrote:

Actually, in thinking about it, I wonder if passive sentences are truly an “exception”. In Japanese, the linguistic term for the passive construction seems to be ukemi. The kanji for this mean “receiving body”. So from this, one could say that in a passive construction the subject is receiving an action. I do not think that one could really argue, in the sentence “I am receiving a gift”, that “I” is not the grammatical subject. What am I doing? I am receiving.

In a passive construction, it would seem to me that the subject is doing something and that is being the recipient of an action. So, in the sentence, the cake was eaten, the cake is being the recipient of the action of being eaten.

It may seem like a twist of logic, but I do not think that it is. “Receive” is a perfectly good verb, so just as the grammatical subject can receive something, it would seem to me that the grammatical subject can also receive an action, which is what passive constructions appear to be expressing.

Note the charming diffidence with which she drops this bombshell of unadulterated genius.

“Baka, baka, baka!” I thought. Referring, of course, to myself. Wasn’t I the one who pointed out that many Japanese so-called “conjugations” in fact create new words? Wasn’t I the one who was always warning against taking European grammar terms too seriously in a Japanese context?

Rather like the early-modern geographers who knew that there must be a continent in the far south to balance the preponderance of land in the north of the globe, I knew that the “passive” should not be, and probably really wasn’t, an exception to the universality of the ga-marked doer.

But I couldn’t quite see how it worked until Cure Yasashiku pointed out the last piece of the puzzle that had been staring me in the face all along.

As Cure Yasashiku says, “receive” itself is a perfectly good verb, and by “conjugating” a verb into the passive we are making it akin to that.

To make this point clearer, let us see how the (rather unusual for English) word “receive” works. If we say

“I received a gift”

clearly “I” is the doer. We may picture “I” holding out her hand to receive the gift. But the point to grasp is that we may equally well say

“I received an unexpected blow from behind”

and “I” is still just as much the doer and the subject of the sentence. It is not a passive sentence like “I was hit from behind”. It is an active sentence, but the actor isn’t doing anything other than grammatically.

As I said, in English, with its predilection for action and ego, this is a very rare kind of construction, but Japanese has a whole “conjugation” devoted to precisely this kind of sentence. And just as in English, it is not passive.

And in fact we are not conjugating at all. We are making a new word, which is the receiving-form of the action. Once again the European concept of conjugation, falsely applied to Japanese, can mislead us – and did mislead me, even though I should have known better.

This model does away with the idea that “doer” and “subject” part company in the passive. It is probably more difficult to grasp this if one’s Japanese remains based in English, because in English there is no “passive conjugation” – or more correctly, receiving-verb.

In English we say

“The cake was eaten by Mary”

Clearly while the subject is the cake, the doer is Mary.

But in Japanese we say

ケーキはメアリーに食べられた

Keeki ga Mearii ni taberareta

Not only is the ga-marked subject the cake, but the ga-marked doer of the action taberareru (to be eaten) is also the cake.

This is even clearer when we realize that Japanese “conjugation”, unlike European conjugation (which really is conjugation), often actually morphs a verb into a different verb or even another part of speech (more on this later).

So taberareru is not just (as in English) “eat” in another part of the sentence whose doer is still Mary. It is “being-eaten”, whose doer is the cake.

So it now becomes clear that the ga particle marks the doer of an action or the manifester of a quality with no exceptions at all – not even the “passive”.

And I put “passive” in quotation marks because it is the use of this highly misleading term that caused the confusion in the first place. Japanese most certainly has a grammatical subject, but what it does not have is a passive form – at least in the sense of anything that works the same way as the English passive voice.

It would avoid endless confusion and misinterpretation if we were to call this class of verbs “receptive verbs”, which is much closer to what they are called in Japanese and describes what they actually do, as opposed to what English does in a similar situation.

Chapter Eight

The Simple Secret of Sou

With receptive verbs (usually called the “passive”) we discussed how a word in Japanese can be changed into a new word. There are various ways that this can happen, and we are going to look at this in depth in the next chapter on modularity.

Before we plunge into that, though, let us take a brief pause to see a different form of word-morphing contrasted with something similar that does not create a new word. We can also see how understanding how the language actually works can eliminate the learning of apparently arbitrary sets of rules that most textbooks present us with.

Putting sou da/desu on the end of a word can represent either hearsay or similarity. Which of the two it means depends on seemingly subtle and arbitrary grammar rules.

But actually that confusing “list of rules” boils down to one simple secret.

Every grammar explanation I have seen makes it seem that there is a complex set of rules that just happen to be what they are and all you can do is learn them by brute force.

But that isn’t really true. Like much of Japanese, the rules make perfect logical and intuitive sense once you understand them.

Let’s take a look at the “rules” approach first.

One very authoritative website tells us that for the “seems like” meaning:

Verbs must be changed to the stem.

The i in i-adjectives must be dropped except for “ii”.

“ii” must first be conjugated to “yosa”.

For all negatives, the “i” must be replaced with “sa”.

This grammar does not work with plain nouns.

One might also add that na-adjectives have the sou added directly to them (rather than putting da/desu between the adjective and the sou as you do when you mean “I heard that…”). And of course, there is another set of “rules” for the “I heard” meaning.

What I am going to tell you is what you are actually doing when you are doing all this, and how knowing that makes it all very easy and intuitive.

Essentially, for the “seems like” meaning, you are grafting sou onto the word so that it becomes a new adjective.

For the “I heard that” meaning, you are completing the statement and then adding sou to mean “so I heard”.

Let’s see how they each work.

Sou meaning “seems like”

For the “seems like” meaning, you are morphing a verb or an adjective to become a new na-adjective.

美味しい　→　美味しそう

oishii (i-adj: delicious) becomes oishisou (na-adj: delicious-looking)

満足　→　満足そう

manzoku (na-adj: contentment/contented) becomes manzokusou (na-adj: contented-looking)

落ちる　→　落ちそう

ochiru (vb: fall) becomes ochisou (na-adj: fall-looking: i.e., looks as if it’s about to fall)

Each time, you are creating a new na-adjective ending in sou, which means

[original word]-looking or -seeming

Remember this and the rest makes sense. You don’t have to memorize each “rule” separately.

Sou meaning “I heard”

With the sou that means “I heard”, you are not grafting sou onto what comes before it. You are completing the statement and then adding the rider “so I heard”.

美味しいそうです

Oishii sou desu

It is delicious, so I hear

Note that this time we are not grafting sou onto oishii by removing the last i and replacing it with sou. We are completing the statement oishii (=it is delicious – remember that i-adjectives contain the “it is”/da/desu within themselves) and then adding the rider that this is what you have heard.

きれいだそうです

Kirei da sou desu

It is pretty, so I have heard

Na-adjectives do not contain da/desu within themselves, so we add da to the adjective to make it a complete statement before adding the rider sou desu.

(Note: we will be dealing in depth with i- and na-adjectives a little later)

So, let’s compare the two forms:

雨が降りそうです

Ame ga furisou desu

It is rainfall-looking (seems as if it will rain)

Contrast this with

雨が降るそうです

Ame ga furu sou desu

It is going to rain, so I have heard

In one case we graft sou onto the verb furu (using the masu-stem method of connection), making the new adjective furisou (=fall-seeming). In the other case we use the full verb furu, completing a sentence that can stand by itself:

雨が降る

Ame ga furu

It will rain (see the last chapter for why we assume this to be a future event)

and then add the sou rider. In English it may help to picture a comma between the statement and the sou desu (= “, so I have heard”).

Also, since nouns do not have a stem that can be used to graft something onto to make a new word (i.e., nouns do not “conjugate”), it is natural and obvious that the “-seeming” meaning cannot be used with nouns but the “I heard” meaning can.

So now it is easy

Once you know this, the whole list of “annoying rules” becomes simple and obvious. We are doing the same thing in each case, in the standard way that Japanese always does these things.

The only slightly tricky parts are

いい　→　よさそう

ii (good) becomes yosasou (good-seeming)

When you connect sou to ii (good) to make the adjective “good-seeming”, it becomes yosasou. This isn’t really confusing as ii always becomes yoi when it is conjugated in any way (and ii is mostly interchangeable with the older form yoi at other times too). For example, the past tense of ii is yokatta.

The only really exceptional thing is that nai becomes nasa when connected to sou to make a negative “doesn’t seem like” adjective.

頼りない　→　頼りなさそう

tayorinai (unreliable) becomes tayorinasasou (unreliable-seeming)

So all that list of mind-muddling rules boils down to one that actually doesn’t make instant sense once you know how it all works. And nasasou (unlikely) is a very useful word on its own, so you would be learning that anyway.

Cultural notes on sou meaning “seems like”

Words like omoshirosou (interesting-seeming) are much more used in Japanese than the English equivalents are. The reason for this is that in Japanese we tend not to express an experience directly unless we have had it directly. So if I have done a thing and think it is interesting I say omoshiroi, but if I haven’t done it but think it would be interesting I have to say omoshirosou.

In two cases the -sou adjective of a word doesn’t mean what you might think:

Kawaii means cute, but kawaisou doesn’t mean cute-looking. It means pitiable. Be careful not to call someone’s baby kawaisou!

Erai means great, magnificent, admirable. However, erasou doesn’t mean admirable-seeming. It means important-looking in the sense of presenting an impression of being important: i.e., arrogant or overbearing. Again, don’t call anyone erasou because you think she looks distinguished!

These are the only two common cases where the -sou adjective doesn’t mean what you expect.

I would add that these exceptional usages underline the fact that when we graft sou onto a word-stem, we are not “conjugating” the original word in the European sense. We are actually morphing it into a new word, whose meaning is generally predictable, but not inevitably so.

Which leads us to the next chapter.

Chapter Nine

Japanese Grammar: The Golden Key

Mighty Morphin’ Modularity

I sometimes liken Japanese immersion to an RPG. A great open world where there are many things to see and discover, treasures to be found, and monsters to overcome.

In some RPGs (like the Dragon Quest series), at a certain stage you can get a master key that will unlock various doors and treasure chests without your having the particular key for that item.

There is a key like that to Japanese grammar. It won’t unlock every door, but it will unlock a lot of them.

If you already have a reasonable grasp of basic Japanese grammar you half-know it already, but, like the real nature of adjectives, it is one of those things the textbooks don’t really spell out. And that is a pity, because once you grasp it fully, it makes so many “puzzling” things just fall naturally into place.

So what is the Golden Key to Japanese Grammar?

The key is the understanding that Japanese is a Modular Language. It works rather like Lego. It is continually fitting new parts onto words and transforming them into new words. By doing this, it does a lot of the work that in English is done by adding separate words.

We have explained in the previous chapter how sou is used to turn a verb or adjective into a new na-adjective. Let’s look here at some other examples.

The potential, causative and receptive (so-called “passive”) “conjugations” take a verb and turn it into a new verb. The new verb is always an ichidan (-ru) verb.

So

話す

hanasu (talk): a godan verb ending in す

when “conjugated” into the potential form becomes

話せる

hanaseru (can talk): an ichidan verb ending (of course) in る

I put “conjugated” in quotes because, while the word is useful, it is not fully accurate. It is a word borrowed from Western grammar and really only applies to Western grammar. We have not really “conjugated” hanasu in the Western-language sense. We have morphed it into a new ichidan verb that now works exactly like any other ichidan verb and can be re-morphed in the same way all ichidan verbs can.

How can ichidan verbs be morphed? Let’s remind ourselves.

We can, for example, morph any verb (ichidan or godan) into tai-form. This turns it from meaning “do-X” to “want-to-do-X”.

When we think about this, we can see that

a) By transforming a word, Japanese is doing what English does by adding other words, in this case “want to”.

b) It transforms the word into a different kind of word.

Just as

話す → 話せる

transforms the godan verb hanasu into the ichidan verb hanaseru, the -tai conjugation makes an even more radical change. Let’s see:

食べる taberu (eat) : verb

when “conjugated” to -tai form becomes

食べたい tabetai (want to eat): i-adjective

Verbs and Adjectives: What they never quite tell you

What? Wait! I-adjective? Isn’t it still a verb?

Well, this again is where Western grammar imposed on Japanese can make life harder. I am not suggesting that we abandon terms like “verb” and “adjective”, but I am saying we need to understand that they only partially fit Japanese words – rather like four-fingered gloves on a five-fingered hand.

In the next chapter, we will explain how i-adjectives are practically verbs. They work like verbs in most respects. Conversely, verbs “conjugated” to -tai or even the simple negative, -nai, are practically i-adjectives. They work almost identically.

For example:

アンパンが食べたい

Anpan ga tabetai

usually translated as “I want to eat anpan” but as Cure Tadashiku points out in her chapter on ga and wo particles, more accurately rendered as “Anpan is making me want to eat it”

and

アンパンを食べたい

Anpan wo tabetai

I want to eat anpan

are both grammatically correct and frequently used.

The first treats tabetai like an “adjective”, as in

えんぴつが赤い

Enpitsu ga akai

The pencil is red

The second treats it more like a “verb” as in

ミルクを飲む

Miruku wo nomu

I drink milk

The point is that the hard-and-fast distinction between Japanese “verbs” and “adjectives”, while useful up to a point, can become more confusing than helpful if taken too literally.

If we want, we can call the new word formed by a verb conjugated to -tai or -nai an “i-verb”. Actually it has the properties of both a verb and an adjective. But then, so do “real” verbs. Every verb is also an adjective. We just have to put it before a noun. In

女の子はご飯を食べている

Onnanoko wa gohan wo tabete iru

The girl is eating rice

tabete iru works as a verb. In

ご飯を食べている女の子

Gohan wo tabete iru onnanoko

The rice-eating girl (girl who is eating rice)

tabete iru works as an adjective.

We can do it with past-tense verbs too:

犬は本を食べた

Inu wa hon wo tabeta

The dog ate the book

本を食べた犬

Hon wo tabeta inu

The dog that ate the book

When morphed with -nai or -tai, a verb (which was always also an adjective) becomes even more adjective-like. It conjugates in all respects just like any other i-adjective. For example:

食べない

Tabenai (not eat)

conjugates just like any i-adjective. So the past tense is

食べなかった

tabenakatta (didn’t eat) – this is a real conjugation rather than a morph, by the way

食べたい

Tabetai (want to eat)

works exactly the same:

食べる → 食べたい

taberu (eat): verb → tabetai (want to eat): i-adjective

We can then “lego”-on -nai to the -tai-formed word to make the negative, using the regular i-adjective “glue-form” of replacing i with ku:

食べたい → 食べたくない

tabetai (want to eat) → tabetakunai (don’t want to eat): both i-adjectives, or i-verbs

and continue to conjugate if we want to:

食べたくない → 食べたくなかった

tabetakunai (don’t want to eat) → tabetakunakatta (didn’t want to eat)

The important point here is to see exactly what is going on.

Textbooks tend to confuse the issue by hanging on to Western concepts like “conjugation”. What is actually happening is that, while English adds words to express many concepts, Japanese turns one word into another word that carries the new meaning. Sometimes that process is really a conjugation in the European sense, but very often it isn’t.

Often the new word is a different kind of word. Godan verbs can transform into ichidan verbs. Verbs can transform into adjectives. Sou can transform i-adjectives and verbs into na-adjectives. If we let go of the concept of conjugation and realize that new words are being formed, it all makes a lot more sense.

And the wonderful thing is that, unlike Western languages’ conjugations, which really are conjugations and which have pages and pages of “irregular verbs”, Japanese lego-morphing is almost 100% regular.

Once you get used to how it works you realize that you have a huge box of morphing-blocks that always work the same way. You can build meanings step-by-step simply by applying the same regular rules.

It is very different from how English works, but it is in fact simpler and a lot more regular.

When you adjust your mind to how it really works (which involves divorcing it somewhat from the Western grammatical terminology imposed on it), it all becomes almost startlingly clear. And rather beautiful.

Chapter Ten

Japanese Adjectives Really Aren't Indescribable

Like most of Japanese grammar, i- and na-adjectives are simple, logical and beautiful. As far as I have seen (and I don’t claim to have seen everything), introductions to grammar do not explain them very clearly.

In a way I can see why. Their aim is to “cut to the chase” and tell you how to use them in practice. The trouble is, to my way of thinking, that this cutting-to-the-chase leaves the impression of a bundle of random quirky “facts” that you have to learn, rather than a complete, clear and beautiful system.

This in turn makes it harder to learn to use them correctly by instinct.

So let me tell you what I think everyone should know from day one of using i- and na-adjectives (but please use this in conjunction with a conventional explanation of their actual use if you aren’t familiar with it).

1. Na-adjectives are essentially nouns. They work like nouns. That is why they need “na”. (I’ll explain that bit in a moment.)

2. I-adjectives are close cousins of verbs. They “conjugate” like verbs. Na-adjectives don’t because nouns don’t “conjugate”.

3. The “is” function is built into i-adjectives. Kirei (na-adjective) means “pretty” (or “prettiness”). But utsukushii (i-adjective) does not mean “beautiful”; it means “is beautiful”.

Now something happens from lesson one that tends to throw this last important point into confusion. We learn

花がきれいです

Hana ga kirei desu

The flower is pretty (na-adj)

and

花が赤いです

Hana ga akai desu

The flower is red (i-adj)

So don’t the two kinds of adjective work identically? Don’t they both require desu?

No, they don’t. The desu on kirei is grammatically necessary. The desu on akai is only used to make the sentence desu/masu formality level. It serves no grammatical function.

That is why, in plain form, we say

花がきれいだ

Hana ga kirei da

花が赤い

Hana ga akai

Hana ga akai is the grammatically complete and proper way to say it. Hana ga kirei needs da.

And now that you know this, you are ready for the next important fact.

4. Na is a form of da.

“So that is why na-adjectives need na! Why didn’t anyone mention that?” you exclaim. So did I.

This na is in fact the “glue form” of da.

When we use da/desu to end a sentence we leave it in its usual form, but when we want to join it onto something we change it to na. So

花はきれいだ

Hana wa kirei da

The flower is pretty

but

きれいな花

Kirei na hana

The pretty flower

And once we understand this, we can now see why another set of “arbitrary rules” is in fact quite obvious and logical.

Connecting two i- or na-adjectives

So, when you connect two verb-like i-adjectives, what do you do? You do just what you do when you connect verbs to something. You put them into te-form.

小さくてかわいい

Chiisakute kawaii

is small and cute

(note that converting the final i to ku makes the “glue-form” that holds conjugations onto i-adjectives)

And what do you do with na-adjectives? Exactly the same thing.

But you can’t conjugate nouns, and na-adjectives are really nouns, aren’t they?

Exactly. And that is why na-adjectives need na/da/desu. And that does conjugate to te-form.

The te-form of da/desu is de. So

きれいで有名だ

Kirei de yuumei da

is pretty and famous

I think I spent about a month wondering why the de particle was used in such an unpredictable way here. Of course, this de is not the de particle. It is the te-form of that same na/da/desu that always has to appear after a na-adjective.

As you see, the process is identical for both types of adjective. Chiisai means “is small”. To make kirei mean “is pretty” (rather than just “pretty”, or really something closer to “prettiness”) you have to add na/da. Both are then put into te-form:

小さい　→　小さくて

chiisai → chiisakute (te-form of chiisai)

is small → is small and

きれいな　→　きれいで

kirei na (glue-form of kirei da) → kirei de (te-form of kirei da/na)

is pretty → is pretty and

Naturally, you can join an i-adjective to a na-adjective, or a na-adjective to an i-adjective, just so long as you use the appropriate te-form as the connector for the first one.

These are the things I wish I had known right from the start, so I am giving them to you. I hope they make this aspect of Japanese feel clearer, easier and more kirei for you just as they did for me.

Chapter Eleven

It’s Not Over

A link to the non-past

So far we have been talking about how textbook explanations make Japanese seem confusing by treating it as if it worked like English. However, I want to end this book by addressing one of the ironic instances where they make Japanese seem confusing by not treating Japanese as if it works like English when it actually does.

Although the cases seem opposite, I suspect that they may derive from the same cause. English grammatical concepts (especially those used in language learning) are largely inherited from French,* so in a few cases the European grammatical terminology does not fit English much better than it fits Japanese.

One important example for Japanese learners is the non-past tense, which is the “dictionary-form” of a word in both Japanese and English (but not French). While academic linguists may be more precise, most people, including most teachers, tend to understand the English “dictionary form” as a “present tense”.

So when we hear about the “non-past tense” in Japanese it can feel very intimidating. Who ever heard of a non-past tense? Why not have a present and a future like other languages? How do we use this strange non-past tense?

Well, as a matter of fact we use it in much the same way that we use the English non-past tense. It works very similarly. In English it gets called the present tense, but it is actually non-past.

Let me explain.

Phrases like “I eat”, “I walk” and so on get called “present tense”, but in fact they are rarely used as such.

Only a foreigner** ever says “I eat potatoes” meaning “I am eating potatoes right now”.

“I eat potatoes” usually means “I am in the general habit of eating potatoes”. Or we might say, “I eat potatoes every Friday”.

The “present tense” is also regularly used to indicate the future:

“Tomorrow we fly to New York”

“I take an exam on Friday”

“I meet my sister next week”

Admittedly English has a specific future tense:

“On Friday I will take an exam”

However, the so-called “present tense” is so often used to represent future events that it would be more accurate to call it non-past, just like the Japanese equivalent.

Remembering this, we can see that the Japanese non-past is used in much the same way as English. It is not identical, but if one realizes that English in fact has a fairly similarly-functioning non-past, the whole question of the Japanese non-past becomes much easier to handle.

ジャガイモを食べる

Jagaimo wo taberu

is usually translated as “I eat potatoes”, but it is more likely to mean “I eat potatoes (in general)” or “I will eat potatoes (tomorrow)” than to mean “I am eating them right now”.

That is most likely to be expressed as

ジャガイモを食べている

Jagaimo wo tabeteiru

which means not “I eat potatoes” but “I am eating potatoes”. As you see, it is the same as English. We don’t usually say “I eat potatoes” to mean “I am eating potatoes” in English either.

If you get a message saying

“I walked to the restaurant and now I eat ice cream”

you can be pretty sure that the sender is not a native English speaker.

Think about it this way and you realize that the mysterious Japanese “non-past tense” isn’t actually mysterious at all. In fact, it is pretty similar to English.

If you can use the English non-past tense, it is a very simple step to understanding the Japanese equivalent.

* One very good example of this is that people (including some dictionaries) habitually say things like “aruku means ‘to walk’”. I confess that I use this myself occasionally because it is a quick, if shoddy, way of indicating that a word is a verb. However, it is quite incorrect, and a student once complained (entirely properly) that it was confusing.

The expression clearly comes from West European languages like French and Spanish in which the dictionary form of a verb is the infinitive, which really does mean “to [verb]”. French marcher means “to walk” (and marche really is a present tense). But aruku does not mean “to walk”, and neither does “walk”. They both mean “walk”.

** The fact that foreign learners of English often do say “I walk” to mean that they are walking now, when native English speakers never in fact say that, is another example of the difficulties that can be caused by textbook grammar.

They say it not because they are foolish, but because they have been told in classes and textbooks that “I walk” is the English present tense, when in fact it is more like the Japanese non-past tense. Lacking sufficient immersion experience, they quite reasonably follow what the term “present tense” would seem to imply and so use unnatural English.

*** Gohon. There doesn’t seem to be a third footnote to this chapter, does there?

I guess this is where I say

おしまい

Goodbye and thank you for so patiently reading this book. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via Sun Daughter Press or the KawaJapa site, or at CureDolly@angelic.com

最後まで読んでくださってありがとうございました。

いつも日本語を頑張ってください。

Unlocking Japanese by Cure Dolly

© 2016 Sun Daughter Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Published by Sun Daughter Press

http://sundaughterpress.com

Also by Cure Dolly: An Alien Doll in Japan

Table of Contents

Title page

Table of contents

The Accidental Conspiracy

I Am Not an Eel

The Ga Is Always With Us

Upside-Down Japanese

Ga and Wo Particles

The Queen and King of Japanese

The Point about the Passive

The Simple Secret of Sou

Mighty Morphin' Modularity

Japanese Adjectives Really Aren't Indescribable

It's Not Over