Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan
From: tvp@gibdo.engr.washington.edu ()
Subject: THE QUICK AND DIRTY GUIDE TO JAPANESE GRAMMAR
(Posted) Message-ID: <1992Dec22.001355.16497@u.washington.edu>
Summary: So many people requested it, I decided to post!
(LONG!)
Organization: clearer than blir
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 00:13:55 GMT Lines: 683
There was pretty strong interest in my guide, so I decided
to post it. I didn't know so many people were reading this group. They
sure haven't been *posting* to it lately. Anyway, spin-off threads are
welcome as this group needs some life pumped into it. Thanks go to a recent
friend I made on the net named Jeff Friedl for providing the final impetus
to produce this. There was another person I talked with via e-mail who
said he was interested in such a thing, but the discussion occured between
the last time gibdo was backed up and the day gibdo's hard disk bit the
big one, so I lost his name and address and can't give proper credit.
THE QUICK AND DIRTY GUIDE TO JAPANESE
by Tad Perry
Many students of Japanese just want to communicate. Sure, they want to say things correctly as often as possible, but they also want to get into the language quickly and start mixing it up early. This QUICK AND DIRTY GUIDE TO JAPANESE was meant to help you do just that. It makes no pretense of being complete, but tries to pack the most *useful information* necessary to achieve the *goal of using Japanese* in the *shortest possible space*. This article therefore only covers *two* things: Particles (those wa, ga, wo, de, ni and he thingies) and verb conjugations. This is my reasoning on this: you can build a vocabulary of nouns, just by looking in a dictionary or asking a native speaker. They almost never inflect (in any true meaning of the word) and are easy. Plus we won't be worrying about those strange noun-like things that can act like adjectives. So *you* can take care of the nouns yourself as you see fit. On the other hand, the verbs and adjectives inflect so I'll try to present the most compact rules conceivable for allowing you to manipulate every verb you ever encounter and hopefully you can take it from there. The less mental overhead for remembering how to do it, the less painful it will be. After knowing the conjugation rules pat, you can get new vocabulary out of a dictionary or ask a native speaker. Now that you have a bunch of nouns and a bunch of verbs and adjectives (that you can inflect), you need to know how to piece them together. That's where learning about the particles come in. Remember, this is a *Quick and Dirty* guide so don't expect these generalizations to *always* work, just expect them to work in as many cases as possible based on what I know. Now, in compiling this, I noticed that the descriptions are pretty comprehensive. So why aren't these things presented this way in class? Well, an educational institution obviously has a financial stake in dragging out your language learning as long as possible (and confusing you along the way), now doesn't it? The also feel obligated to teach you every little detail so you feel like you're getting your money's worth. In the case of this guide, return comments such as: "You made generalization X, but for got to mention exceptions Y and Z." won't be appreciated very much. This is a *quick and dirty* guide, remember? So be forewarned that there are exceptions all over the place, but that I have tried to be as accurate as space allows. And space is the primary concern here. Please don't forget that.
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Tad Perry Internet: tvp@gibdo.engr.washington.edu
CompuServe: 70402,3020 NIFTY-Serve: GBG01266
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