7 articles tagged with "Grammar"
A Japanese particle is often a single kana. Swap it and the nouns, verb, and word order stay the same, yet the sentence says something else. Linguists call two forms that differ in one element a mi...
Turkish speakers start Japanese with an unfair advantage. Both languages are SOVhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93verbwordorder, headfinalhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He...
Spelling, not arithmetic Some kanji compounds aren't compounds at all — they're spelling. 大人/words/otona reads otona, not daijin or oohito. 今日/words/kyou reads kyō, not konnichi well, sometimes — s...
Six boxes, every compound in exactly one Every Japanese compound noun falls into one of six buckets — and which bucket it sits in is the single most useful fact about it. 漢語https://en.wikipedia.org...
The feature hiding in plain sight Tokyo Japanesehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyodialect is a pitchaccent languagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanesepitchaccent. Every word carries either a si...
Japanese grammar looks vast from outside and small from inside. The trick is to find the small set of design choices that generate the rest, then derive everything from there. Three properties do a...
What an honorific actually is An honorific is not vocabulary about politeness. It is politeness as morphosyntax — the social variable fused into the verb stem, the pronoun paradigm, the noun, the s...
