Japanese Grammar for linguists

Linguistics is an interesting disease: among its symptoms, one can identifiy self-isolation, distraction, compulsive writing and useless reflection, but it also has the marvellous side effect of providing the patient linguist with a vision on the invisible threads of language. Therefore, it is a wonderful idea for them to learn new languages.

When I was a teenager, I believed that life was way too short to learn Japanese and Chinese, no matter how interesting they seemed. But now, having checkmarked many of the items in that long list of things to do before dying, I decided to study these two languages. At the same time.


If in both languages, vocabulary learning constitutes an important workload, Chinese is caracterised by complex phonetics and simple morphosyntax, whereas Japanese has simple phonetics (quite similar to Spanish's) and a quite developed morphosyntax, to my greatest joy. Nevertheless, among the various works I have consulted, I haven't found one which combines grammatical progression and pedagogy in the way I like it. I have therefore decided to sketch the points of Japanese grammar that I would like to follow in order to learn it with structural clarity.

Learning a language has nothing to do with grammatical knowledge. Instead, language learning is achieved by acquiring communicative competence. But if you are a linguist, you would like to make grammatical knowledge explicit in order to enhance communicative competence.

1. Writing system
Before working, throw rubbish away; before learning a language, learn its writing system. Happily, you have romanji to ease the learning:
For any of these writing scripts, you will need a virtual keyboard like lexilogo's.



2. Pronunciation
Although deemed quite simple, don't forget these two basics points:
3. Vocabulary
Although some techniques like semantic fields grouping can be useful, vocabulary belongs to the communicative competence rather than to the grammatical knowledge, which can only be achieved through practise. I will focus here on grammatical knowledge, linking each grammar point to relevant online ressources.

4. Morphosyntax
I will structure morphosyntactic features of Japanese as follows:

























Morphosyntaxe of the simple sentence

3.2. Morphosyntaxe of the complex sentence

3.2.1. Coordination

3.2.2. Subordination

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares