Been encountering joshi and stuff, but honestly I have no idea for the names of all the different grammatical parts to google it up.


Basically I was looking for the guideline of when to hse prefixes and suffixes.
Like -ta on verv usually informs something you are doing yourself
たべ for instance means eat, so in a sentence to talk about yourself eating you would say たべた。

for another person, you would use -te.
Theres also -teru, -tai, -masu, and all those other things.
Even if it's all in Hiragana or Katakana it would help!

Otherwise I'll be dumping grammatical questions here, as well as answering them the best I could.

What you have listed are verb conjugational forms that I guess are a form of suffix... but, certainly, none of these are prefixes. Also, I don't know where you've been learning from, but, honestly, nothing you've said is correct at all (no offence intended) and I'd be wary about studying further from whomever / whatever is teaching you.

-ta / -da (depending on the verb in question) is a conjugation indicating simple past tense. 食べた = tabeta = 'I ate'. It tells you nothing about who is doing the action. That is indicated using pronouns, like English. Some examples:

私はリンゴを食べた = watashi wa ringo wo tabeta = I apple ate.
貴方はリンゴを食べた = anata wa ringo wo tabeta = you apple ate.
われわれはリンゴを食べた = wareware wa ringo wo tabeta = we apple ate.
彼らはリンゴを食べた = kare wa ringo wo tabeta = they (usu. male) apple ate.
etc.

The translations are literal - Japanese uses an SOV word order, which means 'Subject, Object, Verb' e.g., 'I, apple, ate'.
English, in comparison, is SVO - Subject, Object, Verb - I eat (the) apple.

は (usually ha, but what it takes this form is is pronounced 'wa') indicates that the previous word / phrase is the subject of the sentence - 'I, you, we, they'
を (wo / o)indicates that the previous word / phrase is a direct object - 'apple'.
These are particles, or 助詞 (jyoshi / joshi). Conjugations, the likes of which you're asking about, have nothing to do with particles, they are a completely different part of grammar.

As for the other conjugations:

食べている
-てる (-teru) is a verb, meaning 'to shine', but I think you mean 'te iru', which is a conjugational suffix that indicates an enduring state of a verb - think of the gerund form (-ing form, as in 'I am eating') in English, and it's quite similar to that.
食べて
-て/-で (-te / -de, depending on the verb in question) is pretty much a casual shortening of te iru, with slight differences that aren't really important as a beginner. Most people use just the 'te' form and not 'te iru'.
食べたい
-tai is what is known as a volitional form - it indicates when the speaker wants or desires something. 食べたい　would mean 'want to eat'.
食べます
-ます (-masu) is a conjugation form that is simply more polite than using the base form. This itself can be conjugated into a polite past tense form as 食べました　and a polite 'te' form as 食べまして. 'masu' can also refer to the 'masu stem' of a word, which is basically a verb's pre-conjugated state that is used in forming the 'masu' form. The 'masu' stem of　食べる is just 食べ - and note how 'masu' is appended to this 'stem' to form 食べます.

They can all be slotted into the examples above as 食べている (tabeteriu)、食べて (tabete)、食べたい (tabetai) and　食べます (tabemasu) respectively, for you to practise.

Let me know if anything is unclear or if you need some help, either in this thread or via PM.

This post was edited by Razzattack on Aug 22 2012 04:25pm

google translate only actually.. and wikipedia. So far it's been self teaching via google search engine and praticing while I backpack Japan.
Also why is りんご in カタカナ？

Also, I just found another article on wikipedia finally about this. Amazingly hard to search for what you want when you don't know the proper grammatic term of it.

So, I've been studying conjugation using this table http://www.as.ua.edu/nihongo/verb%5Ftable%5Froomaji.htm

and I'm a bit stumped on why there is ーます but no ーません
for example
ビルにのみます、ワインにのみません。 should literally translate
Beer I will drink, wine I won't drink. (I think, its not perfectly written)
So that should mean ーます means "will" and ーません means "won't"


Also, I think kansaiben shortens some verb conjucations like -ている into -てる
But would that follow under the 一段 or the 五段 conjucation table?


e: also I've been mainly practicing japanese via facebook chat, but it's repetitive once the people find out a good conversational median where they understand what I say even if it's wrong.

This post was edited by Arcolithe on Aug 24 2012 03:37am

Katakana has lots of uses, and one of the most common is to transcribe loanwords, however this is by no means its only use. Names of places, fruits, and animals (for whom the kanji is quite hard) all use katakana. For example, we say 'トナカイ' for reindeer, even though it does have kanji that are used in professional fields (馴鹿). リンゴ is the same - in kanji, it is written 林檎, but this is never used. The Japanese Wikipedia article can quickly back me up here, its article name being in katakana:
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/リンゴ

Just because a exists doesn't mean it should be used. It becomes obvious to Japanese speakers, if you do this, that you are a ワープロばか - someone who relies too heavily on kana-to-kanji computer conversion (Note that I used ばか instead of 馬鹿, but ばか is not normally written in katakana as it is not a name of anything like a fruit or an animal taxonomy). Another one people do often is using 無い instead ない, which either implies the person is some pseudo-existential philosopher, is writing a police report, or is saying someone has died rather than is trying to simply negate a sentence. Some words just have a common way of being written which needs to be followed; this is why I would avoid translation software and converting to kanji you don't actually recognise.

I can't access that site but, just so you know I'm not just bullshitting you, here is Wikipedia again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation#Negative

Be careful of getting confused between ビール (beer) and ビル (biru, shortened form of 'building'). Also, saying にの is wrong, you seem to be just slurring two particles together there. You should be using を which, as mentioned in my previous post, indicates that the aforementioned word is the direct object of the verb. so ビールを飲みます and ワインを飲みません would be what you need to write.

If you're correct in thinking teru is a corruption of teiru in kansaiben, it would be 五段. However, I cannot confirm if that is correct or not and, personally, I would ignore kansaiben and all other dialects until you become a little more experienced in the standard language.

Well, being a linguistic major, I found out that culture and language grows with each other, kind of like how kanji came with the Silkroad into Japan. Also as you said about 無い being a police report, doctorate (basically an official statement) that comes with culture as well. It's kind of like trying to translate or differentiate between english phrases "You mad?" , "Are you mad?" and "Did you get mad?" (where depending on the origin of the speaker, it can mean different things as well, a foreigner can accidently taunt someone by not knowing English grammar.

Katakana is also used to emphasize a word right?

Well, I'm not saying you should separate the language and the culture, I'm saying you should learn the standard language form of what you want to say before you try to learn any dialects - maybe a few terms are okay if you know the standard eqivalent, but learning dialectical grammar before standard grammar can't be doing you any favours.

No offence, but the conjugations you've asked about are pretty basic, entry-level stuff, and if you don't know them yet, I really would not worry about kansaiben, otherwise you'll confuse yourself and accustom yourself to saying dialectical terms as standard (making you look pretty silly... especially as the perception of a kansaiben speaker is that they are a little bit of a crude 'funny guy' due to the amount of speakers who become comedians). I understand the comparison you are making in terms of English syntactical nuances, but why do you think it is that ESL speakers do NOT learn the non-standard forms first? Like all dialects, Kansaiben is not even one cohesive dialect and forms a dialectical family, and it has different meanings to different people. People who aim to speak a language usually do so in order to be able to communicate with everyone who knows that language, rather than a niche group of people who know a specific version of a specific dialect.

Ultimately, it is my opinion that it won't really improve your Japanese and will in fact get you into bad habits. This is only my opinion, however, and you may choose to get out of the language whatever you wish. Here on the Japanese forum, I think everyone speaks standard Japanese, however, and that's the only way I can really help you.

Katakana is not really used to emphasise words, no. A pretty general rule is that you wouldn't put a word in katakana just because it was intended to be stressed - something like 死ね (die, imperative form - kind of like 'go die') is not written in katakana, for example, even though its meaning is strong.

Katakana is often used for onomatopoeic words that vividly express an emotion, however (although it's not really the same thing). Example:
頭ガンガンする！ Literally: Head 'pounding' is doing! My interpretation: 'My head is pounding [from a headache/ a person's nagging / a hangover]!'

ガンガン is evocative of a gong being struck, I guess how the words 'banging headache' may evoke the sound of a bang. These sorts of words (indeed, they are 'words' in a way that they are not in English) are usually colloquial, though, just so you're aware; at least, the example above is. I have seen this particular word in hiragana, too, and this is where it gets confusing. You see, some such words have kanji, like 目茶目茶, although it is usually written as めちゃめちゃ (to be messy, disorderly, or done to a ridiculous degree), usually because they come from an already extant word, in this case plain old 目茶 (absurd; ridiculous; nonsensical - also mainly in hiragana). This is never written in katakana, despite being used in a similarly 'evocative / onomatopoeic' way. That said, let us return to the original example. ガンガン comes from がん and can mean thumping / thudding or is used to express that something is difficult. This does not have kanji, meaning ガンガン has no kanji. Therefore, the original word is always in hiragana, while the reduplicated form does not have to be, it sometimes is and other times is not.

If you see a repuplication, it is probably one of these onomatopoeic 'evocative' words, and it is perhaps likely to be written in katakana, but what I am trying to express with all the confusing examples above is that there is no catch-all rule of when to use hiragana, katakana, and kanji, and where not to. This will become more evident, when you learn about ateji. 当て字 are kanji used as phonetic symbols instead of the meaning - therefore, even though, say, タバコ is a loanword of 'tobacco', it is VERY FREQUENTLY written using the characters 煙草 instead (and, yet again, other times as とばこ).

In short, it is all a huge mess and if you want to learn Japanese you should abandon a methodical and logical approach to learning the language. There are frequent, huge discrepancies between how you expect a certain alphabet or word to be used, and how it is actually used. In my opinion, you should abandon this method of asking what should be used where, and you should try to observe how the various alphabets are applied to different words as opposed to trying to apply the alphabets to certain situations.

That was a long post, but I hope it made sense to you for it's hard to explain it any differently than showing how illogical and inconsistent Japanese is at times.

This post was edited by Razzattack on Aug 25 2012 06:28pm

Made perfect sense! Darn! I was hoping there was some way to connect it, depending on what I learn from the language I wanted to possibly write a disserentation about it, connecting eastern and western worlds "Altaic and Indo-European".

Thanks for the advice, I was hoping there may have been a complicated yet logical system, but I guess it's just grinding through words and kanji formations. Do you have any advice for standard Japanese maybe? My trip in Japan is about to end soon, and I'd think the latest would be coming from Japan. No one seems to know which university is specifically strong for the Japanese language as a major. Everyone just points at Kyoto and Tokyo university for everything.

If you're looking at etymology you'll find that Sino-Japanese words and relations provide the best comparison, I think. My only worry with Altaic and Indo-European is that I'm not sure how well Japanese fits into the categroy of 'Altaic'. This is a hotly dispute topic even today, you see, because while most people agree that Japanese most closely resembles Chinese (as a major language, not counting Ryukyuan) but there is not really any evidence for a genealogical relationship between the two countries, it is more of an 'adoptive relationship'. I wouldn't base a whole dissertation on foundations which could inherently be questioned.

I'm mentioning this as you said 'what I learn from the language', which made me think you were going to compare them as language families and how they applied to Japan; it is only this that I'd caution you in doing. Comparing purely cultural aspects on this Altaic and Indo-European level would certainly be possible and I assume very enlightening. China forms an integral part of a lot of Japanese history and while the terms Altaic and Indo-European do not expressly include China, I would be interested in seeing such a dissertation simply because of the fact that nothing outside of China is ever really talked about in discussions of what has formed Japan.

There are definitely systems and common applications, but I'd just say to take that all with a pinch of salt. One good thing, though, is that when there are no clearly set rules is that some exceptions are perfectly acceptable. For example, one reasonably consistent application of katakana is its usage in the names of fruit, for example, as mentioned before, but if you know the character for, say, 梅 (ウメ - plum), this particular word is okay to write in kanji. Now, if you don't know it, then you have a get-out clause in that you can just write it with the alphabet and nobody is any the wiser. This same rule goes for all really difficult kanji (only you'd write in hiragana to replace kanji you didn't know, again, most of the time).

I mean, if you were doing Chinese, then you'd have no choice, really, because pinyin (the Chinese romanisation system, which is a lot harder to pronounce and makes a lot less sense in the way it is written) does not have the casual application that hiragana and katakana do in Japanese - using pinyin to a Chinese person will just make you look like a 傻老外 (sha3 lao3 wai4), a stupid foreigner. You either learn the 汉字 (han4 zi4, the innumerable list of Chinese characters that you'll need to express every word, ever) or you get out and give up, because Chinese does not have a middle ground in that it does not have an alphabet. Japanese has romaji, and using that will make you look stupid in the same way using pinyin will, but if you don't know one or two measly character for a Japanese word and you write it in hiragana instead? No big deal. You save face.

Japanese people themselves do this, even, partly because they have never had a character simplification system like China has needed to have (for obvious reasons) and most of their characters remain traditional and more complicated to write. For example, Japanese people use 語 (ご - language, word） instead of the Chinese simplified 语 (yu3), and 車 (くるま - car, vehicle) instead of the Chinese simplified 车 (che1).

For laughs, try asking a Japanese speaker to write this and watch them panic as they've forgotten how:
憂鬱
(ゆううつ - melancholy, depression, dejection, gloom)

The Chinese look like they might have it easier in comparison
忧郁
(you1 yu4)

...but, believe me, you will be able to get away with plain old ゆううつ in Japanese. Christ knows I can't write 憂鬱 for shit either.

For Japanese study in Japan, it's really a case of where you would like to live, I think. I mean, let's face it, if you're actually in Japan, you're going to be speaking the language 24/7 and will learn it anyway. I'm not sure it's the best option, after all, seeing as it will be hugely expensive and it won't be the subsidised exchange system it would be if you took Japanese as a course in your home country... then again, you seem set on that rather than studying in your home country so I'd just advise you to go to a place you like the sound of the most in terms of the course, cost, and location. Don't worry about the fame and prestige of the place, really, learning a language shouldn't be about that. To me, Sapporo sounds nice, as it's quite quiet and rural, but then again that's just me and what I'd look for. You may be completely different. If you tell me what you're looking for out of the university and the place itself, I might be able to suggest somewhere better.

This post was edited by Razzattack on Aug 26 2012 02:03am

For christ sake, I can't even write 憂鬱 lol Chinese and Japanese are nothing alike. Chinese might have simplified/traditional characters but I think Japanese sometimes overcomplicates things with so many exceptions and romaji, katakana and hiragana. My mom was a linguistic major so me and my friends talked about how culture and language affect each other vice versa. In a way, Chinese might be easier to learn for some people... possibly.

Japan has been ciriticized for taking other cultures on a superficial level, and integrating it and making there own as well as lacking patriotism up until recent years. If you can call patriotisn getting together once every 4 years for the Olympics than I guess it is a form of patriotism in a way. Taking other cultures is okay though, because other countries import cultures as well. But in terms of Japanese exceptionalism, and as a Japanese national, I have nothing popping up in my head other than sushi or manga because it is so obscure. Maybe it is due to the fact I've spent many years living outside of Japan. If I start living outside of Japan again, I think my vision will be more clear, and envision how Japan would be characterized in an international community. I'm not a linguistic major, but that is my opinion.

This post was edited by Chikin9gari on Aug 26 2012 11:37am

I've recently seen one chart for English speakers that lists major languages in eight categories in difficulty to learn from English. The hardest two are in the last category, Korean and Japanese. Mandarin is right under it, meaning that it is easier for English speakers to learn Mandarin than Japanese or Korean. I'll look around for it and post it tomorrow.