Questions and Negation is the primary follow-up to Using “Wa” and “Desu”, tripling what you can do with just one sentence structure.
Related upcoming lessons:
Pronouns and Plurals is the first follow-up to Using “Wa” and “Desu”. More short beginning lessons of this sort coming up. Here’s the preliminary outline for the near furture:
Grammar-oriented:
Specific vocabulary and situations:
As the first Beginning Lesson covering grammar, Using “Wa” and “Desu” introduces your first practical Japanese sentence structure: “[A] wa [B] desu”. Subsequent lessons will focus on grammar expanding the use of this basic pattern as well as some particular uses of the form.
I’ve added an introduction to this very important particle, The Topic Marker “Wa”. Along with Desu and Masu, this is the bare minimum core grammar needed to start using formal spoken Japanese.
The next few things in the works will be several Beginning Lessons making use of the grammar covered up through Desu and Masu.
This next grammar lesson is another overview. Japanese Word Classes covers nouns, pronouns, verbs, all three classes of adjectives, and particles. Verbs and adjectives especially will get a more detailed treatment in later lessons, as will demonstratives (“ko-so-a-do” words) and counters, which I left out to keep things simple.
In other news, I’m thinking of moving the as-of-yet unreleased linguistics stuff to a separate series, much like the separate Kana Resources page. I might reorganize the Hiragana and The Japanese Sound System in order to separate out a more concise guide to pronunciation. This would make it easier for those starting from the beginning to get into the grammar and expressions stuff more quickly.
The second introductory grammar lesson, Desu and Masu, is now available. Desu is the Japanese copula, a verb meaning “to be”, and –masu is the polite verb suffix. Together with The Structure of a Japanese Sentence, this lesson covers the remainder of the bare minimum grammar needed to use formal spoken Japanese. This one was also tricky to write since I was still struggling with how much verb conjugation to introduce before the big lesson. I ended up focusing on what to make of the conjugations once you have them, saving the topic of the process itself for later.
Upcoming grammar lessons will cover word categories and conjugation of verbs and adjectives. I also need to go back and add a section on the topic marker “wa”, saving the infamous “wa vs ga” issue for a another time. The next few Beginning Lessons will involve uses of desu, and the particles “ka”, “yo”, and “ne” also deserve some attention.
I’ve posted the second of the two lessons on expressions, Greetings and Other Expressions. You may want to start with the first, Names and Introductions. No grammar is necessary for these pages, but you’ll get the most out of them if you’ve read the Introduction to the Japanese Language up until Levels of Formality, which is now placed before the first grammar lesson.
So now, I’m going to start working on grammar to finish up the Intro.
The first of the Beginning Lessons is now out. This series will cover material typical of a first course in Japanese. The first lesson, Names and Introductions, will be one of two sections on basic expressions, which will be followed by basic sentence structures and vocabulary.
Several coming grammar topics will still be under Introduction to the Japanese Language. The basic idea is that each part will be somewhat self contained, but that the beginning lessons will rely on the intro as background. Hopefully the way I expect this to work will become clear. In this most recent one, I put the stuff on Hiragana and pronunciation as “recommended background”, with links to specific sections throughout the lesson for easy reference.
I realize now that by jumping ahead I’ve created some gaps. In particular, です/desu, ます/masu, and は/wa will all be covered soon. Also, I came up with the idea of relegating some information to “FAQ” sections to keep the beginning lessons a little cleaner. I also think a quick reference page for each lesson formatted for printing might be useful. These would certainly be something that I do later on though.
Levels of Formality is finally out. I stuck to the culture side of things for the most recent draft, and I’m happy with the result. It’s not my greatest work ever, though; there is definitely some serious revision in my future once I’m finished with the intro series.
Any way, this section discusses the rough levels of formality (or politeness) used in Japanese speech, the basic factors affecting choice of level, and the nature of each style of speech. I stuck with a high level overview, similar to The Japanese Writing System. I’ll eventually do some more in depth articles for these kinds of topics, which is the information that is more difficult to find.
For anyone who is already following my progress, I’d like to hear from you. I took the comments forms off “pages” outside of the blog, but feel free to leave your comments here instead. For specific questions and corrections, please use the contact form and make sure to specify the title of the exact page in question.
By now it’s been nearly a week since I posted the last new lesson in Introduction to the Japanese Language. The second part of the series has turned out to be far more difficult to write.
My main dilemma is this. I want to keep the amount of grammar to the minimum that is strictly necessary for the upcoming Beginning Lessons (and delaying the rest until right before it is needed), but at the same time I don’t want to make any conceptual leaps, which are a major source of misunderstanding.
But I’m not liking how my attempts at getting into “desu” and “masu” and levels of formality are going. Up until now I’ve been trying to include some grammar, but since I haven’t done verb conjugation yet, determining how much to introduce as background has been extremely difficult. I think I may have to dump the grammar altogether and stick to unconjugated forms for this lesson, and go in greater depth after covering verb conjugation. The topic of politeness and formality deserves multiple sections anyway.
The question then is what to do with the other basic grammar articles, since I do know how I want to precede from the first page on sentence structure. Maybe I can separate them out into a “fundamentals of Japanese grammar series” or something similar. That would make Intro a little lame though…
I plan to start the Beginning Lessons section with a grammar-light lesson on greetings and expressions, so that gives me some time to think about it. Be on the lookout for several new lessons/articles this week.
