Content notes
Everything on this site represents the author’s understanding of how Japanese grammar works. Ultimately, this site presents an opinion. As the old joke goes: if you don’t like this opinion, he has others!
More seriously, if you do disagree with anything here, please let the author know. But please provide examples and use evidence-based reasoning rather than merely complaining with statements like “That’s wrong!” or “That’s a confusing way to think about it”. There’s usually a reason things are presented as they are.
Arguments are unlikely to sway the author’s opinion unless they provide concrete examples demonstrating errors or inconsistencies. Neither appeals to authority (“so-and-so says this”) nor technical jargon (“declinations with the subjunctive mood …”) are likely to persuade. Examples, please.
Linguistics and grammar
Academic linguists study every language spoken on earth (and then some). They’ve had to develop a sort of “meta-language” to describe the differences and similarities across countless languages. (The author calls this meta-language “linguistic-grammarian”.) The words in this language have very specific meanings and can be used to describe any language.
Learning this meta-language is an incredibly difficult undertaking!
For laymen not linguists
As a layman, trying to follow and understand two linguists describing aspects of an unfamiliar language can be an exercise in frustration. The conversations are full of arcane grammatical jargon and extremely nuanced points that can be quite hard to grasp. (“It’s all Greek to me” doesn’t begin to cover it!)
Fortunately, our needs are at least slightly more modest: we only wish to diagram sentences in one language: Japanese.
Further, we presume at least a basic level of Japanese language skills. Specifically, readers should know at least a hundred or so simple Japanese words and be able to construct basic Japanese sentences. Readers should possess something like a young, native child’s capability in the language (but with adult understanding of concepts).
We’re also only diagramming structure (syntax), not meaning (semantics). One doesn’t need a deep, nuanced understanding of Japanese to make sense of these diagrams, but the words themselves should help to explain the ideas displayed by a diagram (how the words are used and what affects what).
As long as you can recognize “things” vs. “actions/existence” vs. “modifiers”, the diagrams should make some sense.
This doesn’t mean it’s easy to create accurate diagrams, though!
Japanese grammar and syntax is quite complex in its own right. It often differs from English grammar in quite subtle ways.
Worse, explaining things in one language by using another can introduce all sorts of unintended confusion. Like it or not, the languages we speak literally train the neural pathways in our brains. We tend to “think” in our own languages even when attempting to learn or teach another — this often causes confusion.
True fluency requires “thinking” in the target languages, something we hope to encourage with these diagrams.
Japanese terminology
While the diagrams themselves will never contain any grammatical jargon in either language, we are forced to use grammatical terminology to explain how they are constructed.
Because English and Japanese grammatical terms can have subtly different meanings, this site always prefers the Japanese terms! Whenever possible, we also provide English equivalents or translations, but when the meanings differ, no matter how subtly, we always intend the Japanese word and the Japanese meaning.
Case in point
The English word “noun” and the Japanese word 名詞 mean exactly the same thing: they are “named things”. “Verb” and 動詞 are also almost identical.
But what most English-language sources call “adjectives” in Japanese behave strangely indeed compared to their English equivalents.
For one thing, Japanese has two types of “adjectives”: 形容詞 and 形容動詞.
For another, Japanese grammar resources say these types of words describe action or state in predicate of a sentence. They think of all three as verb-like, as first-class words that form the predicate of a sentence.
More to the point, they don’t think of 形容詞 and 形容動詞 as second-class words that merely modify nouns. They don’t think of them primarily as “adjectives” that merely modify subjects and objects.
Don’t believe it? Consider the following:
Japanese dictionaries and grammar resources usually identify 形容動詞 as ”だ-words”, but we consider them ”な-words”!
They think of them first as 用言 or verb-like (e.g. 「静かだ」— “it’s quiet”). We think of them first as adjective-like (e.g. 「静かな家」— “a quiet house”).
This was a bit of an epiphany for the author. It’s why this site uses Japanese terms whenever possible.
The goal, as much as possible, is to think about Japanese sentences like a Japanese native.
Why study grammar/syntax?
We all learned our native languages primarily by immersion (repeated exposure and mimicry). We didn’t study grammar and “rules” until fairly late in our childhood.
The human brain is incredibly well adapted to pattern matching. With sufficient input and practice, we can reach even fairly advanced levels of proficiency without studying grammar or formally studying how sentences are structured.
Nothing is more beneficial to learning a language than massive amounts of input (listening or reading) and plenty of practice with feedback.
Yet most if not all countries force their schoolchildren to learn more about their native languages. Students learn to think about their native languages. Most educated people eventually study grammar, composition, and classic literature at some point.
So why do we force our children to study grammar?
Studying the structure of our languages allows us to communicate more effectively and to express more nuanced thoughts. “Ungrammared” is almost as much an impediment to communicating complex thoughts as “illiterate”.
While “he done it” would likely be understood, it sounds unrefined.
In the same way, 「その花がきれい！」 (without だ at the end) or 「あの家が白いだ」(with だ at the end) communicates the ideas effectively enough, but they are wrong, they sound unfinished/awkward/unrefined and such mistakes in more complex sentences eventually create difficulties.
These types of mistakes eventually tend to fade with sufficient input: your brain eventually pattern-matches and rejects things that “sound wrong”. Studying grammar and syntax speed up the process considerably, however!
The diagraming techniques taught here provide a visual aid for reasoning about and composing Japanese sentences. They visually clarify grammatical syntax and structure.
Still, if you don’t value grammar, then you probably won’t find sentence diagrams or this site terribly useful. (And you’d be wrong. 😉)
Learn like a native
This site attempts to teach Japanese grammatical syntax similar to how it would be taught to Japanese 中学生 (middle-school students). But it only attempts to explain enough basic grammar to diagram Japanese sentences — it’s not a complete course in Japanese grammar!
Much of the information presented is cribbed from this wonderful site about Japanese grammar.
Because this is a site for foreign learners of Japanese, however, some concessions, alterations, and omissions are inevitable.
Whenever possible, concepts are introduced in the same order as a Japanese middle-school curriculum. The information is hierarchically organized using Japanese taxonomies.
Concepts are generally described with as Japanese a mindset as the Author’s English-native brain can provide.
Ultimately, though, this site aims at foreign learners of the Language (English speakers, specifically). Some concessions, omissions, and even additions are inevitable as we try to help foreigners get over some pre-conceptions from their own native languages.
In particular, Native Japanese grammar resources don’t usually teach a “zero pronoun”. Nor do they insist that every clause always has logical subject, even if unstated. But few natives would argue these points once explained, and they demonstrably help many foreign learners to better understand Japanese sentences.