Japanese Grammar

Japanese grammar is a very deep and difficult subject, and the author is not an expert. What we cover here is only the tip of the iceberg (it’s mostly the high-level stuff necessary to understand sentence diagrams).

Very little grammar is required to understand sentence diagrams. Sentence diagrams don’t use grammar terms at all (in either language).

Unfortunately, one does need to use and understand grammar terms in order to create sentence diagrams. This section explains the terminology used in the section for creating diagrams.

Online resources

For a more thorough introduction to Japanese grammar, the author highly recommends the following free sites:

Written in English

  • The Tofugu grammar hub

  • Cure Dolly’s videos and book

    Warning: The book may be easier more comfortable for most people. The animated “android” and creepy voice can be a bit hard to take at first, but the content is well worth it. Much of this site reflects ideas from these videos. One strong recommendation: turn on subtitles and watch at 1.25X speed (with or without audio).

    Sadly, the author of these wonderful videos is no longer with us. I’m unsure of her background, but based on her slightly odd diction in both languages, I suspect she was a native Japanese speaker who moved to an English speaking country as a child, and spent the majority of her life in the west.

  • Jay Rubin’s book Making sense of Japanese is an outstanding resource. It does exactly what it promises, and many of the ideas underly both the Cure Dolly videos and this site. It’s not structured as a textbook, but rather as more conversational prose. It introduces some of the most important aspects of the language (things that English-speakers tend to misunderstand).

Written in Japanese

Most of this section is the author’s attempt at translating material from a wonderful online Japanese grammar tutorial aimed at Japanese middle-school students: 国語の文 法.

We only present a drastically reduced subset of the material available on the original site, however. Please refer to the original for further explanation.

Again, the goal is to explain Japanese grammar as it is taught to Japanese natives, using Japanese terminology as much as possible. Further, we only teach enough grammar to enable one to create Japanese sentence diagrams.

Any errors on the remainder of this site are almost certainly due to the author’s poor Japanese reading skills and misunderstanding of the concepts.

Organization

The remainder of this section mirrors the organization of the kokugobunpou.com site: