About
This site was inspired by a thread on the Wanikani community forum that mentioned another grammatical diagramming technique called “tree diagrams”.
The author found tree diagrams difficult to create and understand because they depended heavily on technical grammatical jargon.
But they reminded him of how much he enjoyed creating sentence diagrams in primary school. He wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to create something similar for Japanese that.
Shortly afterword, he started a different thread to translate 川柳 (a sort of light-hearted, comedic haiku). Several times he wished for some sort of diagram to discuss the more interesting points of the grammar contained. In particular, he wanted to highlight the impact of topics vs. subjects and the function of the zero pronoun.
The goal was to create something as easy to understand as English sentence diagrams. Something that made the internal structure of Japanese sentences visible, without relying on technical jargon.
After countless long and tedious conversations with many much more knowledgeable friends on the forum, he eventually learned enough to come up with the system documented here.
Site details
This site was created using the wonderful static site generator
Astro with the docs theme. Several components were
written in Svelte to render diagrams, etc.
All content was written in Markdown using the MDX plugin with remark-ruby installed to make it easier to add furigana to Japanese sentences.
All the source code for this site is available online (see the links in the sidebar).
The author
Rex Walters is a US Navy brat who’s first exposure to Japan was in the mid 1970’s when his father moved the family to Hayama in Kanagawa prefecture. He’s now married to a Japanese native with three completely bilingual adult children (two of whom currently reside in Japan).
Although he’s been speaking Japanese (poorly) for many years, thanks to Wanikani he’s recently learned how to read the language. It turns out that being illiterate was holding him back (who could have known?).
Acknowledgements
This site wouldn’t have been possible without the help of too many to list.
The author would particularly like to thank his family for their patient corrections and constant assistance. They have to be tired of explaining the semantic and grammatical nuances of various 川柳！
He’d also like to thank the fine folks at Tofugu and their love child Wanikani. Without them, he’d never have learned how to read and better understand this crazy language.
Lastly, he’d like to thank all of his forum friends that taught him so much and made this learning process so enjoyable:
In no particular order, THANK YOU to rfindley, alo, bakugames, ChristopherFritz, Jonapedia, yamitenshi, Gorbit99, wct, Chocobits (who taught me the opposite of clickbait is “clickyeet”!), fallynleaf, Kumirei, Leebo, ekg, trunklayer, NicoleRauch, superelf94, Myria, enbyboiwonder, KJules, Daisoujou, Uint2048, Sinyavasen, Hubbit200, Amimononohitsuji, GearAid, OwenDG, LaVieQ, tiredkiwi, and especially pm215, denzo, Arzar33, and Myria (who were all incredibly patient with both the author’s questions and his weird ideas).
Apologies to the many who were unintentionally left off the list — the author’s memory isn’t what it once was!
Contact
The best way to contact Rex for any comments or questions about this site is to create a new ‘issue’ on github.