Comments on: Beginner’s Japanese – Chapter II – Sentences

By: Jonadab

Jonadab — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:46:01 +0000

If you think stringing a few modifiers onto a noun makes for long sentences, you should study ancient Greek, wherein a literate writer would routinely go on for a page or more, nesting participals and subjunctives and relative clauses and whatnot to ten or twenty levels deep, modifying not just nouns but also verbs and prepositional phrases and everything else, delving into many points, so that in the long run careless readers, caught up in the details and missing the forest for the trees, cruising along through the words without paying attention to the grammar, might easily lose track of what the original main verb was, before finally wrapping up the sentence at long last and moving on to a new independent clause with its own indicative verb.

(And yes, I realize the English there has a dangling participle. In Greek, “wrapping” would inflect to match the case, number, and gender of “writer” rather than “readers”, so the sentence would be completely unambiguous — if you could keep track of the whole thing in your head at once.)

By: Danzinch

Danzinch — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:19:59 +0000

Useful and comprehensible lessons… helped me quite a bit. ^^

BTW, I’ve heard that portuguese is the hardest language for one to learn… it has loads of grammatical nonsense. XD

By: cmariano

cmariano — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:12:49 +0000

Aha, I read that little blurb about German. I really don’t think German is that hard (I’m learning it in school). The verbs that split are annoying..the only one I know is mitkommen (assuming I spelt that right), and I can’t even seperate it properly -_-.

Well, thanks for another lesson. I love learning the basics of languages…but it confuses me later on when I mix them up with each other..hehe..

By: Michx

Michx — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:21:33 +0000

What does “desu” means?.Sori i’m just a newbie on learning japanese…Hehe..:)

By: Neo Horizon

Neo Horizon — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:57:21 +0000

Hi. I’m just slowly making my way through your Japanese guides and I just wanted to say that your clarifications between subjects and topics made a lot of sense and were easy to follow. Actually, pretty much everything you’ve written in these guides have made a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for writing them. ^^

By: M.D. Geist

M.D. Geist — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 23:55:38 +0000

@canis there are some mistakes in ur german sentence… well nevertheless germans a strange language…

With possible sentences like : “Wenn Robben hinter Robben robben, robben Robben hinter Robben her!”
Funny to notice how both plural Noun and plural verbform can sound the same and are only seperated by writing the first letter big. (And even that can be confusing if the verb starts the sentence and has to be written big!)

Other examples :
Fliegen – fliegen
Sägen – sägen
Spinnen – spinnen (

By: someguy

someguy — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 01:13:19 +0000

I dont know japanese and understood almost none of this o_o i wanna learn but it looks hard lol

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 05:23:09 +0000

SABER!!

By: canis

canis — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:01:40 +0000

–Yeah German’s bad about that too. What’s really fun is the verb forms that split the verb into two parts and put them in different places in the sentence. Sometimes I swear stuff like that was invented to torture people…–

If we (I’m german) invented that to torture foreigners we fell into our own trap cause poor girls like me have to explain german grammar to my american bf who insists on learning german but keeps nagging on how unreasonable it is. :P

About the example:
“The dog which my brother bought last month died recently after being knocked down by a car which I heard was driven by a drunk driver.”

Yeah, we loooove to make this kind of monster sentences too. ^^
3-5 paragrapher with like 4-10 commas were my special “attack” in essays. :D

The example in german would be:
“Der Hund, den mein Bruder, letzen Monat gekauft hatte, ist vor kurzem gestroben, nachdem er von einem Auto überfahren wurde, dessen Fahrer, soweit ich gehört habe, betrunken war.”

Well thanks again for this lesson. (though I guess I will read it some more times again before I move on to make sure I got all of it ^^)

By: Nya? a blog about anime, programming and 42 » Blog Archive » tama-nee’s long legs

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:25:15 +0000

[...] until today, when i have read part 2 of darkmirage’s japanese lessons. [...]