Japanese Grammar Structure (Updated)

Dear all,

おはようございます！

If you recall my post yesterday that i talked about Japanese grammatical terms, today i am going to share how and why the grammatical terms matter.

To make things short, i am going to refer 名詞 (Nouns) as 名, 助詞 (Particles) as 助, 動詞 (Verbs) as 動, 副詞 (Adverbs) as 副, 形容詞 (Adjectives) as 形, etc

Let’s take a look at a few example sentences.

Figure 1: I am Tanaka

Figure 2: I drank water.

Do you find that it is easier for you to understand how the grammar structure work?
I see that a lot of Japanese schools here in Singapore do not use this structural method of teaching the students, except for Hougang Japanese Language School, my alma mater.

If you are good in Mathematics and remember the grammar structures, you would be able to do something like this.

Figure 3: The beautiful teacher bought expensive water.

Figure 4: The beautiful sensei met the handsome Tanaka-san right?

Once you are able to construct a diagram like the above, what you need to do is to use sentences to internalize what you have learned into these structures as shown above. In this way, you would be able to form sentences more easily. For example, you would know that to link 2 words (e.g a noun (名詞) and a verb (動詞) together, you would require a noun, a particle and a verb.

Knowing how grammatical terms are linked enables you to form sentences more easily. You would not ever need to remember… “Eh, how to say Mr Miller met Ms Sakura at Donki Hote”, just remember the grammar structures in boxes.

I would have a few parts on this article tomorrow or next Tues, so stay tuned!