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I’ve recently completed Season 4 and started writing some Lang-8 entries. The first thing I noticed is that there seem to be a lot more endings for words that I don’t know.
One example being “ならいます” I learned this from Textfugu as “to learn” current/future tense. However when I attempted to use it I was corrected to ならいう and told I should learn everything as う form. I get that this is more v.stem+something, but I’m suddenly unsure how to proceed.
Can someone who is better than I explain what I should be studying. Do I need to skip ahead and figure out all the endings and what they do? Is that even possible?
Perhaps it was ならう (= dictionary form). That said, there’s good arguments either way for whether you should learn it ます form first or dictionary form first, so don’t listen to any corrector who goes “this is the way it’s done, so you’ve gotta do it this way”.
Either way, ならいう is certainly wrong. Can you post the whole correction so we can see what’s going on?
I was attempting to say, “Please help me to learn Japanese.”
After going though a few different corrections this was the final result – 私が日本語を習うのを手伝って下さい。The two things i see that are hardest to understand is the ならう and i think that’s て form at the end to add the please, which I see is season 7 so I haven’t learned it yet.
And yes, it was refereed to as dictionary form.
Ah yeah, you need to use the dictionary form if you’re going to add a nominaliser. =)
Stupid grammar question: What’s a Nominaliser? Should I know that or have I just not gotten there yet.
So much to learn on all these forms…. I’ve been waiting to learn the vocab lists before moving on so far. Now I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just power through and give myself a “basic” understanding of the grammar so I can at least understand why I screwed something up.
Nominaliser = thing that turns a verb or phrase into a noun-like thing (i.e. “nominalise” in the grammatical means “noun-ify”, just as “verbalise” means “verb-ify”). The concept is a part of grammar in general rather than Japanese grammar specifically. In this sentence, the nominaliser の turns the whole phrase 日本語を習う into a single noun-like object, which can be used in a sentence just like any other noun (here, it’s functioning as the direct object to the verb 手伝う).
Japanese has two nominalisers: の and こと. Note that の-as-nominaliser is different to の-as-possessive, so don’t get them confused. Nominalisers need to follow a dictionary-form verb.
AnonymousMaybe you’re rushing it a bit…?
Thanks +Joel that makes sense.
+Tsetycoon13 – You’re likely right. It’s just that when I do something wrong I like to be able to understand why I was wrong, learning from my mistakes and all.
I don’t see why Koichi suggests using Lang-8 so early – what good are corrections if you can’t (at least vaguely) understand them? When your Japanese is so basic, there’s only so far the helper can simplify it while still trying to make it sound more natural/correct. It’s not always easy to determine how much a learner knows so you can never be sure which grammatical structures and vocabulary to use.
Just out of interest, what did you write originally? Were there other corrections?
Good point Mr. I was posting for a while before I was able to understand them and make the most of them.
I don’t see why Koichi suggests using Lang-8 so early – what good are corrections if you can’t (at least vaguely) understand them? When your Japanese is so basic, there’s only so far the helper can simplify it while still trying to make it sound more natural/correct. It’s not always easy to determine how much a learner knows so you can never be sure which grammatical structures and vocabulary to use.
Just out of interest, what did you write originally? Were there other corrections?
I’m a bit embarrassed to post it as I now understand better alot of where my mistakes came from. I’ve made a couple of other posts as well and the majority of my mistakes are coming from verb forms.
Speaking of verbs…..
I just ran into a wall with verb forms and the conversion to dictionary forms. Textfugu teaches with ます for starting out, but from looking around in jisho.org and other sites (Tae Kim’s) a lot of people seem to teach dictionary form first. Earlier Joel mentioned that both ways have merit and I was wondering what those merits are.
I’m starting to use resources like Memrise and WaniKani to expand my vocabulary and I’m noticing alot of verbs are in anything expect ます form. This is the first part of learning the language that has seemed really difficult for me to grasp, so I’m just looking for advise on what the best way to scale this verb wall is. These different forms are really causing me headaches.
ます-form first: Every verb conjugates the same, there are no exceptions. Most auxiliary verbs and adjectives attach on to the ます-stem as well. As a new starter in Japanese, it’s likely you’d only ever use the ます-form when speaking with a Japanese person, because it’s not likely you’ll come to know anyone well enough to be casual. (Downside: obscures the differences between the verb groups.)
Dictionary form first: Way more versatile, and appears in way more grammar forms and conjugations. (Downside: it’s complex. So many different conjugations…)
Good points by Joel there. ます-form is easier to learn first but the problem is that I’ve only seen TextFugu use that method, so learning new vocab anywhere other than here is a bit difficult since they all use dictionary form. However, when you’re comfortable with dictionary form, you’ll see it’s better to learn words in that way. I’d say once you’ve got a grip on ます-form and how it works, skip ahead to the section on dictionary form; I wish I had when I started but maybe that’s just me.
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