Log: ryanheise tries to solve Japanese grammar

[ryanheise]

Week 3 update (late again!)

I will now divide the verbs into:

(1) special cases like する,
(2) verbs like 行く, and
(3) verbs like 見る.

Also, going forward, I am not sure how useful it is to fill in all the different conjugations of all of the verbs in my table. What I've found is that certain verbs are rarely conjugated in certain ways, and also only certain conjugations make sense for some words. This makes it difficult to "look out" for a particular conjugation of a verb that in practice isn't used or is rarely used. Instead, for each new type of conjugation I add to my table, I will try to think of examples that make sense for that particular conjugation, and will assume all other verbs in that category will conjugate in the same way until I meet a counter example.

In my last update, I noticed that I completely missed the category (3) verbs for the last column. The common category (2) has forms like 行ける and 話せる, but it seems I couldn't recall what it was for category (3). Since then, I realised I had heard 食べられる before. The other quasi group I missed was the つ verbs like 待つ, although that is simply 待てる.

Regarding 食べられる, I remember in the past thinking something was fishy about this verb being different from others I had heard, but it still had the え sound in there. That was about the extent of my analysis. In another completely compartmentalised area of my mind, I had developed a familiarisation for the passive form, but never connected the dots that in the case of this word (and by assumption all of category (3)) the passive form is identical.

Thinking about it more, this reminds me about a similar thing we do in English for verbs like "interesting", "interested", "boring", "bored". Now the past tenses of these verbs actually double as adjectives. If you are bored (adjective) it is because "passively" you were bored by someone or something. So we can easily justify why the passive form of the verb is effectively an adjective.

Similarly for Japanese, with 食べられる it is easy to see how these different senses might be connected. E.g. "can be eaten" captures both the "can" and the "passive" senses.

Anyway, it probably makes sense to add the passive as my next column. We have for group (3), 食べられる as mentioned already. For group (2), one verb that comes to mind that makes sense in a passive way is 読む, and the passive for that is 読まれる. I will assume other verbs in this category work the same way even if I have never heard them conjugated that way before. For example, I would assume that 行く becomes 行かれる. Then also 言う would become 言われる (remembering the わ for these verbs that end in う - it's kind of a small exception in category (2)).

It's getting late here (3am) so I will not think about any plans for my next update, and instead will let the next thing that stands out to me get added to my table.

[ryanheise]

Week 4 (late again, but at least consistently late. Consistency is important right?)

This week I decided to look at the present continuous forms that end with ている. These turned out to be a lot more varied than I thought. They don't fit into the 3 categories I identified earlier.

At this stage, I haven't identified what the categories are, I am just writing down a variety of instances that I can remember hearing that end with different consonants (keeping in mind there is probably more variation for the る ending), and I will see if I can spot the patterns afterwards.

する・している
見る・見ている
食べる・食べている
言う・言っている
行く・行っている
なう・なっている
読む・読んでいる
遊ぶ・遊んでいる
話す・話している
待つ・待っている

There are a few on my list I can't recall ever hearing: 泳ぐ, 死ぬ. Or any other verbs that have these endings. I'll have to look out for these (maybe not ぬ if there are none).

But looking at the above list of those I could remember hearing, I can see that the 見る and 食べる verbs which were in the same group in my previous classification are still in the same group when applying the ている rules. i.e. They work the same way as each other where we just chop off the る and then add ている.

As for the others, there is some variation. This is a small sample size, so I'm going to wait until I add some more examples to the list. However, I am fairly certain that any verb ending in つ is going to become っている (and う feels the same), and I have a good feeling that other む verbs become んでいる (and ぶ feels the same).

I am not so confident about くor ぐ. I feel almost confident about す but I'll try to increase the sample size first.

One more note is that I have often heard Japanese learners talk about the so-called "-て" form. I never really bothered to find out what that was (intentionally), but of course you get to hear "-て" used in a lot of various sentence patterns, including -てください. My feeling would obviously be that the same rules that are used to produce this "-て" form are the same rules that I am trying to figure out for ている.

[ryanheise]

Week 5 (Back on schedule!)

Luckily, in the past couple of days I remembered some more ている examples, and heard/encountered a few more.

The first of the mysteries, 死ぬ　➞　死んでいる.
I also remembered 学ぶ　➞　学んでいる which supports my intuition on the -ぶ verbs.
It seems I didn't include any normal る verbs last time, but I do recall hearing なる　➞　なっている and 乗る　➞　乗っている.
I still did not come across the conjugation for 泳ぐ , so I'll put that one aside for the moment.

I did however remember quite a few other -く verbs in their ている form. For example:

聞く becomes 聞いている
書く becomes 書いている
歩く becomes 歩いている

This leads me to believe that 行っている is actually the exception here, and normally for -く verbs the く gets replaced by いている. But if 行く is an exception, I'll assume there could be more exceptions.

Logic would say -ぐ verbs would be similar to -く verbs, although I feel uncomfortable assuming that without any examples coming to mind for now (I have almost certainly heard examples before but I just haven't noticed this detail yet, and my memory has a habit of dodging when I target a specific thing to remember).

I also remember hearing another -す verb and I remember that it was also conjugated している but now I can't remember which verb it was, sadly. (As I was typing this, I remembered a sentence from an old LingQ story where someone asks someone to press the button in the lift: "ボタンを押してください", and these てください rules seem to be the same as the ているrules, so I'll take that as additional support for the case).

So from what I've seen so far, the patterns are:

Exceptions:
する　➞　している

Verbs in the 見る/食べる category:
る　➞　ている

All other verbs:
く　➞　いている (exception: 行く　➞　行っている)
ぐ　➞　(not confident)
う　➞　っている
つ　➞　っている
る　➞　っている
む　➞　んでいる
ぶ　➞　んでいる
ぬ　➞　んでいる
す　➞　している

So that leaves just one more to fill in for ぐ.

[ryanheise]

Week 6

Not much progress this week since I've been apartment hunting(*), but I did make a couple of observations:

泳いでいる - I came across this last missing conjugation after watching lots of videos on YouTube about swimming, some about swimming people, many about swimming fish, and some strangely enough about Abe's swimming eyes. That may sound like a mostly unproductive expedition, but on the other hand, it was a good way to get focused immersion on a particular topic, and I might do more of this in the future.

来る - I somehow missed this one, and when now thinking about its conjugations, I also notice it is another exception. e.g. 来る、来ます、来ません、来ない、来ている. The other forms do not come to mind yet.

(*) kind of an interesting thing to try to do during a coronavirus lockdown. Some real estate agents even offered to do Skype apartment tours, but mostly the rule was to invite no more than 2 people at a time in person.

[ryanheise]

Week 7

Progress is going to be slow for a couple of weeks as I deal with moving. By next week's log entry, I will have just landed in the new apartment with unpacked boxes, but I look forward to hopefully stepping up my immersion after that.

So this week I'll put the word 引っ越す up for consideration which means moving houses

I've heard some of its conjugations before, and the rest come from the intuitions explored above since it appears to conjugate in the normal way:

引っ越す・引っ越します・引っ越しません・引っ越しました・引っ越さない・引っ越せる・引っ越している.

For this week, let's also add the "let's" conjugations like 行こう/行きましょう. For this week's word, it will be 引っ越そう / 引っ越しましょう. I will leave the remaining words in my table as an exercise for next week and then will get to see what the patterns are for the different types of verb.

[ryanheise]

Week 8 (late)

After a week long operation, I've moved everything to the new apartment. I've sort of been on cruise control with Japanese in the meantime, and today's log entry will be similarly lightweight.

(Speaking of lightweight, I can only wish my luggage was that. Moving has made me seriously contemplate a minimalist lifestyle, and if I ever move to Japan, it is tempting to get myself to a position where I reduce my physical possessions to a more manageable level. For starters, I'll be attempting to get rid of all my books and switch entirely to digital.)

It may be a couple of weeks before I finish sorting through my life's accumulation of stuff, but after that, I REALLY want to step up my Japanese immersion which is essential for this "noticing" approach to work. Of course, while unpacking boxes, I can have Japanese podcasts playing in the background, but I'll need more of the active as well as the passive.

- - - -

What I planned to work on this time was to use my memory and intuition to fill in the "Let's" conjugations for a range of different verbs and look for the patterns.

First, the easy ones, the polite forms:

しましょう, 来ましょう, 見ましょう, 食べましょう, 行きましょう, 泳ぎましょう, なりましょう, 待ちましょう, 会いましょう, 選びましょう, 読みましょう, 死にましょう, 話しましょう, 言いましょう, 引っ越しましょう

There is nothing novel here. For each of these, we can take the polite form like "ikimasu" and in every case replace the "masu" by "mashou".

Now the plain forms:

しよう, 見よう, 食べよう, 行こう, 泳ごう, なろう, 待とう, 会おう, 選ぼう, 読もう, 死のう, 話そう, 言おう, 引っ越そう

First, I skipped the conjugation for 来る since it didn't come to mind immediately. It is irregular, though, which is probably why I wasn't absolutely certain.

But writing them out, the pattern clearly follows the 3 categories of verb I identified earlier. So we can put the following in the same group:

見る -> 見よう
食べる -> 食べよう

With this category of verb, the usual approach is to just remove the る and replace it by the new ending, and here the story is no different where the new ending becomes よう.

For the irregular verbs, する maps to しよう and I'll have to keep listening out for 来る.

For the rest, the "normal" category of verbs, the usual approach is to rather than delete the last character and replace it by the new ending, to instead transform the last character, keeping the consonant and changing the vowel. E.g. iku -> ikimasu (ku becomes ki). Also, in the hiragana table, the sound of the leading consonant can also change sometimes depending on the vowel that follows it. For example, we don't say ta, ti, tu, te, to, we say ta, chi, tsu, te, to. So in practice, we're not simply changing the final vowel, we're "shifting" our position within the hiragana table to the column for that vowel, staying within the same consonant row (but acknowledging that the consonant can change its sound within the same row as we move across the different vowels). Here, it's the same sort of thing, so iku becomes ikou. In each and every case, we chop off the final vowel and add "ou".

[ryanheise]

Week 9 (equally late)

I really struggled to find time for Japanese this week, but I'm also determined not to skip a week, so I have one small observation to jot down.

A few times this week, I heard the ちゃ form used after a verb. E.g.

1. 日本のクリスマスは苦手 from JLPT stories: この時期にはデパートで自分のためになにか買っちゃダメなわけ？
2. ペッパピッグ: それは困ったね。どこへ行っちゃったんだろう 。

I'm not 100% sure if they're both used in the same sense, but my observation is that in both situations, they were talking to themselves. Not a definitive observation by any means, but just one tiny observation / data point.

[devilyoudont]

To give a little hint, these are both contractions, rather than a proper verb form

[ryanheise]

Thanks, luckily I'm already familiar with this construct and have seen it in both its expanded and contracted form, although what I was trying to develop here was just an intuition for when a native speaker would likely use it in practice, and when they wouldn't use it. And then my larger goal is to collect lots of these little observations / data points over time through immersion, giving me a very fuzzy set of rules about grammar usage (my thesis being that fuzzy is better than strict when it comes to languages).

[ryanheise]

Week 10 (equally late)

If I knew how to get my hands on a Japanese audio book for Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A simple, effective way to banish clutter forever", that's probably what I'd be listening to as I try to sort through my possessions.

In terms of increasing my immersion, I haven't had the time yet, but I've experimented with leveraging my "dead time" with varying degrees of success:

- While cooking (success - can easily pay attention to the audio)
- While cleaning (success - can easily pay attention to the audio)
- While sorting through my possessions (fail - I cannot pay attention to the audio while making decisions)

There may be a small benefit to having audio going in the background while sorting through my boxes which is that there are "moments" here and there where the audio grabs my attention, and it's only because the audio was playing continuously that my brain took advantage of those brief moments. But it's not a very time-efficient way of getting input, compared to listening alongside cooking, cleaning or exercising.

So what new did I notice this week? Only something very minor. I was watching some Korean dramas and I noticed something in Korean that reminded me of the ちゃ in Japanese that noticed last week. In Korean, people often use the 지 ending when talking to themselves. Actually, this is a short form of 죠 but the shorter form 지 is just more casual. Incidentally, when you're talking to yourself, there is no reason to be formal, hence why you'd say 지. While ちゃ doesn't exactly have the same meaning as 지, I feel that using the shortened form has the same effect. So the shortened form would be more casual, and incidentally when talking to yourself it seems appropriate to use casual language.

I'll try to do my next update in 4 days to try to get somewhat back on schedule.