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Lesson 41: Five Key Facts

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Today we're going to talk about something very important that affects the whole structure of Japanese.

And, surprise, surprise, the textbooks never explain this properly.

What we're going to talk about is Japanese words.

Not vocabulary, but the actual nature of the words themselves and how they structurally work inside the language.

This isn't difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

But if you don't know it, it's very confusing because you actually see a sentence and you don't know what the words are really doing inside that sentence.

And this is the position that the textbooks leave you in.

Now, the fact is that Japanese is much simpler than English and much simpler than most languages in the types of words that it has.

However, the English textbooks and dictionaries try to assimilate Japanese words to the various English types and this doesn't work well at all and leads to endless confusion.

So I'm going to present five facts that will clarify the whole situation.

Fact 1: Nearly all Japanese words fall into one of three categories. Just three.

And those three categories are: Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives.

Now, there are also, as we know, particles – they're not words, but they are the nuts and bolts that hold the language together.

And there are a few -- a very few -- specialized words that don't fall into those three categories.

For example, there are conjunction words that join together two logical clauses to make a compound sentence.

Most conjunctions aren't done with words anyway -- they're done with the te-form, the i-stem, or groups of particles like "demo" and "noni".

But there are a few dedicated conjunctions like "kedo" and the other "ga", the "ga" that isn't a particle but a conjunction, which we discussed in a recent video.

Now, apart from these, everything you see is going to be a noun, a verb, or an adjective.

Fact 2: Verbs and adjectives are very easily recognized and distinguished.

Every verb ends in an -u row kana -- and it has to be a kana, it can't be included in kanji.

And every adjective has to end in the kana i. Again, it has to be the kana, can't be part of a kanji.

Now, as we know, there are certain completely regular transformations that this -u row kana and that this i can make.

They can go into te-form or ta-form, and the final -u row kana of a verb can change into the equivalent kana in the same row in order to attach a helper word such as the negative helper adjective "nai" or the causative helper verb "seru/saseru".

Now, once you know the basic permutations of verbs and adjectives, which you should do very early on, you know that if a word doesn't have one of those possible verb endings or one of those possible adjective endings, it is a noun.

You know that if a word is written in kanji only or can be written in kanji only, it is in 99 cases out of 100 a noun.

So Japanese, as I've said before, is a very noun-centered language.

Fact 3: There is a legion of super-nouns.

What I mean by this is that there are certain special categories of noun, each of which has one superpower and one only.

That's to say that the nouns in each of these groups of special or super-nouns differ from ordinary nouns in one respect only.

Now, two of those groups we already know, so as Fact 4 I'm just going to go over those quickly.

The first group is adjectival nouns, which are horribly misnamed by the textbooks "na adjectives".

They're not adjectives. They are nouns that can under certain circumstances be used adjectivally.

The superpower of adjectival nouns, the one thing they can do that makes them different from any other noun, is that they can use the soft or connective form of the copula "da".

So, we can say "yashiki-ga fushigi da" -- "mansion mysterious is".

When we do this we're just doing what we can do with any noun.

We can say "Sakura-ga Nihonjin da" -- "Sakura Japanese person is".

But we can also use that soft form of "da", which is "na", and we can say "fushigi-na yashiki" - "mysterious-is mansion".

You can't do that with a regular noun.

And that's the only difference between a regular noun and an adjectival noun.

The second group is suru nouns, which the dictionaries somewhat confusingly call "suru verbs".

What they are is nouns.

And their superpower is that they are allowed to drop the direct object marker, "-wo".

So, if we take the noun "benkyou", which means "study", we can say "benkyou-wo suru", which means "do study" but we can also say "benkyou suru", which means "study" (the verb).

We can use the -wo to mark a direct object of any verb, but we can only drop that -wo in the case of suru nouns.

That is their superpower.

So when we do that, we fuse together "benkyou" with "suru" and make what we really can call a "suru verb".

But the important point to remember is that when "suru" is not attached to it, it's not a suru verb.

It's not any kind of a verb. It's a noun.

So we can say "benkyou-ga suki da".

That means "study is pleasing to me".

We don't say "benkyou-suru-no-ga suki da", because what we'd be doing if we said that would be taking a noun, turning it into a verb with "suru", and then turning it back into a noun again with "no".

We don't need to do that because it's a noun in the first place.

Now, the third group, which we haven't yet introduced, is adverbial nouns.

Now, there are a lot of these and an awful lot of them end in the kana "ri", but not all of them by any means.

So, we're going to look at two that do and one that doesn't, and we're going to look at their superpower.

Their superpower is very similar to the superpower of the suru noun, which is to say that they can drop the relevant particle under certain circumstances.

As we know, any noun that's appropriate for the use can be turned into an adverb by adding -ni.

So, "shizuka", which is the noun "quiet", can be used adverbially with -ni.

We can say "shizuka-ni suru" -- "do quietly / act quietly".

We can say "shizuka-ni aruku" -- "walk quietly".

With adverbial nouns, we can drop that -ni.

So, we'll take one that ends in the typical "ri": "yukkuri" -- that means ''slow'' or ''leisurely'' -- and we can say "yukkuri-ni suru" -- "act in a leisurely manner", "yukkuri-ni aruku" -- "walk slowly".

But we can also say "yukkuri suru", "yukuri aruku". We can drop that -ni.

So, that's the one and only superpower of the adverbial noun.

And it's important to understand this because when you start trying to explain them without recognizing this fundamental fact, you can get into all kinds of difficulty.

Let's take another one: "amari".

Now, this noun is usually explained in a way that's completely confusing.

"Amari" is a noun, and what it means is "excess".

You can use it in a completely literal sense.

You can say "gohan-no amari" -- which means "the excess rice / the leftover cooked rice".

It's very often used in more abstract ways.

So, we can say "kanashimi no amari naita".

Now, this means "from an excess of sadness, I cried."

And, as you see, we can leave out the particle.

We usually do leave out the particle with "amari".

So it's now being used adverbially and it still means "excess".

Now, the textbooks generally introduce it in a different context, which makes it very confusing when we see it in other contexts and especially when we don't understand that it's actually a noun.

They show it being used adverbially in expressions like "amari benkyou shinai".

What does that literally mean?

It literally means "I don't study too much / I don't do an excess of study."

But of course, as we know, what it means in practice is that "I don't study very much".

And this is what we call litotes.

We've talked about hyperbole in language and how it's a very common phenomenon.

Litotes is the opposite of hyperbole.

Hyperbole is saying more than we really mean; litotes is saying less than we really mean.

The word "litotes" isn't as well known as "hyperbole".

That's perhaps because current Western speech is much more prone to hyperbole than to litotes.

But we still have litotes in set expressions.

So, if we are going on a picnic and we look at the dark clouds in the sky and say "It doesn't look too good!" what we're literally saying is "It doesn't look excessively good" but what we actually mean is "It doesn't look very good!"

And it's just the same with "amari".

If we say "amari benkyou shinai", we're saying "I don't study too much / I don't study excessively" but what we actually mean is "I don't study very much at all."

So, let's just take one more that doesn't end in "ri", and that's "zuibun".

What it really means is "sufficiently".

And you may say, "Well, 'sufficiently' isn't a noun".

And that's true -- in English it isn't a noun.

In Japanese it is, and if we look at the kanji "zuibun", what it actually means is something like "appropriate portion" or "appropriate amount" -- in other words, "sufficient" or "sufficiently".

And this is another litotes which is common to both English and Japanese and many other languages.

When you say to someone "zuibun jouzu da ne", what you're literally saying is "you're skilful enough / you're sufficiently skilful".

What you actually mean is that the person is very skilful.

And this is just the same in English. You might say "You're pretty good".

And "zuibun", like "pretty" or "fairly" in English can run the full range from its original meaning of "sufficiently" or "fairly" to its more usual litotes meaning of "very /considerably".

So the thing to remember is that there are a very limited number of word-types in Japanese.

Nearly all words are either verbs, nouns or adjectives.

And the ones that aren't verbs or adjectives, whatever the dictionaries tell you they are, are practically all the time nouns.

When you understand that, you have a much clearer understanding of what's going on in a sentence.