I wonder if we should come up with a list of linguistics papers / chapters / books somewhere. It could be an answer on our resources meta question.

It could be divided up into different topics.

A lot of ling papers, in both English and Japanese, are freely available online.

But we could add papers and books even if they aren't freely available, since after all people can use libraries :-)

@rhyaeris I think your edits are helpful, but as long as you're doing those edits, could you take a closer look at each question and see if anything else can be improved? Typos, formatting, dead links, and so on.

@kuchitsu Yay! I do that too, although at this point I'm probably not learning much from it.

How long have you been learning Japanese?

I'm probably not the best person to give advice since I'm probably a slower learner than some of the other folks around here, but I do know a little about the science of language acquisition, and I think you're right – every little bit helps! At least as long as you're paying attention.

I don't know what your interests are, but if you can find Japanese stuff you enjoy listening to, whether it's podcasts or audiobooks or drama CDs, that's another way to squeeze a lot of language practice into your day.

(Sadly audiobooks are not as popular in Japan as they are in English-speaking countries, so the selection is sparse and they're rather more expensive.)

Do you have people you can talk with in Japanese?

Ah, I see. That's good to hear :-)

@rhyaeris In general, I think any improvement is okay around here. On larger sites like Stack Overflow where they get a lot more edits, I think there's a good reason to reject "trivial" edits because they could take up too much reviewer time. But we really don't get too many edit suggestions in the first place.

(Most other users seem to agree, but there was that one user who rejected several of your edits, so I guess he disagrees!)

One thing we don't want is edits that invalidate existing answers.

So even if something is wrong or doesn't make sense in the question, if someone has written an answer that addresses it, we probably shouldn't change the question.

So it's also important not to change too much when editing!

@rhyaeris One thing to watch out for when editing questions is tags. Our tags are kind of a mess, so there's very often room for improvement in how our questions are tagged.

The tag system was really designed for programming sites like Stack Overflow, and it doesn't work perfectly over here on natural language sites, but I think we can still improve what we're doing with tags here and there :-)

We still don't have a tag for 連体詞 yet.

Unfortunately, our tradition of using English names for tags doesn't work too well here because (as far as I know) there is no standard English name for 連体詞. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Should we just use "rentaishi" or something, romanized?

Samuel Martin uses adnoun in his 1975 Reference Grammar of Japanese, but this term isn't well known.

Other linguists have used attributive words or adnominal words, where attributive and adnominal are used as translations of 連体.

Attributive is by analogy to English grammar, where attributive position is the position occupied by attributive adjectives such as cold in cold war, or attributive nouns such as chicken in chicken soup.

Adnominal is a more literal translation of 連体 (= 体言に連なる)

Where 体言 is sometimes glossed in English as 'nominal' (versus 名詞 for 'noun')

Well, no one ever learned a language by reading a book on grammar.

Gotta use it to learn it! :-)

@kuchitsu I'm a nerd, I love grammar :-)

A lot of people recommend Makino and Tsutsui's A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar.

It's organized as a dictionary, so you look up specific particles to learn about them. It's not a textbook you read cover-to-cover.

Yeah, kanji add a great deal of morphological transparency to the language!

Which one is heat+heat? 熱々?

There are a bunch of patterns you'll notice in kanji compounds. Putting together two characters with similar meaning, as in 火炎, for example.

It sounds like you're already noticing patterns, which is good :-)

Oh, I see.

One advantage in putting together two morphemes of similar meaning is avoiding homophones.

You'll notice that a lot of morphemes borrowed from Chinese (the 音読み) sound the same in Japanese.

Even more so than in Chinese.

That's also why modern Chinese (especially Mandarin) is moving to two-syllable words. The language Japanese largely borrowed Chinese morphemes from was Middle Chinese, mostly over a thousand years ago, and Middle Chinese was more monosyllabic than Mandarin is today because it had a great deal more variety in syllable forms.

Over time Chinese syllables have gotten simpler and simpler.

They're simpler in Japanese too than they were in Ancient Chinese.

Have you noticed that 漢語 tend to be two-character compounds, or larger compounds made up of two-character compounds?

They aren't all, of course, they just tend to be :-)

漢字 = Chinese characters, 漢語 = Sino-Japanese words

漢語 are either words borrowed from Chinese, or words made in Japanese out of morphemes borrowed from Chinese, patterned after words borrowed from Chinese.

@rhyaeris Yes, we can come up with "tag synonyms" to do that, but we have to pick one as a "master" tag.

I'm not sure if we should make tag synonyms like "adnominal-words" → "rentaishi". I think we should do it as long as it causes less confusion than it clears up :-)

Unfortunately, I don't really know which words people know.

@kuchitsu Do you have the opportunity to talk to anyone in Japanese?

If you don't, you can find "language exchanges" online where you can video chat with people.

And you can chat online too: chatpad.jp

@kuchitsu You can certainly practice with non-native speakers, but you naturally imitate what you hear, so you have to be careful not to pick up bad habits by imitating mistakes your friends make.

There's three volumes, by the way.

Basic, Intermediate, Advanced.

Well, your English seems fine.

Eventually you'll probably want to pick up some resources that are in Japanese rather than English.

But there are a lot of English to Japanese resources.

I don't know how the situation is in Russian, but I know there are often a lot more resources available in English than in other languages, so I know a lot of people do that sort of thing.

I don't know, I'm kind of bad at expressing myself in any language :-)

I think that sometimes people tend to express different things in different languages, so sometimes that can get lost in translation.

Oh yeah? Well, there's a lot of informal English out there, though people tend to clean it up a bit when they type stuff online. Most of the time, anyway.

Japanese word order is relatively free, largely because of the postpositions (particles / case markers) that tell you what each part of the sentence does.

There's usually a relatively unmarked word order, though, and just because you can put the words in a different order doesn't mean they're always completely equivalent. I think it's like you said for Russian, variations aren't necessarily identical even if they get the same meaning across.

(Of course, since I'm just learning, I might not always know the difference!)

@kuchitsu It depends on the language, though. If you ever learn Korean, you might end up wanting to learn it through Japanese :-)

@rhyaeris It tends to be a matter of emphasis.

Or information structure.

The basic meaning may be the same, but if you move something out of its unmarked position, it could be interpreted as emphasizing it.

I'm interested in historical Japanese, but my emphasis is on learning the modern language.

Classical Japanese is really more based on Early Middle Japanese than Old Japanese.

But EMJ and OJ aren't necessarily distinguished as often as they should be.

Er.

I typed 'Modern', but I meant 'Middle'! I'd better go check that I didn't make the same mistake earlier today :-)

phew, I typed 'Middle' earlier today :-)

@kuchitsu The major divisions are into Old Japanese, Early Middle Japanese, Late Middle Japanese, and Modern Japanese. The form of the language before Old Japanese is largely unknown because it wasn't written down, but people have made some efforts at reconstructing Proto-Japanese.

And you can divide those up further, e.g. you can separate out Early Modern Japanese from Modern Japanese.

@kuchitsu There are always stories in the news about how confusing it is for older Japanese speakers and how rapidly loanwords are flooding the language.

I think it's more about 外来語 in general and not so much about 和製英語, though.

I think to a Japanese speaker, it doesn't necessarily matter whether a loan phrase is 和製 or not, because they're speaking Japanese, not English! :-)

Although it might matter if a Japanese speaker learning English talks about cunning paper in English.

@kuchitsu Our own venerable Yoichi Oishi recently posted a comment:

"Pre-noun adjectival" would be inaccurate.

"Adnominal" is definitely a technical term.

@EckV I don't know. You could ask on meta.

I think that might be best. We do already have a term for one 活用形, specifically the 連用形.

Some of our terms are based in 学校文法 (traditional grammar as taught to native speakers in Japanese schools), others in 日本語教育 (Japanese as taught to second language learners)

So we have "na-adjectives", which are called 「ナ形容詞」 in 日本語教育, but called 「形容動詞」 in 学校文法, so most native speakers know the latter and not the former.

Likewise, 連用形 is a term from 学校文法 that is usually not used in 日本語教育

@EckV It's okay to ask things like that here, though you could also ask it on the network-wide meta, meta.stackexchange.com

Wherever you feel more comfortable asking :-)

@rhyaeris Hopefully. We should make more tag synonyms :-)

The way the tag system works, it's easier for moderators to do things like that than regular users. The process for regular users to create tag synonyms exists but it's really cumbersome and doesn't work well on smaller SE sites like this one.

I might put together a meta thread with a list of proposed synonyms for terms from different grammatical frameworks.

One problem is that terms sometimes carry with them conceptual distinctions, too.

@EckV Oh, neat! :-)

For example, the tag excerpt for "na-adjectives" says 「形容動詞」 in Japanese because that's the term native speakers are most likely familiar with. But with 「形容動詞」, the following な or だ or whatnot is considered part of the word, whereas with "na-adjectives" it's taught as a separate word, the same copula that appears with nouns.

So we're sort of glossing over that conceptual distinction when we make synonyms between the two.

But I'm not sure there's anything to be done about that.

Yeah, maybe having the tag wiki mention stuff like that is a good solution.

I'm sorry, I don't know! :-)

People talk about JapanesePod101, too. Has anyone ever used that site?

I wonder if I'd have learned a lot faster if I started learning in 2016 instead of in the 90s. There are a lot more readily available resources these days. It seems like a great time to learn Japanese :-)

← slow learner!

I'd probably find a way to learn slowly in 2016 :-)