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    Cover of The structure of the Japanese language

    The structure of the Japanese language

    Susumu Kuno

    Writing & Language
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    0recommend
    2mentions
    2people
    2013–2022years
    100% neutral

    Mentions per year

    2013201420152016201720182019202020212022

    What Hacker News says

    1. TainnorAug 2022
      I find this article rather confused. The difference between は and が is not adequately explained, there are questionable analyses (verbs of motion analysed as transitive just because they can take を), weird terminology ("genitive case"... in a language that doesn't have cases, also it's not like the article is at least consistent in calling を an "accusative case" marker), and at times weird English to the point of being confusing (誰が described as "confidential", I think what they mean is "non-polite")...

      but regardless, that's nowhere near a "complete introduction" to particles. I have a textbook (The Structure of the Japanese Language by Susumu Kuno) that devotes three entire chapters only to は vs. が. Of course, you can give a tl;dr of it, ignoring edge cases, but you do have to at least talk a bit more carefully about what a topic is, and what a subject is.

      thread
    2. goblin89Sep 2013
      > At some point you will hate it when someone uses romaji since kana is so much easier to read.

      I'm currently reading The Structure of the Japanese Language, and that is indeed the case (the book doesn't use kana, maybe it was difficult to typeset at that time). And I'm not at all proficient with the language at this point, nor have I studied kana specifically. I've struggled a lot with it initially, but consistently refused to read or write romaji, which may have helped.

      (Having just recently returned to the RTK deck after a break, I feel it's not enough and I probably should be working through words or sentences already, maybe in parallel. Thank you for describing the various aspects of your workflow in this thread!)

      thread

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