Hmmm, the one thing an english-speaker needs to know about nihongo is that
nihongo is reverse polish while english is more like infix. This solves a
lot of the syntactic difficulties one may have with a particle-based
grammar.  After that, there are serious fundamental semantic issues - In
particular, I seem to see meanings jump between "as", "in order to",
"because" etc. whenever I attempt to read japanese texts - cause and
effect are not clearly separated.

Edmund



On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Ohshima, Yoshiki wrote:

>   Hello,
> 
> > English has the order subject-verb-object (SVO) while Japanese has
> > subject-object-verb.
> > (See http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Subject+Verb+Object)
> 
>   The concept of "subject" or "object" are pretty much
> westerner's point of view:-) It would be more fair to say,
> as in the http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Japanese_language+,
> a sentense structure looks like:
> 
>   TOPIC: PARTICLE: COMMENT
> 
> And TOPIC can be sometimes omitted if known and PARTICLE is
> sometimes not necessary.  (And sometimes people don't say
> COMMENT neither:-).)
> 
>   Like German, and I believe Dutch has similar
> characteristic although my knowledge on German is almost
> gone, the "case" of the word is denoted by the acompanying
> particle (in Japanese, it is a sort of suffix, in German, it
> is "der des dem den" thingy.)  So the word order in the
> sentense is somewhat forgiving.
> 
> > Example 
> > 
> > | Ellipse's |  width |
> > 
> >   vs.
> > 
> > | the width  |  of the Ellipse |
> > 
> > 
> > Would it be possible that you give some examples (with word by
> > word English translation, I don't know Japanese) why it does not sound
> > natural in Japanese?
> 
>   Regarding this "possesive case", the former is just
> natural and the current one is fine.  The problem occurs
> when "increase by" or such things involved.
> 
>   Ellipse's x increase by 5
> 
> looks ok/understandable in English.  But in Japanese, the
> more natural form would be
> 
>   Ellipse "no" x "wo" 5 "masu (increase)"
> 
>   ("no" is a particle which denotes that the following word
> is a possesion of the preceding word.  "wo" is a particle
> which denotes the preceding word is the object.
> 
>   Or, it is possible to say
> 
>   5 | Ellipse "no" x "wo" "masu (increase)"
> 
>   However, it is pretty hard to make up a natural sentense
> with "5" sitting at the end.  The current way is something
> like to say:
> 
>   Ellipse's x "increase by the following number:" 5
> 
> This is understandable, but somewhat tricky.  Basically the
> object, or a building blocks/tile of eToy sometimes have to
> be surrounded by another two tiles that are related and
> represent a single concept.
> 
>   One possible way is to allow some "fuzz-words" around the
> actual building bloks.  But I can see many problems with
> this approach...
> 
> -- Yoshiki
>