[iamnotlarry]

Remember those English diagramming classes everyone hated? I'm not very familiar with the education system in Japan, but I doubt they have diagramming classes. In Japanese, the diagramming is built into the language. You tag the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, etc. Everything gets markup.

Which part of the sentence is the direct object? Uh... the part with the direct object tag hanging off it? Correct!

Have you ever heard a programming language described as "designed for teaching"? Japanese is a language designed to be as simple as possible to learn.

Coming from English, the idea that a natural language could actually be designed was a shock to me. I thought they just evolved sloppily and haphazardly. Well, Japanese is proof that it doesn't have to be that way. Clear rules and not too many of them. No exceptions. Rigidly consistent. It's like a language created in a lab that never got dirtied up by real world usage. Except, oh wait, it's a real language used by millions of people every day.

[unscaled]

I never had the pleasure of taking them myself, butI'm pretty sure Japanese grammar classes are not so fun as you imagine.

Putting aside that the norm in Japanese school is rote memorization and pedantic attention to details (e.g. you'd memorize dates of historical events), the Japanese grammar that is taught in class is traditional Japanese grammar. It's pretty streamlined compared to the abomination that is medieval Latin grammar (which remains the basis for English grammar taught in class), but it still targets Classical Japanese and uses rather obscure terms where clear diagrams would suffice.

I'll have to ask, but I think that instead of diagrams, Japanese students mainly need to memorize the difference between Izenkei, Mizenkei, Renyoukei, Rentaikei and Shuushikei, even though the last one is irrelevant for modern Japanese.

And of course Japanese wasn't "designed" any more than English was. There are dialects with widely varying grammar and vocabulary, and there some aspects which are very hard to learn even if you ignore the writing system (e.g. the proper use of Wa vs Ga, the proper use of emphatic sentence endings like no/n'da or yo). Inflection is way more regular than English, and syntax is pretty streamlined, which is a boon.

[iamnotlarry]

Wa/Ga aren't that hard. Mostly just subject vs topic. Just like objective and subjective isn't that hard in English. Of course, most Americans can't master objective/subjective.

The trick for wa/ga is often just to remember that subjects are often implied in Japanese and missing from the actual text/speech. So, "Nekko ga suki desu" because the "watakushi wa" was implied.

[laurieg]

I think you're probably falling into a common trap: There are plenty of exceptions, you just don't know them yet.

For sure, Japanese verbs are more regular than English verbs. But most materials written about Japanese are aimed squarely at beginners. They naturally skip over any foibles for pedagogical reasons. There isn't all that much written (in English) about tricky sentences, syntactic ambiguity and similar mistakes.

[klodolph]

There's a theory that humans have a certain "complexity budget" for languages. People will add things to simple languages, and forget things from complex languages, to arrive at some sort of equilibrium. Language complexity is a bit of a touchy subject though.

By comparison, Japanese might have simpler syntax and phonology than English, but higher orthographic and morphological complexity (and English is already orthographically complex).

[vram22]

Sanskrit is very consistent in its rules too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit

We had it in school in grades 8-10 or so and I really enjoyed learning it. The grammar rules are fairly simple and there are not many of them, IIRC. Words can be made up out of smaller words by joining them together by simple rules.

Another interesting thing is that many words have multiple meanings, a fact that poet and prose writes in the Sanskrit literature leveraged heavily. So a passage of text can have multiple layers of meaning.

It is almost like a programming language where you compose bigger structures such as functions and classes out of the atomic elements of the language.

[vorg]

> the idea that a natural language could actually be designed was a shock to me

Perhaps the Japanese grammar was designed by a small group of individuals, maybe even one individual, a long time ago, and promoted officially by the Japanese Emperor of the time. Many writing systems have been designed from scratch in the past. Many spoken languages have risen from regional dialect to imperial language, and at least one language, Israeli, was brought to life after being dead as a spoken language for centuries. No-one's ever found a definitive link between Japanese and any other language. Perhaps at some time, the Japanese grammar was designed from scratch, perhaps using a mixture of vocabulary from many other nearby languages existing at that time, and promulgated to become the language of all Japan.

[kalleboo]

The grammar perhaps, but then you get to the writing system :)

Meanwhile over in Korean, the writing system was designed from scratch to be very simple (I'm led to believe - I don't know any Korean)

[iamnotlarry]

I really like the Korean writing system. It's very cool. Take the 1-4 sounds that make up a syllable, arrange them into the syllable template, and you have a single character that represents that syllable. It's pretty slick, space-efficient, phonetic, and full of yummy goodness.

Then, just to mess with people, optionally throw in thousands of Chinese characters.