What's your technique for the differences in sentence structure order?

Japanese
#1

Couldn’t think of a catchy title.

Basically, the order of words in Japanese is different from English a lot of the time. For example, “a room with a big bed” would be: 大きなベッドのある部屋. Where, if we are literally translating the words, they’re in the reverse order. i.e., in English the room is mentioned first, then the bed, whereas in Japanese it’s the opposite.
Also for things like: “A person looking for a dog” becomes 犬を探している人, where the word order in something akin to “Dog, looked for by a person”.

Do you fine fellas have a technique for remembering these differences? I’ve been trying to simply brute force these example sentences, but I can’t seem to get out of ‘english-order-mode’, if that makes sense.

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#2

I think its only really one difference

In English, extra information comes after the relevant noun. In Japanese, it comes before.

I never really used any technique, it just came with time and practice.

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#3

I think this is also one of those things that extensive reading/listening helps a lot with. Seeing how people naturally stick sentences together and how they attach all the parts (even when you don’t understand the whys just yet) helps build an instinct for stuff like that that is much more difficult to build if you’re just interpreting rules from books.

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#4

Generally, the only reversal I think anyone should worry about or even think of as a reversal is the verb at the end.

Everything else is only reversed if you think about the most common and conventionally accepted English sentence orders.

The fact is, grammatically correct sentences can be created that can get you closer to the feeling of Japanese.

Two most useful tricks imho:

  1. If possible, make it a prepositional phrase

I can see him from over here => From over here, I can see him.

  1. Anything that could be an adjective or adverb comes first.

I saw a man who was walking a dog and wearing a hat => A hat wearing, dog walking man is who I saw.

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#5

Technique? Time and practice. It sounds weird until it doesn’t. But I do think that this is one of the hardest things to get over in the early stages, and even at intermediate levels.

One technique that may work for you is looking through a magazine or google images and just describing the images you see in Japanese with the correct structure. Whether it be a person ordering at a bar or a lady in an orange dress. If you don’t know the vocab, move on to the next image or page. Or if you’re out, in your own head you can describe someone or something you’re observing. I do feel however that things don’t really get solidified until you see them in the wild, so just read and watch more stuff as well. Understanding will come, it might just take a little while to get there.

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#6

This is a reasonable video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBAYCbL3lEc. There are many more similar videos and articles, so this is just one of them, but it’s helpful to get over the hurdle of changing your perspective of how a sentence is structured.

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#7

Brute-forcing the example sentences is where I’ve landed too, and two and a half years in I’m still not sure if it’s actually building the right pattern or just building familiarity with those specific sentences.

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#8

I think early on, it’s natural to directly translate each piece of the sentence because you’re trying to make sense of it all. But eventually, you start getting used to the order, and you move away from directly translating each piece, and you just try to say your thought with the structures available in Japanese.

My journey was:

  1. translate each piece of a sentence and then translate the whole sentence backwards
  2. learn set phrases and replace the important part for me (__がほしい。__と思います。__と言いました。)
  3. think “what am i trying to say?” and then think “what’s the Japanese way to say it?”*
  4. just say what I want in Japanese

Other comments:

  • adjective + noun usually follows the same order as English
  • I think of Japanese sentences as turning things from a modifying clause (a room that has a big bed) into an adjective in front of the noun (大きなベッドのある部屋)
  • It definitely takes practice reading the same sentence a couple times to hold the pieces of the sentence in your head to create a full picture (instead of trying to hold the full sentence in your head and translating it backwards)

*There’s some Japanese grammar where there’s no good word-by-word way to translate it –
公園は広ければ広いほどいい。 → The park, if it widens, the wide limit, is good (???) = The bigger the park, the better it is.
ば〜ほど (JLPT N3) | Bunpro

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#9

I studied on my own for around a year before I went to live in Japan and attend a language school and to be honest it took a loooong time before the sentence structures made any sense to me.

As far as i can tell there’s no technique that will significantly change how fast you learn this, it just comes down to listening and reading a lot.

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#10

What helped me a lot was not starting with Bunpro. First Anki, then Migaku; I got used to typing my own sentence translations, and I did so using literal word orders and meanings.

I feel this helped me internalize Japanese sentence structure. And, until you do so, you’re really just ‘decoding’ Japanese rather than learning it, so it’s an important thing to work on (imho).

While Bunpro is now my main platform, I do wish they would let me customize the hints/translations so that I could continue to write what is actually being said, rather than how we would say something similar in English.

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#11

Pretend you’re Yoda.

Otherwise it’s just a case of time and practice. I’d recommend learning some common phrases rather than just constructing sentences purely from grammar rules. Then modify those set phrases to what you need.

#12

an extra tip for software developers: Japanese sentence order is closer to object-oriented programming than to English. At the beginning it helped me a lot to think of Japanese this way.

That said, it will come over time with practice, and it will become natural. You do need tons of input, tons of output, and you need to slowly overcome the mental translation. At some point, expressing things in Japanese will be just that - expressing things in Japanese. When you speak your own language, you don’t think about the grammar points either.

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