The Joys of Japanese: Part II

Probably the first thing that comes to any one's mind when you mention Chinese as a whole is the tonal accent. I do not know about many of the dialects, but Mandarin Chinese, from which the examples are used here, makes use of four tones (1st tone, high and level; 2nd tone, rising; 3rd tone, falling and rising; 4th tone, falling) plus a neutral tone. Cantonese, the second largest dialect, has nine tones. Japanese, conversely, follows a pitch accent. Standard Japanese has two pitches: High [H] and Low [L]. Pitch is far more subtle than tone, and although 80% of Japanese words are classified as flat, or without a pitch, it is the only reason that non-native Japanese speakers stand out. English, to bring it into perspective, has a stress accent. I know nothing of the stress rules in English, but I would imagine that there is no way to classify them since English seems to be one of the most arbitrarily structured languages as a whole that I have ever encountered. Yet I am writing in it. Bizarre.

Verbs. O, verbs. Thou givest us thy power to declare our actions. If you've ever studied Spanish, French, Italian, or some other Indo-European language, you will find Chinese and Japanese simultaneously a blessing and a curse. With European languages you have to memorize not only the tenses but separate suffixes for the different numbers (first person singular, second person singular, third person singular, first person plural, second person plural, and third person plural) and possibly even different forms of address (tú vs. usted), Chinese and Japanese use the exact same form of the verb for every person. That's about as far as my Chinese knowledge goes, but in regards to Japanese, the only thing you have to worry about is recognizing the non-past and past affixes. The rest of the inflections on the verb are merely moods, describing states or conditions.

Let's compare the English verb to speak with the Japanese counterpart 話す hanasu.

English
I speak
You speak
He, She, It speaks
We speak
You (plural) speak
They speak

Japanese
話す hanasu

The Japanese counterpart uses the same form of the verb for the infinitive (or at least, when you look up a verb in a Japanese dictionary [for this reason, they are referred to as the dictionary form], this is the form that you get because infinitives, in reality, do not exist) as well as the conjugations for all persons in neutral Japanese speech. Pronouns are optional, usually for clarification of who is talking, and varying pronouns may be chosen depending on the speaker's sex: i.e., a male speaker may say (in more relaxed situations) 僕が話す boku ga hanasu, while a female may say (again, in more relaxed situations) あたしが話す atashi ga hanasu, and both sexes (in more polite speech, however) わたくしが話す watakushi ga hanasu.. though the verb would require a change in the verbal affix to reflect a more formal tone. It should also be noted that Japanese verbs in this tense are called non-past because these are used to discuss not only present, but also future actions. Thus, the above sentences may be roughly translated either as "I [do] speak" or "I will speak." Context will generally tell you which is correct.

The regular English verb generally ends with -ed (such as talked, walked, etc), though unfortunately, the English equivalent of this verb has an irregular past tense (spoke). Most Japanese verbs in the past are regular except for two (来る kuru, to come and する suru, to do/make) and end with た -ta, with, of course, an exception to three verb types. The past tense of 話す hanasu is 話した hanashita.

These verbs in Japanese also have neutral polite forms. The neutral polite non-past form is 話します hanashimasu and the past form is 話しました hanashimashita. I am not certain on the origin of the suffixes ます -masu and ました -mashita, but I did read somewhere once that it was speculated to have come from the humble verb 参る mairu, meaning 'to go' or 'to come.' I will not discuss honorific and humble verbs herein, at least for now.

Another point of Japanese grammar which may or may not come as to a surprise to those who have never been a student of the Japanese language is that a class of 'true' Japanese adjectives can conjugate just like verbs. This is because originally they are stative verbs in Japanese, or in other words, they automatically have the idea of 'to be' built into them. Thus, the adjective 激しい hageshii, which means violent or intense, can also take the place of a verb and describe a characteristic or condition of someone or something, and may be inflected according to the non-past and past.

激しい雨 hageshii ame "intense rain" or "violent rain"
雨が激しい ame ga hageshii "the rain is [will be] intense" or "the rain is [will be] violent"
雨が激しかった ame ga hageshikatta "the rain was intense" or "the rain was violent"

Adjectives of this type end in -ai (若い wakai, young), -ii (美しい utsukushii, beautiful), -ui (醜い minikui, ugly), and -oi (多い ooi, many, lots), and may be made polite with the addition of desu regardless of tense. Please note that adjectives ending in -ei belong to a different set of adjectives that do not inflect without the help of the copula です desu (or だ da, in its impolite form). This second set of adjectives are originally quantitative compound nouns from Chinese, called quasi-adjectives or "na"-adjectives, though I prefer calling them Sino-Japanese adjectives. This is because in their modifier state (before a noun), they are usually (though not always) followed by な na. A few adjectives of this type may also take の no, and an even rarer few customarily are left without a particle. The reason for the な na, as I speculate, and as you should keep in mind that I am still a student, is because according to my teacher in old Japanese, they used to say なり nari, which is the positive basic stem of the verb なる naru, to become/be, and is probably placed there to make up for the lack of a built in "be" as seen in 'true' Japanese adjectives.