Today, I’d like to discuss something I am still figuring out, so don’t expect a complete answer. Have you ever noticed how lots of verbs ending in -す are transitive? Stuff like 話す, 記す, etc. I am not counting compounds here, so e.g. 呼び出す does not count. I assumed this was just a heuristic, but I could not come up with pure verbs ending in -す that weren’t transitive.

Thankfully, a friend of mine (who happens to be fantastic at Japanese) mentioned 暮らす. This prompted a debate. Is 暮らす transitive or intransitive? After all, Jitendex/JMdict was saying the verb was intransitive, but a lot of people were saying that 暮らす is considered transitive, and multiple dictionaries (especially 古語 dictionaries) mentioned it being transitive. So what was it?

Today, I saw an interesting post on Japanese Stackexchange. The user had been having trouble with understanding Japanese polite speech (敬語) and had tried to rely on Reddit to get a better understanding of it. The Reddit post the user linked in the JSE post was not super clear and it characterized “formal” as a “polite” speech register.

Now usually, I don’t really answer on JSE. A lot of people know Japanese (grammar) better than me, but I remembered a cool analogy I saw on Discord and decided to make a comment with it. The thing is, that comment didn’t actually help them answer their own question, so I felt bad and decided to post a full answer.

I feel like studying grammar has never really been all that popular. Honestly, I get it. I too remember grammar from my school days. It wasn’t always super exciting. In this post, I’d like to discuss the way I personally study grammar, because it’s pretty different from traditional methods.

The key tool I use to learn grammar in any new language is what I call an example sentence database (ESD). This idea came to me as I was writing the grammar book.

Yesterday, I was reviewing the sections I am writing on adjectives for the grammar book. In the book, I sometimes end with To go further… subsections. Those are meant for more intermediate or advanced students of grammar and often contain either some etymology or information on a deeper issue related to the section.

This specific subsection was discussing adjectives that seem to have two different forms: one as an い-adjective, one as a な-adjective. In there, I had given two examples: 大き- and 小さ-. Now the more common forms are of course 大きい and 小さい, but still 大きな and 小さな do exist.

While I was writing the section on the -た form in my grammar book, I started to look at what others had done when introducing it. After all, it’s a pretty complex thing, usually more so than people assume at first glance. As usual, my first instinct was to visit the guide I had used myself when I first tried (and failed) to learn Japanese: Tae Kim.

Of course, Tae Kim does not call it the -た form. He simply calls it the past form. Honestly, I do not really mind this simplification, but since I try to avoid saying half-truths too often, I will stick with the name -た form. After all, the -た form has another very important use, the perfect aspect. Anyway, this discussion is for another post, so let’s go back to what interests us: How to conjugate verbs to the -た form.

Today, as I was browsing through Japanese Stack Exchange, I realized a lot of the material that was on this site was not really discussed anywhere else. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because many contributors on the site had accumulated a lot of expertise on the finer points of Japanese language and were spending a lot of time answering questions.

The questions ranged from mundane translation requests to more complex inquiries that required extensive research and analysis, usually leading to a debate in the comments between well-known members of the communities, one citing Frellesvig, the other citing Vovin, everyone having a good time (or so I always assumed anyway).