Japanese Word Order MATTERS (more than you think) 2 Simple rules crack tough sentences | Lesson 46

Japanese word order doesn't just matter. It makes the difference between understanding and not understanding most complex sentences. ▼See More ▼

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[onlycasual]

This is my biggest problem and it's feels very defeating when you know all the grammar and vocab in a sentence but your brain can't compute how it fits together. Then I look at the translation/subs and it's so obvious in hindsight. This video helps a lot, thanks.

[light]

I know you're not here anymore but I'm still going to give you my sincere thanks. This video really blew my mind.
Thank you sensei.

[Garbaz]

Coming from German, it is astonishing how logical and straightforward Japanese grammar is.

[triplearielinfinite]

i started off kind of skeptical, but after breaking down 3 complex sentences from my sentence cards in this way, they all started to strangely make sense. Japanese sentences were making sense consistently for once. thank you

[stardayze]

This cleared up so many things for me. Your channel is amazing.

[maximilianstarling]

Hi, Cure Dolly, I just wanted to tell you that I'm extremely grateful to you. All the videos I watch from you are like a blessing from heaven. I can't describe properly to you how much things become clear after one of your lessons. Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.

[bitcube]

This is absolutely brilliant. After your explanation I was able to understand the sentence at 14:30 before you translated it. It just seems so much more logical and clean in Japanese. It was so weird because I understood the sentence but when I made the effort to translate it to English my neurons collapsed :D

[darkmattergamesofficial]

Wow, this lesson in particular really cleared up complex sentences for me. When explained this way, Japanese sentence structure is incredibly simple and easy to understand. I can hear Tae Kim quaking in his boots!

[colonelvector]

Thank you for explaining this.

Its such a basic concept, yet its insane how you can read an entire beginner book and it won't touch on these modifiers at all

[anishpatel]

this has to be the best explanation of japanese senetence structure out there! i was so confused for so long when using the sov framework. this is a game changer. thank you so much for the excellent lesson. so grateful!

[NoOneWillGuessWhoIam]

I like how Japanese is so neatly structured. Though, still having a hard time to get the meaning of some sentences from time to time. Especially casual ones with a lot of contractions.

And I'm really not sure about this "word-order" thing-y being a trait of "European languages", because it just doesn't work for so many languages that are considered European. Especially Slavic, which act similar to Japanese in the way that to assign "roles" to the words in a sentence they use grammatical cases instead of logical particles. Though, I admit, that there are "natural word orderings" (let's call it that, since it is not a category, but sentence/meaning-specific cases), that you use most of the time, as well as "unnatural" ones which you don't use (unless you don't want to sound like Star Wars' Master Yoda.) And labelling such languages with SVO or SOV feels so bizarre and unnessecary for me as a Slavic speaker... Probably similar to what Japanese people feel when someone tells them that their language or some aspects of it are categorised as this and that... And it doesn't really fit. Maybe on the level of sentences word order works. But not in the sense of "Language <X> is <Category A>" statement.
And I just can't quite grasp how this "word order" categorisation of a language may be of any use to anyone... Maybe it works for English, because it was simply derived from the fact that "word order matters", but lumping every other language using this "hypothesis" and trying to squeeze them into this "universal property" just to find out it doesn't actually work for other languages... And still continue to impose this system... I don't get it...
Though, watching your videos I begin to understand that such problems stem from the assumption that "everything should be explained in terms of English." Probably because the ones that explain use English and they target English-speaking audience, so they need some concepts to be understood by both sides. Even if these concepts are flawed in terms of another language. But that doesn't mean one can't explain "alien" concepts as precisely as possible without using "native" similarities and systems. Because I can see that this channel is doing exactly the opposite. You brilliantly explain Japanese in terms of Japanese even though you use English. And I really appreciate this, since it makes things a lot easier to understand. Not every time. Sometimes I need to think about it for a long time. But it definitely helps to structure the language in a more "natural" way.

Thank you very much!

P.S. Sorry, I kind of forgot what I wanted to write in the first place. (^:

[Randhrick]

Great video, although I already knew what was discussed in the video, it helped me confirm some aspects of this subject.
I remember seeing somewhere that Japanese had no word order except for the verb at the end when I started learning, good thing I always use different sources for learning something.

[Dogrethson]

I'm glad I got to this point in the playlist.

My teacher kept waving at us how Word Order does not matter and that Native Japanese have a particular word order anyway

[xiahainatsumi]

9:25

i called it "Relative pronouns"
"...dress (that/which) i bought at the market on saturday" 😂

thank for your new/other knowledge

[azadlatif]

You’re amazing as alwayssss! Arigato 😍

[draces]

Your channel is amazing. Thank you so much.

[ProudAjax]

This was the exact thing I needed clarified, thank you so much

[KulKulKula]

The more I watch this channel trying to learn Japanese, the more I don't know how did I learn English as a second language, lol

[KazukiP]

14:50 I was really struggling here thinking “I just don’t get this” and then you explained and at 15:01 it just clicked in my head and I audibly gasped😂😂😂
THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[Raddishist]

I feel that having difficulty fully understanding what you mean by listening to the audio alone causes me to pay more attention to the visuals which truly carry your videos. Thank you for the upload.