Beating the Japanese Language Plateau - な and い adjectives

I'm currently going over Tae Kim's Grammar guide, a book I've visited briefly in the past and decided that if I encounter any areas that never really stuck in my brain that I should dive deeper into these topics and try to understand them from a fundamental perspective and make a post about it.

I've always wished that I could figure out what the "lego" bricks are in Japanese so I can derive some of the language or derive some words by rearranging the lego bricks.

The fundamental bricks are the particles, vocabulary and conjugations, but nothing about this has ever struck me as intuitive or easy to understand.

I remember when I was a kid learning english I would always advance very quickly once I learned about how to manipulate words, such as adding -ing or -ly at the end of the word.

In Japanese this is much more difficult because there's a lot more types of conjugations, than in english. Japanese changes the structure of words instead of adding words to change the meaning and the meaning can vary drastically based on context.

Tae Kim uses the example:
”ボブは魚が好きだ”
Which is a very easy sentence to understand when you see the translation, "Bob likes (eating) fish". But he mentions that 好き is an adjective, which makes the translation a bit incorrect.

I know that Japanese is a very context-based language, so actually this sentence doesn't always have to mean Bob likes to eat fish. A more direct translation would be something like "As for Bob, he's fond of fish". I think fond is a better translation because it is more of a state than an action.

Here are some other possible interpretations of this sentence:

”ボブは魚が好きだ”
"Bob enjoys fish as food"
Context: Conversation about food/dining

”ボブは魚が好きだ”
"Bob is fond of fish as animals"
Context: Conversation about hobbies like fish as pets

”ボブは魚が好きだ”
"Bob bob prefers fish over other things"
Context: Comparison of preferences such as pets or food

I think that a lot of Japanese courses and textbooks don't really talk about the context so much, which I think is a missed opportunity for understanding the language's fundamental reliance on context for meaning.

I've been in many meetings for work in the anime industry where we run into trouble in communication because I might ask a question which is tangentially related to what we were discussing and being met with confusion about what I mean. It makes me want to understand this part of Japanese

I also learned in diving into this that you can assume whether or not something is a な or い adjective based on the meaning of the word. い adjectives are often objective, tangible, or sensory, and な adjectives are abstract, subjective, and evaluative.

好き being evaluative means that it will be a な adjective.

It also made me think that if 好き is an adjective, then I should be able to use the same sentence structure and simply replace 好き with another adjective and make a different sentence.

ボブは魚がおいしい。
As for Bob, the fish is delicious.

ボブは魚が面白い。
As for Bob, the fish is interesting.

ボブは魚が美しい。
As for Bob, the fish is beautiful.

ボブは魚が大切だ。
As for Bob, the fish is important.

ボブは魚が簡単だ。
As for Bob, the fish is easy.
Context: Could be in regards to taking care of a pet fish

You can put any verb in the place of 好き from the original sentence and make many other sentences that a related to Bob's perspective.

When you're in grade school in Japan they teach through repetition rather than explanations. Personally I find the more advanced explanations more useful and easier to remember. As I'm studying lately I'm trying to use more and more of the technical terms for these as natives use them. I think it could be useful If I ever get into a discussion about grammar with a native speaker.

Sometimes the English Japanese textbook term is different than the native Japanese term. In this case it's pretty close
な形容詞 (na-keiyoushi): Na-adjective
い形容詞 (i-keiyoushi): I-adjective

The kanji for 形容詞 is quite nice and descriptive I think.

• 形 (kei): Form, shape, or appearance.
• 容 (yō): Appearance, form, or content.
• 詞 (shi): Word, part of speech, or expression.

Put them together and you get Form/Appearance/Word, which sounds like an adjective.

Something I haven't seen much of is also just simple compound word creation in Japanese. I feel like it could be really useful to take vocabulary and then with using the same kanji, making up new words.

For example words I already know that use these kanji would be
形容詞: Adjective
形状: (keijou) Shape
美容院: (biyouin) Beauty Salon
歌詞: (kashi) Lyrics (song word)

There are a lot of linguistic terms that use the final kanji:
名詞 (meishi): Noun (Name word)
動詞 (dōushi): Verb (Motion word)
形容動詞 (keiyōdōshi): Adjectival Verb

Ending in 形(shape) also has a lot of useful grammer words
連体形 (rentaikei): When a verb or adjective modifies a noun. 連 (take with)
終止形 (shūshikei): Dictionary form
活用形 (katsuyōkei):Conjugated form

I want to start building up some sort of intuition for the parts of the vocab similar to suffixes and prefixes in english. I imagine that this will speed up fluency by allowing me to derive meaning instead of having to look everything up.

In the past when I looked up the Japanese for う-verb and る-verb is was somewhat upset because the Japanese is more useful. 一段 and 五段 which is "one way"/"5 way". It's when I learned that る verbs can only be conjugated one way and the rest get conjugated 5 ways. The meaning of the word being built-in I find extremely useful.

In all the beginner books and courses I took I never saw someone bringing up this 五段 conjugation table, but basically if you change the vowel through あ、い、う、え、お at the end you change the meaning.

After learning this about Ichidan and Godan is the reason why I decided to start studying the grammar component names in Japanese.

Finally, to the differences between い形容詞 and な形容詞:

な形容詞: I'm remembering this as noun keiyoushi. な being a mnemonic for なうん(noun). To help me remember that these adjectives can be used as a noun with the addition of だ. eg: あの人は優しいだ。(That person is kind). They also require the addition of な in order to modify a nouns. These adjectives also usually are in the category of abstract, descriptive, or evaluative qualities.

い形容詞: These adjectives need to be modified through conjugation to change the meaning. It is possible to turn these into verbs through modification, which I will save for another post.

For now though I think I'll be able to remember the different between な形容詞 and い形容詞. I know it seems like I'm very scattered, tangential, and diving too deep too early, but this just is how I learn.

If you're reading this, hope my experience diving into this was useful!