Quick Index:
Study Habits: My advice on how to study Japanese language
Memory: Hints on how and what to remember when you study Japanese

Kana: Hints on remembering Hiragana and Katakana
Kanji: Hints on learning Kanji

Pronunciation:  Hints on Specific Sounds
Accentation:  Five Easy Basic Structural Principles

Basic Word Categories: What is a Noun? (Please don't say person, place or thing!)
Case Particles: About ga, ni, o, and de, etc.
Comparison Particles: About wa, mo, dake, etc.
Parsing: How do words fit together into phrases and sentences?

Questions: How to ask questions; question-words, requests, etc.
More Verb Forms: Passive, Causative, Passive-causative, etc.
Contractions: Used in informal speech, etc.  
Reportage: Sentence endings can show where information comes from...

Honorifics: Distality versus Affiliation in Japanese
Ritual Language: Some general observations
Fragments and Contractions: the messy loose ends of ordinary speech

Dictionaries: What to look for in choosing a dictionary
Resources: How to pursue further training in Japanese

This clinic is for anyone interested in an overview of Japanese language structure.  It is designed to address particular problems typically encountered by students, and each section can be approached independently of the others if necessary.  The lists of vocabulary, expressions, etc., are designed to be representative, but not comprehensive.  As such, this is neither a reference grammar nor a training program.  It is for students who want to get the 'big picture.'

Much of the material herein derives from my own experience learning Japanese language, first at Oberlin College, then Cornell University, then Nagoya University.  The grammatical descriptions owe much to Eleanor Jorden's Beginning Japanese (Yale University Press, 1962) and to Jorden & Noda's Japanese: The Spoken Language (Yale University Press, 1988), but each section contains significant departures from those analyses.  There have been several key moments in my experience when I said to myself, "Aha, if only I had thought about it THIS way, I could have saved myself years of consternation!"  Hopefully, these pages will make your learning experience more, not less, pleasurable and efficient.

The web pages were originally written to accompany a set of video lectures (available at the NCSU foreign language laboratory).  The lectures were first designed for students who could read Chinese or Korean, and thus knew a fair amount about Chinese characters.  Later, I included students who had studied in Japan but needed to go back and re-establish a solid foundation.  I have added somewhat to the original pages, so that they are self-sufficient without the videos.  However, the sections on pronunciation and accentation still require the videos.

As with every nation, the boundaries of Japan were determined by a long process of political manipulations.  If we go back just a few decades, we can perceive an enormously diverse population living in the approximate territory now called Japan.  Only in the modern period has there been a clear set of boundaries (geographic, linguistic, racial, etc.) to separate 'who is' from 'who is not' Japanese, and the creation of those boundaries has made it seem (often falsely) as if all those people inside the boundary hold something more deeply in common with each other than with other people who exist outside the boundaries.  Likewise, the spoken languages of these various peoples were sometimes mutually unintelligible, despite the fact they were connected to each other (and to the languages of Korea, the Urals, the Altais, etc.) by even earlier historical connections.  Only in the modern period (i.e., since the late nineteenth century) has a 'national spoken language' been created (along with a closely allied national standard written language), so that now, a person at one end of Japan can communicate using the 'same words' as a person at the other end.  This 'national language' is, however, not the only contemporary spoken language of Japan.  People of many regions still nurture the differences between their regional languages (which are now rendered subordinate by being called 'dialects') and the 'national language,' whose norms, while often arbitrary, are ferociously guarded by institutions such as NHK and the Ministry of Education.  Nonetheless, this 'national language' prevails.  For better or for worse,'Standard Japanese' is what we have: it is the idiom of most contemporary broadcasts, internet media, and written publications, and it is the most straightforward means to gain access to the cultures, peoples, and economies now called 'Japan.'