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Everything I have known about Japanese grammar structure till now is S-O-V. Japanese is S-O-V language. But what's about adj? Adverb?... Something like that. Of couse that I did some research about this. But all I found is this:

Sentence Topic, Time, Location, Subject, Indirect Object, Direct Object, Verb. [Source]

But I understand nothing at all. I mean it isn't answer my question: the order of adj, adverb... Is it standing before noun or after, what happen if I got 2 adj... Do you guys know it? Please teach me about it. It terribly confuses me.

And thank you for reading my... query?

Star Light
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  • You might be interested in this question as well: [Sentence structure/element order](http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/6095) – blutorange Dec 16 '14 at 21:37
  • Well, I had read it before I created this thread. But I still confuse because it hard to understand and not essential enough. Thank you, anyway. – Star Light Dec 17 '14 at 15:25

1 Answers1

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Adjectives (and relative clauses for that matter) are always before the noun they modify. I don't know if there are rules for the ordering of adjective groups. Maybe Wikipedia can tell you more.

As for the I understand nothing at all part:

  • Wikipedia can help you on "sentence topic";
  • "time" refers to time expressions such as "three hours ago", "yesterday", "in a week" etc.;
  • "location" means an expression indicating the place where an action takes place, such as "here", "in a church", "near the riverbank", "underneath a tree" etc.;
  • "Subject" is the subject, which is roughly the doer of the action, but there are exceptions, most notably the verb aru (~to have), where the subject is the topic and what is possesed is the subject; aru is lit. to exist, so As for (possessor), (possessed thing) exists is the idea behind it, reminding me of the Latin use of the dative in this case;
  • "Indirect object" is a second object some verbs have, e.g. "give", where it is the person you give something; and "direct object" is the "object" in SOV.
  • "Verb" is the sentence's verb.

I honestly didn't know place expressions were confined to before the subject; and time expressions as well. I'm rather inclined to think that this is flexible, and the only real rule is that the verb ends the sentence - for which, unfortunately, you can find exceptions in songs.

Also, I don't know whether to include complements of motion (from somewhere, to swhr., through swhr.) in "location" or not.

I will take look in the cited source and see what it says. Or maybe I'll just wait for comments here.

Update: the cited reference states that:

Japanese is flexible in terms of word-order due to use of particles. Sentences, however, generally have the following structure:

Sentence Topic, Time, Location, Subject, Indirect Object, Direct Object, Verb.

Also, it does not appear (most incredibly in my opinion) to have anything about the adjective-noun ordering in a location you'd expect to find it in. I might consider reporting this to the wikibooks community. Somebody definitely should.

Community
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MickG
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  • It is indeed unbelievable that in a book on Japanese grammar such as the cited source there is nothing easily findable on this topic. It should be reported to Wikibooks. – MickG Dec 16 '14 at 20:01
  • Yes, I also know Japanese structure is flexible. But how flexible can it be? For example: 私は Tú です。 And: Tú は私です。 Is the same? Is that flexible? I'm sorry if my above question isn't clearly enough. – Star Light Dec 17 '14 at 19:20
  • No. `私は Tú です` would translate to `I am Tú`, whereas `Tú は私です` would be `Tú is me`, for all I know. But then you put the `は` on two different things in the two sentences, so you can't expect them to be the same. In general these phrases do not allow any permutation, for all I know, since the `…です` part cannot be split, and `は` cannot be placed before the topic they mark. – MickG Dec 17 '14 at 19:44