Hang tight while we fetch the video data and transcripts. This only takes a moment.
Connecting to YouTube player…
Fetching transcript data…
We’ll display the transcript, summary, and all view options as soon as everything loads.
Next steps
Loading transcript tools…
Lesson 1: Japanese made easy! What schools never teach. The core Japanese sentence -organic Japanese | Organic Japanese with Cure Dolly | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Lesson 1: Japanese made easy! What schools never teach. The core Japanese sentence -organic Japanese
Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.
Share:
Video Transcript
Video Summary
Summary
Core Theme
This content introduces "Organic Japanese," a method of learning Japanese by focusing on its inherent logical structure, contrasting it with traditional Western approaches that often misrepresent the language's simplicity.
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Hello, everyone.
My name is Cure Dolly and I am here to teach you Organic Japanese.
What is Organic Japanese?
It is Japanese pure and simple, with no harmful additives.
Japanese is the simplest, the most logical, the most easily understandable language
I have ever encountered – much easier than Western languages.
But you wouldn't know that if you try to learn it from Western textbooks or Japanese learning websites.
Why not?
Because they don't teach Japanese structure.
They teach English structure and then try to force Japanese into it.
And it doesn't fit, and it doesn't work very well.
That is the main reason, I think, why so many people give up Japanese.
The Western system makes it seem complicated, full of strange exceptions and odd rules that
you have to memorize.
And none of this is true if you learn the language the way it really is.
So, this course is not just for people beginning Japanese.
It's very good for those people – this is the best way to start.
But if you've been learning Japanese for a while and you find yourself getting confused by things,
it would be very good to watch this series and learn from the start the way
Japanese should have been explained in the first place.
All right, let's get started.
The most basic thing about Japanese is the Japanese core sentence.
Every Japanese sentence is fundamentally the same.
It has the same core.
What does it look like?
It looks like this.
We're going to picture it as a train.
Every Japanese sentence has these two elements: A and B. The main carriage and the engine.
The engine is what makes the sentence move, what makes it work.
The carriage has to be there because without the carriage there's nothing for the engine to move.
Those two things are the core of every Japanese sentence.
And if you can understand this, you can understand every sentence,
no matter how complicated it becomes.
Later on we'll have a lot more carriages.
We can say more about A; we can say more about B; we can combine logical sentences together
to make complex sentences.
But every Japanese sentence conforms to this basic type.
So, what are A and B?
Let's begin by reminding ourselves that in any language
whatever there are only two kinds of sentence.
And they are A is B sentences and A does B sentences.
So an A does B sentence is "Sakura walks".
An A is B sentence is "Sakura is Japanese".
And we can put these into the past tense; we can put them in the negative; we can turn
them into questions; we can say more about A; we can say more about B. But, ultimately,
every sentence boils down to one of these: an A is B or an A does B sentence.
So let's look at how we do this in Japanese.
In Japanese, if we want to say "Sakura walks" (A does B: Sakura walks), then A is Sakura,
the main carriage, and B is walks, the thing she does, the engine of the sentence.
Walk in Japanese is "aruku".
And we need one more thing to make the core Japanese sentence.
And that is the linchpin of every sentence, and it's が (ga).
Now I want you to make friends with ga, because this is the center of Japanese grammar.
Every Japanese sentence revolves around ga.
And the first part of the reason that Japanese gets so confusing the way it's taught in the textbooks
is that they don't properly explain this.
In some sentences we're not going to be able to see the ga, but it's always there, and
it's always doing the same job.
That may sound a little complicated, but it isn't.
It's very simple, and I'm going to explain that in the next lesson.
For now, let's just stick with the very simplest kind of sentence.
So here is ga.
It looks like a post with a big hook on it, doesn't it?
It links together A and B and turns them into a sentence.
So, our core A does B sentence is "Sakura ga aruku": "Sakura walks".
Now let's take an A is B sentence: "Sakura is Japanese",
or, as we say, "Sakura is a Japanese person".
So, A again is Sakura, B is Nihonjin, which means Japanese person, and once again we need
ga to link them together.
So we're going to picture the A car, the main carriage, with a ga on it, because the main
carriage, the subject of the sentence, aways carries a ga, to link it to the engine.
So, Sakura ga Nihonjin – and we need one more thing.
There's one other thing that I want you to make friends with, and that's だ (da).
"Sakura ga Nihonjin da": "Sakura is a Japanese person".
Now, you may have met this da in its fancy form, desu, but there are very good reasons
for learning the plain, simple form first.
So we're going to learn da.
Now if you look at da, it's like an equals sign boxed off to the left.
And this is a perfect mnemonic for what it does, because da tells us that A is B.
Why is it boxed off to the left?
Because it only works one way.
Think about this logically: Sakura ga Nihonjin da – Sakura = Japanese person.
But it doesn't work the other way: Japanese people are Sakura – they're not all Sakura.
Sakura is a Japanese person, but a Japanese person is not necessarily Sakura.
So now we have an A is B sentence and an A does B sentence.
There is one more form of the Japanese core sentence, for it has three forms.
The third form is when we have a describing word, an adjective.
In Japanese, describing words end with い (i), just as they often do in English: happy, sunny, cloudy, silly.
In Japanese it's just the same: happy – ureshii; sad – kanashii; blue – aoi.
Now, we don't have to learn all these, but we do need to know about Japanese adjectives
ending in i because they make the third kind of sentence.
So let's take an easy one: pen (that's a nice easy word because it means pen) –
"pen ga akai" – "pen is red".
Now, you notice that we don't have a da on this sentence.
Why is that?
Because the i-adjective akai (red) – it doesn't mean red, it means is-red.
The da function, the equals function, is built into those i-adjectives.
So those are the three forms of Japanese sentence.
They all start with the subject of the sentence, they're all connected with ga, and they can
end in three ways: with a verb, which will end in u, with the copula, da, or with an i
because the last word is an adjective.
And now you know the basics of Japanese.
And although this is very very basic, you already know some things that the textbooks
never teach you, and you have already overcome one of the problems that makes Japanese get
so very very complicated.
All right.
Now, if you are learning Japanese for the first time, I'd like you to do a little homework.
What I'd like you to do is to make some A does B and A is B sentences of your own.
If you don't know any Japanese vocabulary, I've got a link to a word list in the information
section below this video.
And at the moment, if you put your sentences in the comments below the video,
I will correct them and tell you if you have them right.
I'm expecting this channel to grow rather large, so I won't be able to go on doing this forever,
but at the moment if you put your test sentences into the comments below
I will correct them for you.
And if you'd like to start learning some basic Japanese kanji and start learning how Japanese
words fit together as well as how Japanese sentences fit together, may I recommend my
book, Alice in Kanji Land.
You'll find details of that in the information below.
If you have any questions or comments, please put them in the comments below.
Thank you for attending this lesson.
Kore kara mo yoroshiku onegai shimasu.
Class dismissed.
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
