Nihongo morphologically

I am confused with how the parts of speech in Japanese works, what phonemic endings to apply on what part of speech to command what kind of semantic or speech changes.
In English, the language I previously learned, we can change strong, to strength, to strenghen. We can change nation, to national, to nationalize. Fix to fixture, to fixation, to fixer, to fixable depending on what nuances of speech we want to command. This is the flexibility of English. I want to believe that the same flexibility should exist in Japanese and I start to google for this.
These are some of my earliest findings, I hope Japanese experts in this forum could give me some more links or personal enlightenment in the knowledge of Japanese morphology and its flexes.
ティダの語源を探る
鼻音化について

Denominal and deadjectival verbs


These are what I already know:
Adjective to nouns
高い －＞ 高さ
強い ー＞ 強さ
固い ー＞ 固さ
Nouns to verbs
強め －＞ 強める/強まる
固め －＞ 固める/固まる
高い －＞ 高める/高まる

I hope to understand the whole pictures of Japanese morphology to be able to multiply the vocabularies I already known by reusing them morphologically.

ax

Before you get into further details of morphology:
Adjective to noun
高い －＞ 高さ
強い ー＞ 強さ
固い ー＞ 固さ

this is another interesting article by Jack Halpern about how Japanese search engine should work.
The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc. - The Challenges of Intelligent Japanese Searching

and sorry for the careless mistakes. Post edited.

ax

Well, something like national->nationalize is very easy. Just add a 化 to it. Not all combinations work, but it's a very flexible little kanji. As for something like strong->strengthen, you're going from adjective to verb.
強く->強くする or 強化 (see? 化!).

Honestly though, I always did my best to ignore this type of stuff until I felt i was at an advanced level. Same w/ Group 1, 2, 3 verbs. Never touched them until late in year 3. Memorization worked better for me.

I don't believe in laborious memorization and always in the favor of finding mnemonics to remember stuff in my strive for learning languages.
I think if we have a big map that tells all about the morphology of Japanese words, that would be very helpful.

Ax

To each his own. I'm under the impression that the more you have to think of something as you learn it, the more you have to think as you use it. After switching schools, I'd see people that still thought of their verbs in groups, and it took them forever to spit it out. Afterall... memorization (and repetition) is how you learned your mother tongue, no? I'd say the gigantic tables are far more laborious.

GaijinPunch said:

To each his own. I'm under the impression that the more you have to think of something as you learn it, the more you have to think as you use it. After switching schools, I'd see people that still thought of their verbs in groups, and it took them forever to spit it out. Afterall... memorization (and repetition) is how you learned your mother tongue, no? I'd say the gigantic tables are far more laborious.

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I second the motion.

GaijinPunch said:

To each his own. I'm under the impression that the more you have to think of something as you learn it, the more you have to think as you use it. After switching schools, I'd see people that still thought of their verbs in groups, and it took them forever to spit it out. Afterall... memorization (and repetition) is how you learned your mother tongue, no? I'd say the gigantic tables are far more laborious.

Click to expand...

I don't think that one is necessarily exclusive of the other. You need to know the rules to apply new patterns that you haven't learned, or figure out things that you're coming across for the first time. But that doesn't mean that not relying on rote memory alone means you don't rely on memory at all. With practice you'll become more fluent, the connections in the brain will get stronger, and you'll not have to think about how to get from one place to the other. It's all in the practice, but I certainly see merit in breaking things down into their parts so that you know why something is the way it is. For instance, I would rather learn how to form the causative than memorize causative forms for every verb I come across. I think the latter ends up being more labor-intesive.

I'm not saying you should throw out conventional teaching methods all together... I just think they can be over-taught, and usually are (my opinion, of course). My 3rd year sensei used to make us memorize sentences. Full sentences, and say them as fast as we could. We had verbal tests every couple of weeks. If you slipped, you lost points. Everyone complained, "but we don't know what some of the sentences mean!". She said she didn't care -- it wasn't the point. I'd like to hug her now.

I guess everyone's brain works differently though... finding where yours works best is the key.

Well, I guess we agree, then. Perhaps, though, we put emphasis on opposite sides of the equation, but as you said, there's nothing wrong with that.

GaijinPunch said:

I guess everyone's brain works differently though... finding where yours works best is the key.

Click to expand...