Writing is frustratingly labour intensive (or patience building) but reading (at least while learning) is an adventure of aha! moments as common radicals and kanji are noticed and connected.

Reading kanji words and phrases really highlights the different processes competing and combining in the brain. The little list of possible known sounds and the little list of possible known meanings for each individual kanji interact to build and/or retrieve a meaning for the whole word in context.

Looks good. Talking directly about the language elements rather than trains is definitely more me.

For more general language discussion, have you stumbled across Taylor Jones?

youtube.com/@languagejon...

Yes, the zero-ga idea in particular seems to come from him. His book is more of a set of essays on various aspects of Japanese language construction and viewpoints rather than a course or introduction.

The second and third translations are there to highlight how the ga-marked subject has been hidden in the natural translation.

For sure. If a metaphor helps the reader go “Ah! I see!” and ties together loose threads in a consistent way (that doesn’t undermine later learning) then that can be amazing - and super memorable too.

Learning Japanese with your parsing hat on will make it even more fun!

Have fun! They’re a great set of videos and good to come back to at different points on your “journey”

(Although, to be honest, I don’t generally love metaphors when explaining concepts that can be understood directly. They’re hard to get right and often just make the reader think about something else.)

I find them unnecessary and clunky. And as sentences get longer and more complicated, the trains get stranger. I think it’s possible to say there are three main types of sentence without drawing engines, and still be understood perfectly well.

Yes, while I’m not a huge fan of the train cars and engines, the models she uses to describe Japanese grammar are compact and useful. #findTheGa

😍

Pika! Pika!