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I am a native Japanese speaker with a casual interest in languages. I sometimes have trouble explaining the Japanese grammar in English because I do not know the established English translation of some technical terms in the Japanese grammar such as joshi (助詞). (In this particular case, it seems that joshi is usually translated as “particle.”)

I can look up a Japanese-English dictionary for this purpose, but is there any more easily accessible list of technical terms, preferably freely available online?

Added: I know several general Japanese-English dictionaries and translation services freely available online, which can be used to satisfy my need but not in the most convenient way. I am looking for a simple table of technical terms in the Japanese grammar written both in Japanese and in English, which may look like:

  • 文: sentence
  • 段落: paragraph
  • 名詞: noun
  • 動詞: verb
  • 助詞: particle
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  • Hi. Thanks for your question but like a lot of the initial ones it is off topic. Please stick to questions about the language itself (which admitedly, may not be particularly useful for you!) Thanks.
    – Ali
    May 31, 2011 at 19:45
  • 1
    @Ali: I posted a question on meta. May 31, 2011 at 19:54
  • What, japanese.se.com doesnot have community wiki yet?
    – syockit
    Jun 2, 2011 at 1:45

4 Answers 4

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I found three fairly comprehensive lists online; each covers slightly different areas.

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  • Thanks, these lists are useful! I will accept your answer after waiting for a day to see if there is any better answer. Jun 1, 2011 at 16:29
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Section 5 of the ipadic user manual (warning: 271KB PDF) has a list of Japanese parts of speech which seems quite exhaustive. Each entry includes the name for the part of speech in both Japanese and English, an explanation in English and several Japanese examples.

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  • 2
    Thanks. This manual is interesting. Just to add, some of the terminology used in the manual (such as “verb-main”) is nonstandard, so caution is needed to use it. Jul 27, 2012 at 11:15
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Sounds like you are looking for a technical dictionary (i.e. Japanese - English Dictionary of Technical Terms) which is more or less the Japanese term followed by the English term and the reading. These tend to be very specialized and domain specific (e.g. Computers/IT, medical, etc) so a standard dictionary may or may not have all of the terms you are looking for.

In regards to finding such a resource, you might be better off looking for one what was written for native Japanese speakers trying to learn English as most of the resources I've been able to find (i.e Japanese Grammatical Terms) appear quite limited.

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  • Somewhat sadly, they don't appear to offer a Japanese - English Dictionary of Technical Terms - Linguistics.
    – jkerian
    May 31, 2011 at 20:43
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I found a list of English grammar terms in Japanese, and a very exhaustive list of English grammatical terms which you could use with a dictionary to compile your own list. The Japanese-English list isn't authoritative, but has a good enough translation for many terms.

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  • Well, I know there are many lists of English grammar terms both in Japanese and in English. I am looking for lists of Japanese grammar terms both in Japanese and in English. May 31, 2011 at 20:49
  • I don't quite get the difference. That list gives Japanese grammar terms and their English translations, similar to what you gave above.
    – nevan king
    May 31, 2011 at 20:55
  • For example, how do you look up the English translation for joshi (助詞) in that list, if you do not know that the answer is “particle”? The list only contains grammatical terms used in the English grammar, and understandably this word is not on the list. May 31, 2011 at 20:58
  • Do you mean that the list isn't exhaustive? Here's another list with more terms: learn-japanese.info/language.html
    – nevan king
    May 31, 2011 at 21:07
  • (1) “Do you mean that the list isn't exhaustive?” No. Please understand that the Japanese grammar discussed in Japanese and the English grammar discussed in Japanese require different vocabularies. The two lists you stated in the answer consist of the terms for the English grammar. The word joshi (助詞) does not appear in the English grammar as far as I know, which is why the two lists you mentioned in this answer do not contain this word. It has nothing to do with exhaustiveness. (more) May 31, 2011 at 21:19

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