Jeremy Rabaino

Software Engineer

Introduction

When learning Japanese, I was taught using Visual Learning Japanese (VLJ) by the Shinjuku Japanese Language Institute. This method classifies parts of speech into cards of different colors and shapes to help students understand how they link together. When taking notes, I wanted to use the same colors and card styles to help me remember the grammar rules. This page is an explanation of digital version of the VLJ cards that I created for my notes.

Parts of Speech

Here are the parts of speech that I learned using the VLJ method:

Each part of speech has a different color, and some even have background patterns.

I-Adjectives and verbs can both be conjugated, so they are represented with a right triangle. Suru verbs encapsulate a word, and the entire unit is treated as a verb. Adverbs are the only ones with a rounded border.

meishi doushi jisuushi

<span class="jisuushi">毎日</span>、
<span class="meishi">学校</span>
<span class="joshi left-triangle">に</span>
<span class="doushi right-triangle">行きます</span>。
毎日、学校に行きます。

One of the things I was peculiar about was keeping everything inline, so a text-to-speech reader could still read out the text. I had originally been using custom HTML tags instead of classes since it would be less to type, but they didn't work in Obsidian, so I had to change it.

Conjugations

There are a few different ways that conjigations can be represented, and those have to be able to be applied to both verbs and i-adjectives. To handle this, the shape of the card is seperate from the type.

<span class="keiyoushi right-triangle">早い</span><br />
<span class="meishi block"><span class="doushi">行き</span>方</span><br />
<span class="joshi">が</span>
<span class="doushi right-squiggle">わかれば</span>、
<span class="doushi right-trapezoid">教えて</span>
<span class="doushi right-triangle">ください</span>。
早い行き方がわかれば、教えてください。

The right triangle is used for most conjugations (past, present, negative), the right trapezoid represents the te form, and the right squiggle represents the conditional form.

Combinations

Some cards can be nested inside one another multiple levels deep:

block

<span class="keiyoushi block right-triangle">
    <span class="doushi block">
        <span class="surumeishi">勉強</span>
        し
    </span>
    たい
</span>
勉強したい

Some cards can be connected to one another:

left-triangle-socket

<span class="keiyoushi right-triangle">おいしい</span>
<span class="meishi left-triangle-socket">そう</span>
<span class="doushi right-triangle">だ</span>
<span class="joshi">って</span>。
おいしいそうだって。

Extras

Here are a few other helpful things I added to help with taking notes:

one-of

<div class="flex">
    <div class="one-of">
        <span class="meishi">本</span><br />
        <span class="meishi">新聞</span><br />
        <span class="meishi">雑誌</span>
    </div>
    によると、～
</div>
本
新聞
雑誌
によると、～
The card colors also come in dark mode, which can be view via the button at the bottom of the page.

Conclusion

Using the VLJ cards helped me to understand how different parts of speech link together. I found that I could remember the rules better when I used the same colors and shapes in my notes. By implementing the cards in CSS, I could import everything into a different system, such as Anki for flashcards.