Tae Kim's Grammar with *Useful* Sentence Diagrams

This deck is a modification of a previous deck for Tae Kim's Grammar Guide (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US) to include sentence diagrams. Normally when you hear 'sentence diagrams' you think of the traditional, complicated stuff. These are different. They're very intuitive and easy to use. They're based on something called 'dependency grammar'. The diagrams simply chunk the sentences into bunsetsu, which are the basic units of Japanese expressions. The arrows point from dependent units (e.g. descriptive) to the things they depend on (e.g. the things being described). Every sentence has a 'root', which doesn't depend on anything (e.g. a final verb). Thus the diagrams give you a sense of how the parts of the sentence relate and how the flow of parsing should occur. The structure of Japanese sentences can be surprisingly 'alien' to learners used to English and similar languages, so these diagrams help break things down for you visually, easing the burden as you focus on specific grammar points in example sentences and getting you used to the dynamics and 'word order' in Japanese. I tried to explain as simply as possible how to use the diagrams here. Update: Dear Anki deck reviewer who stated:

"...there are no diagrams for sentences other than the first. Example: "アリスは学生？／うん、トムも学生。" will have a diagram for the question, but not for the answer. In this case, the grammar point in question is in the answer, which makes the diagrams incomplete."

My response to this review is:

There are and have always been diagrams for all of the 'expressions' in the deck, but it's true that for about 65 cards where the 'expression' field contains multiple sentences, CaboCha (see below) only generated a diagram for the first sentence. This is fine--the diagrams are not intended to illustrate the Tae Kim grammar points, merely to offload most of the burden of parsing sentences on cards to help you focus on the grammar points as illustrated by the Tae Kim guide. The deck already had its own highlighting for those.

I put the translation on the front, with the expression, so you can focus on the grammar points and how they, specifically, contribute to make meanings in sentences, rather than getting too distracted by trying to recall entire sentence meanings as well. In other words, with this layout the front of the card asks: given the grammar point highlighted in a sentence, how does it contribute to the given meaning of the sentence? Flipping the card over gives the explanation for the grammar point so you can check your answer and grade yourself on whether you understood the contribution correctly. You can of course change the layout how you want. There are two sets of diagrams, the differences are purely cosmetic: use the appearance you like better. The first set of sentence diagrams were created w/ the Japanese dependency parser CaboCha and XeLaTeX, using this Python script which converts CaboCha's -f1 output into TikZ-dependency code, integrated w/ ImageMagick + GhostScript via the LaTeX standalone package. The second set of diagrams uses the same tools, but with different LaTeX code and CaboCha's -f3 (xml) output. The diagrams are transparent PNG files. CaboCha is about 90% accurate, considered on par with similar materials curated by humans. For linguistic researchers, they tend to manually correct this material but since it’s so accurate they’ve little work to do. For regular folk the accuracy is good enough to supplement our learning. If you want diagrams for other Anki decks, try here.