This sort of definition has been filling my head and my notebook for the last few days. This started when I decided I needed to study something that I would like to be able to talk about, rather than random general stuff like the smart.fm lists, and decided I'd like to be able to actually discuss the Japanese language with Japanese in Japanese. I often break my flow and retreat to English to mention some part of speech. But now I have a notebook that has four pages so far filled with Japanese grammar and general linguistics definitions.
I started here at wa-pedia. Not a place I frequent; it's just where my google search for "japanese grammar in japanese" led me, several pages down. I started reading the article and saw a lot of juicy, meaningful words and started writing things down and just looking up anything I didn't know. I've so far gotten through the 動詞 (どうし) - verbs and am looking at the adjectives. I tell you, some things are frustrating and damn near impossible to find. I'll highlight some of the more difficult to find words for us later.
I eventually ended up at the Wikipedia article on Japanese grammar and found that the two were nearly identical. This rather disappointed me because Wikipedia's technical articles tend to be among the less useful ones for the layman. Though the page at wa-pedia is slightly different, and a bit more language-learner friendly, it may still just be an older version of the same page.
However, it is still immensely enlightening. Learning the grammar of the language inside out rather than outside in is very satisfying and clears up lots of potentially (or actually) confusing areas. It is simply a mistake to view a language in the terms of another language's grammar. Unless they are very similar it will simply not work well at all. And learning grammatical terms in that language, you have something to talk about!
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