In English, when we want to refer to something without saying exactly what it is, we have two simple words:
Japanese, on the other hand, has six words to cover the same ground. That might sound intimidating at first, but the system behind these words is simple and logical.
In this article, we’re going to break down all six words, see exactly when to use each one, and look at how they work in real sentences.
If you’re just starting to learn Japanese, understanding basic sentence structure is your first critical step. Fortunately, Japanese sentences follow incredibly logical patterns once you know what to look at.
In this lesson, we’ll break down the most fundamental sentence pattern in Japanese:
A wa B desu.A は B です。
This how we say “A = B”.
There is an elegant simplicity to Japanese verbs.
In many languages, learning verb conjugations is a nightmare involving endless lists of exceptions that simply need to be memorized.
But in Japanese, verb conjugations are incredibly logical and predictable.
Especially compared to English, where many verbs have seemingly random conjugations (eat/ate, go/went, be/was), Japanese verbs follow consistent, reliable patterns. Even the few exceptions that do exist mostly follow the same patterns as all other verbs.
What makes Japanese verbs so logical is that they all have the same structure. Once you understand this basic structure, learning new verb tenses and forms becomes easy.
Nouns are one of the most essential building blocks in any language, since they are what we use to refer to ‘things’.
But instead of referring to ‘things’ using a single noun, like “dog”, we can also refer to things much more specifically by giving more detail, such as “the dog chewing a giant bone under the bench over there in the park”.
For this, we need complex noun phrases, and mastering these will hugely increase your ability to express yourself in Japanese.
Probably the simplest way to build more complex sentences in Japanese is to take two simple sentences and join them together to form one longer sentence.
Just as in English, one of the most common situations where we would do this is when we want to explain the reason for doing something or to show cause and effect. That is, to say something like:
I did Y, because X happened.
Here, the word “because” is joining two separate statements – “I did Y” and “X happened” – and in doing so, explains that one of these actions is the reason for the other one.
Another way to express the above sentence is like this:
X happened, so I did Y.
This is the same information, but we’ve swapped the order of the statements and used “so” instead of “because”.
In this article, we will see how we can use the particles “kara” and “node” to connect two actions together in this way to effectively say “so” or because”.
We’re also going to do this in both polite and informal Japanese, and we will see how the rules apply slightly differently in each case.
In Japanese, there are a number of different particles that people use to add more emotion and personality to their sentences.
The particles that are actually used in everday life vary from region to region, with different Japanese dialects often having their own alternatives, but probably the two most common ones are “yo” and “ne”.
In this article, we’re going to take a detailed look at how we can use each of these particles to convey different emotions. We’ll also see how we can use both of them together to express something different again.
Let’s get to it, starting with the particle “yo”!
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