Japanese Sentence Structure: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

Most people find Japanese sentence structure to be difficult and confusing.

This is completely understandable considering how fundamentally different it is to other languages, but the truth is that Japanese grammar is actually incredibly logical – it just needs to be looked at from the right angle.

Usually, the basic structure of Japanese sentences is considered to be SOV – subject-object-verb (eg. Isubject sushiobject eatverb). This description makes it easier to compare with English, for example, which follows an SVO structure, but the truth is, this comparison is mostly meaningless because the two languages function in completely different ways. The SOV label is also wrong sometimes, as it is not uncommon in Japanese to see sentences with the object appearing before the subject. No wonder it seems so confusing…

Instead of trying to fit a Japanese-shaped peg into an English-shaped hole, let’s start again.

Firstly, in English, the main pieces of a sentence go in a specific order. The person doing the action (the subject, eg. I) is first, followed by the word that describes the action (the verb, eg. eat), then the thing that the action is done to (the object, eg. sushi). In English, it is the word order that tells us who did what.

Japanese sentences are structured around grammatical markers called ‘particles’. Each particle indicates how the word before it relates to other words in the sentence, usually to the verb. The verb appears last, but the order of the other words can vary because it is the particles, not word order, that tell us who did what.

For example, a basic sentence might have a topic (which is often the same as the subject) followed by the particle ‘wa’, then an object with the particle ‘wo’, and finally the verb. This basic word ordering is why Japanese is often considered an SOV language, but as long as the right particles are used with the right words, the actual order of the words can be changed.

In this article, I break it all down and show you exactly how Japanese sentences work, using plenty of examples and charts showing very clearly how Japanese sentences are structured. Every aspect of Japanese grammar fits within the structure outlined below.

Let’s get to it!

Contents
Basic “desu”「です」 sentences
How particles work
Defining different roles
Expanding individual elements

Basic “desu”「です」 sentences

Let’s start by looking at basic sentences that use the special verb “desu”「です」 (pronounced “dess”), which is effectively equivalent to the English verb “be” (am, are, is).

Sentences using “desu”「です」 usually follow this basic structure:

[topic] waは … (something that describes the topic) … desuです

Here are a few simple examples:

The first step to understanding this structure is knowing what “wa”「は」 is.

“Wa”「は」 (pronounced “wa”) is what is known as a particle. Particles are like markers that identify what role each word or phrase plays within a sentence.

The particle “wa”「は」 tells us that the word or phrase before it is the topic of that sentence.

The topic is basically the thing that is being talked about in that sentence, and usually appears near the beginning. In our examples above, the things that are being talked about are “I”, “this”, and “the car”, respectively, so the topics of these sentences in Japanese are “watashi”, kore” and “kuruma”「私わたし」, 「これ」 and 「車くるま」.

The topic of a Japanese sentence is very similar to what other languages refer to as the subject. The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that does the action described by the main verb in the sentence. These are, in fact, slightly different concepts, but for now, we will treat them as being the same so as to keep things simple.

Particles like “wa”「は」 do not exist in English, but they are the backbone of Japanese grammar. We’ll look at particles in more detail soon.

These sentences also show us another important rule that applies to all Japanese sentences:

The main verb comes at the end of the sentence.

In all of the above examples, that verb is “desu”「です」, which takes the form of “is” or “am” in the English translations. However, this rule also applies for other verbs, which we will look at shortly.

First, let’s take another look at the first two sentences above. Text with the same formatting has the same meaning.

First of all, we can see that “wa”「は」 has no English equivalent. This is because its entire purpose is to show that “watashi”「私わたし」 or “kore”「これ」 is the topic of these sentences. That is, “wa”「は」 defines these words as the topic. In English, there is no need for a particle like “wa”「は」 because the subject of a sentence can be determined based on the word order. We’ll look at this more closely in the next section.

Secondly, since “hito”「人ひと」 means “person” and “kuruma”「車くるま」 means “car”, we can see that there is no Japanese equivalent of “a”.

The articles “a”, “an” and “the” do not exist in Japanese.

What this means is that the sentences, “This is a car”, and, “This is the car”, would both be, “kore wa kuruma desu”「これは車くるまです」. There is no differentiation.

This makes things simpler in some ways, but can be hard to get used if you’ve spent your entire life speaking English or similar languages, as not having these words can sometimes make a sentence feel incomplete. Without them, it can be hard to know if someone is referring to a specific car, or just any car. There are other ways to specify which car is being talked about, but in many cases, this is implied purely by context. This is something you will get used to over time.

We now know three very important rules relating to Japanese sentence structure:

• The particle “wa”「は」 identifies the topic of a sentence
• The verb comes at the end of the sentence
• The articles “a”, “an” and “the” do not exist in Japanese

These rules apply to everything, so using the first two in particular, we can adapt our sentence structure model from earlier to this:

[topic] waは … (other information) … [verb]

When the verb is “desu”「です」, the ‘other information’ can just be a noun (kore wa kuruma desuこれは車くるまです) or adjective (kuruma wa akai desu車くるまは赤あかいです). In fact, the last thing immediately before “desu”「です」 should be either a noun or an adjective.

For verbs other than “desu”「です」, however, basically everything in the ‘other information’ section needs to be accompanied by a particle.

How particles work

The main thing that differentiates Japanese from most other languages is its use of particles. We’ve already seen the particle “wa”「は」, but there are many more particles, and a proper understanding of what they are and how to use them will make the Japanese language much easier to decipher.

As stated earlier:

Particles are like markers that tell us the role each word plays in a sentence.

In any language, a combination of words only makes sense if the role of each word is clear. The biggest difference between Japanese and English (and many other languages) is how these roles are defined.

First, let’s understand what is meant by ‘the role each word plays in a sentence’.

In English, for the main elements in a sentence, this role is determined by word order. Here’s a very basic example:

Taro saw Noriko.

This sentence has three words: Taro, saw and Noriko. The central word in any sentence, in both English and Japanese, is the main verb, which in this case is “saw”. The other words in a sentence always relate to the main verb, either directly or indirectly, so every sentence must have a main verb.

To figure out what the role of each of the other words is, we look at the word order:

• “Taro” comes before “saw”, which tells us that Taro is the one that saw something.
• “Noriko” comes after “saw”, which tells us that Noriko is the thing that was seen.

If we change the order and put “Noriko” first, we end up with the sentence:

Noriko saw Taro.

This has an entirely different meaning because changing the word order changes the role that each word plays, which in turn, changes the overall meaning of the sentence.

Japanese is different. In Japanese, particles determine the role of each word in a sentence.

Given that the Japanese word for “saw” is “mimashita”「見みました」, we would normally write the above sentence as:

This sentence has two particles:

• “wa”「は」, which tells us who we are talking about
• “wo”「を」, which tells us what they saw

In more general terms:

• waは defines the ‘topic’ of a sentence, which is usually the person or thing that performed the main action being described
• woを, pronounced “o”, defines to whom or to what that action was done, which is known as the ‘object’ of the verb

Importantly, particles define the role of the word that comes before them. In the above example:

• The word before “wa”「は」 is “Tarō”「たろう」, so we know that Taro is the person who performed the act of seeing.
• The word before “wo”「を」 is “Noriko”「のりこ」, so we know that Noriko is the ‘thing’ that was seen.

If we put this all together, it means: Taro saw Noriko.

Because of particles like these, word order is not as important as it is in English. In Japanese, we can actually change the order of the words without changing the fundamental meaning of the sentence, as long as the same particles are paired with the same words. Both of the following mean effectively the same thing:

These two sentences both mean “Taro saw Noriko”. The word order doesn’t affect the fundamental meaning because the particles tell us what each word in the sentence does.

That said, we wouldn’t normally use sentence two above because, as our sentence structure model shows, the topic is usually near the beginning of the sentence. This is not a hard rule, but it is unnatural in most situations for the topic to be placed after other key elements in the same clause.

Defining different roles

In our basic example sentence involving Taro and Noriko, the only roles that have actually been defined are the topic (Taro) and the object (Noriko).

These, together with the verb, are the three most important pieces of information in a sentence. They tell us:

• What action is done
• Who does the action
• To what or whom the action is done
• Roughly when the action occurs (past, present, future etc. as defined by the verb tense)

Of course, there are many more pieces of information that can be added to a sentence.

Let’s start by considering some basic information that relates directly to the action itself, such as:

• When (more precisely) the action takes place
• Where the action takes place
• The destination of the action
• The origin of the action
• The means by which the action is done

When we include this information, we need to specify how that information relates to the other parts of the sentence, and to the main verb in particular.

Before we look at how this is done in Japanese, let’s consider how the role of additional information is defined in English.

Defining roles in English

We know that the subject and the object are determined based on word order. For most additional information, however, word order alone is not enough – we need prepositions like “in”, “on”, “at”, “to” and “from”.

For example, we can’t just say “Taro saw Noriko the library”. We need a preposition to tell us how “the library” relates to everything else. The preposition we use depends on what role we want to attribute to “the library”.

The diagram below shows some examples of how prepositions are used to define the relationship between different pieces of information and the action described by the main verb.

We can usually just add this additional information – together with the appropriate preposition – to the end of the sentence after the object. For example, to define the location where Taro saw Noriko, we could use the preposition “at” and insert it after “Noriko” (the object of the verb “saw”):

Taro saw Noriko at the library.

It can also go at the beginning of the sentence:

At the library, Taro saw Noriko.

Either way, the “at” is essential to understanding what role the library plays. Without it, we don’t know if Taro saw Noriko at the library, in front of the library, on his way to the library, or while he was thinking about what he would do when he got to the library. The role needs to be defined.

Defining roles in Japanese

In Japanese, just as we did with the topic and the object, we define the roles of additional elements using particles. The Japanese version of the above diagram looks like this:

The first major difference, as we’ve already discussed, is that the topic and the object, like everything else, are determined by particles, not word order as they are in English.

Each of the elements – including the topic and object – need to be included in a sentence with the appropriate particle after them. There are a few exceptions to this (such as time words, where “ni”「に」 is only required in some cases), but in general, particles are required.

To build a sentence, we just need to insert each piece of information – together with its particle – into the sentence structure we identified earlier:

[topic] waは … (other information) … [verb]

Note that, as mentioned, the topic is only placed at the beginning of the sentence because that is its natural location in most situations. It is not, however, a requirement.

Let’s do this with our example sentence:

Taro saw Noriko at the library.

We know that Taro is the topic, and the verb is saw (mimashita). The ‘other information’ is:

• Noriko, who is the thing that was seen (the object)
• The library, which is where he saw her (the location)

This fits into our diagram like so:

The ‘other information’ can go in basically any order, so we just need to insert it together with the appropriate particles:

To say that the order doesn’t matter is oversimplifying things a little, as it does make a subtle difference to where the emphasis lies, and certain orderings are generally more natural than others. However, this is far less important than using the right particles, as using the wrong ones would change the meaning entirely. If we swap “wo” and “de”, for example, we get:

Although grammatically correct, this obviously makes no sense. When it comes to the meaning of a sentence, particles are critical.

Now let’s add another element and try building the following sentence in Japanese:

On Sunday, Taro saw Noriko at the train station

If we put this into our diagram, we get this:

As indicated, we attribute the particles as follows:

• Tarō wa太郎たろうは
• Noriko wo紀子のりこを
• nichiyōbi ni日曜日にちようびに
• eki de駅えきで

Using our three basic rules, we can then create our sentence to be any of the following:

There are other possible combinations too, and as long as all the pieces of information are followed by the correct particles, they are grammatically correct and have the same fundamental meaning.

Again, some orderings are more natural than others. For example, time phrases usually appear near the beginning of the sentence, so in most cases, the third option above is less preferable. Time phrases are also unique in that they often appear even before the topic, like so:

[time phrase] + [topic] waは … (other information) … [verb]

This would make our example look like this:

The actual difference between this and the other orderings above is negligible. It’s like the difference between the following:

On Sunday, Taro saw Noriko at the train station
Taro saw Noriko at the train station on Sunday

As you can see, the word order doesn’t really affect the meaning.

Let’s look at another example:

Taro went with Noriko from the train station to the library by car.

Here’s the diagram for this:

This gives us:

• Tarō wa太郎たろうは
• toshokan ni図書館としょかんに
• eki kara駅えきから
• Noriko to紀子のりこと
• kuruma de車くるまで

Note that Noriko’s role has changed from object to co-participant, hence the particle after her name has changed too. The same is true for eki駅えき.

Our sentence could be written as:

Again, these are all correct and have essentially the same meaning, with just a slight difference in emphasis.

Now let’s look at another way that we can add more information to a sentence.

Expanding individual elements

An important point about the diagrams above are that they show the relationship between certain pieces of information and the main verb. This is because each of them relates directly to the action. For example:

• “nichiyōbi ni”「日曜日にちようびに」 defines when the action takes places
• “eki de”「駅えきで」 defines where the action takes place
• “toshokan ni”「図書館としょかんに」 defines the destination of the action

We can, however, add other information that doesn’t relate directly to the verb. Instead it relates specifically to one of the individual elements in the sentence.

The simplest example of this is adjectives.

In Japanese, adjectives are used in much the same way as they are in English – immediately before the noun they describe. (This is in addition to their use in simple sentences where the main verb is “desu”「です」, such as “kuruma wa akai desu”「車くるまは赤あかいです」).

Let’s take a shorter version of our sentence from earlier…

…and change it to specify that the car was blue:

(Note that in English, “by” changes to “in”, but the meaning is essentially the same).

What we’re essentially doing is expanding the individual element, “kuruma”「車くるま」, to add more detail. In this case, the ‘means of transport’ has changed from “kuruma”「車くるま」 to “aoi kuruma”「青あおい車くるま」. When we do this, “aoi kuruma”「青あおい車くるま」 as a whole should be marked by “de”「で」, since “a blue car” is the means of transport, not just “a car”.

This has no impact on the other parts of the sentence, so it fits into the diagram differently:

Expanding on a single noun like this creates what is called a noun phrase. A noun phrase is essentially a phrase that, as a whole, represents a single thing. Technically, “car” by itself is a noun phrase, but so are all of the following:

• a car
• a blue car
• my car
• my blue car
• the blue car over there
• the blue car that’s always parked in the street next to the mailbox

All of these represent a single thing – a car – and can be substituted into sentences in the same way, like so:

• He is driving a car.
• He is driving my blue car.
• He is driving the blue car that’s always parked in the street next to the mailbox.

Noun phrases are just as common in Japanese as they are in English, and serve the same fundamental purpose – to add more information about a specific noun.

There are many different ways that noun phrases can be formed, in both English and Japanese. Another very common example is:

Here, we’ve taken the noun “car” and expanded on it to indicate that it belongs to ‘me’. The result is the noun phrase, “my car”, which in Japanese is:

This makes use of another very common particle: noの.

The particle “no”「の」 indicates possession.

Effectively, “no”「の」 converts “I”, “you”, “he”, “she” and “they” into “my”, “your”, “his”, “her” and “their”, respectively. For other things like people’s names, animals, places and objects, it has the same effect as adding “‘s” (apostrophe s).

If instead we wanted to say “Taro’s car”, for example, we would say “Tarō no kuruma”「太郎たろうの車くるま」, with the “no”「の」 indicating that the car belongs to Taro.

The one-size-fits-all way of defining “no”「の」 would be to say it is equal to English “of ”. For example, instead of “my car” or “Taro’s car”, “watashi no kuruma”「私わたしの車くるま」 and “Tarō no kuruma”「太郎たろうの車くるま」 could be thought of as “the car of me” or “the car of Taro”.

“No”「の」 can be used to connect just about any two things, where one of the two things belongs to the other in some way, such as “the back of the door”, “the color of your eyes” or even “the rain of yesterday”.

Now that we know this, let’s substitute “watashi no kuruma”「私わたしの車くるま」 into our example sentence. First, here’s the diagram:

This can be turned into the following:

Here, the means of transportation is “my car”, so the noun phrase “watashi no kuruma”「私わたしの車くるま」 needs to be followed by the particle “de”「で」.

It’s important to note that even though “no”「の」 is a particle, it cannot be moved around freely like the other particles we’ve looked at. This is because it is part of a noun phrase, and noun phrases cannot be separated. Doing so would be like separating “my” from “car”. The result might be something like this:

If we want to change the word order, we can, but we need to move the whole noun phrase “watashi no kuruma”「私わたしの車くるま」, and the associated particle “de”「で」, together as a single block. Here’s one way we could do this:

This is true for any noun in any sentence. That is, any noun can be expanded into a more detailed noun phrase. The resulting noun phrase can then be used in the same way as the original noun, no matter what role that noun has in the sentence. It just has to be kept together as a single block.

For example, the destination could be changed from “the library” to “the university library”:

Or “my car” could be used as the object, defined by “wo”「を」:

It can even be used as the topic:

Any noun, no matter where it is used, can be expanded as long as the resulting phrase is a valid noun phrase.

Our diagram can therefore be modified to look like this:

In Japanese, noun phrases are used in a lot of different ways, from simple examples like the ones above, to more complex expressions like:

• This is the book that he bought yesterday (kore wa kare ga kinō katta hon desuこれは彼かれが昨日きのう買かった本ほんです)
• When I went to Japan, I ate lots of ramen (watashi wa nihon ni itta toki, rāmen wo takusan tabemashita私わたしは日本にほんに行いったとき、ラーメンをたくさん食たべました)
• I think it would be better to go tomorrow morning (ashita no asa itta hō ga ii to omoimasu明日あしたの朝あさ行いった方ほうがいいと思おもいます)
• Please wash your plate before you watch TV (terebi wo miru mae ni sara wo aratte kudasaiテレビを見みる前まえに皿さらを洗あらってください)

The various ways of building different noun phrases and using them in sentences are covered in detail in my book, 80/20 Japanese. To read a free sample chapter from the book, click here.

Japanese sentence structure summary

The most important things to remember about Japanese sentence structure are:

• The verb comes last
• Particles define the roles of each of the different elements within a sentence
• Word order is less important, and only influences the emphasis
• Each noun in a sentence can be expanded into a more detailed noun phrase
• It is usually more natural to put the topic and time phrases near the beginning of the sentence

The result is that basic sentences usually look like this, with the ‘other information’ appearing optionally and in any order:

This basic structure is the foundation of the entire Japanese language. If you understand this, Japanese will start to make a lot more sense.

What next?

You can learn more about particles, noun phrases and everything else essential to the Japanese language in my book, 80/20 Japanese. To receive a free sample chapter, click here.

Alternatively, learn how to enhance your sentences with adverbs, or learn more about what “desu”「です」 means and how to use it correctly.