In English, there are three basic verb tenses: past, present, and future. In English, or especially Romance languages like Spanish, the verbs change based on the person performing the act. This is one of the easy parts of the Japanese language. There are also three different types of verbs in Japanese. There are only two irregular verbs in Japanese. Standard, polite Japanese, or formal Japanese, uses the -masu verb ending.
Informal speech uses the dictionary or infinite form of the verb! Some words or phrases are more often used by men or women, though. As for counters, there are many specific words or suffixes used to count objects in Japanese.
This is important to learn because it determines how you conjugate these verbs. If you know your hiragana and katakana chart , you can think of this as changing the end syllable from the u-row to the i-row. June 4, His name is Tae Kim. This is his grammar guide. Learn it. Love it. May 9, Tae Kim's Guide is my current Japanese Bible.
July 18, Access FluentU on the website to use it with your computer or tablet or, better yet, start learning Japanese on the go with the FluentU app for iOS or Android! Not only will you learn more about the disappearing subjects, but FluentU gets you familiar with all of the ins and outs of Japanese sentences by breaking them down into their individual parts. You can use this same method to learn about particles, modifying adjectives, verb conjugation and more.
Unlike in English, the sentence structure is very free. But each of the above utterances means the same thing. In English, it would be mighty strange if you said this. For the purposes of learning basic Japanese sentence structure, however, stick to Subject-Object-Verb. It may seem tough at first to turn your SVO sentences around to SOV and to slap particles at the ends of nouns instead of prepositions in front, but with practice, you can train your brain to do it quickly and easily.
Start with easy Japanese sentences that express basic things, and then gradually build your way up. If you love learning Japanese with authentic materials, then I should also tell you more about FluentU. FluentU naturally and gradually eases you into learning Japanese language and culture. You'll learn real Japanese as it's spoken in real life. FluentU makes these native Japanese videos approachable through interactive transcripts. Tap on any word to look it up instantly. All definitions have multiple examples, and they're written for Japanese learners like you.
Tap to add words you'd like to review to a vocab list. And FluentU has a learn mode which turns every video into a language learning lesson. You can always swipe left or right to see more examples. 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.
However, this rule also applies for other verbs, which we will look at shortly. Text with the same formatting has the same meaning. I am a person. This is a car. There is no differentiation. 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. These rules apply to everything, so using the first two in particular, we can adapt our sentence structure model from earlier to this:.
How particles work The main thing that differentiates Japanese from most other languages is its use of particles. 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. In English, for the main elements in a sentence, this role is determined by word order. This sentence has three words: Taro, saw and Noriko. The other words in a sentence always relate to the main verb, either directly or indirectly, so every sentence must have a main verb. 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.
Importantly, particles define the role of the word that comes before them. In the above example:. 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:. 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.
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.
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