Basic Grammar Rules
(Congratulations!) on completing lesson one, and welcome to lesson two: Basic Grammar Rules. In this lesson I’ll go over some basic rules that you have to follow to learn how to form basic sentences in Japanese.
Word Order
In English, the word order is subject-verb-object. Japanese word order is subject-object-verb, and seems almost “back to front” compared to English. So, instead of saying “I am going to Japan”, you’d say “Japan to I am going”. Japanese people will often miss out the subject when it’s obvious from the context of the sentence, for example, “I bought this CD” would be “watashi ga kono shidi o kaimashita”, however some Japanese may miss out the subject, “watashi ga” (”I”) as it’s clear that they bought the CD from the context of the sentence.
Articles
The Japanese don’t use articles, so there are no words that are the equivalent to “the” or “a”, so “a book” is just “book”. The context of the sentence will often make it clear as to which article would be used.
“wa”
You’ll often seen the word “wa” in Japanese sentences. The word “wa” itself doesn’t have any meaning, it is used as a topic particle, and marks the topic or important point of the sentence to the listener or reader. It is often used to place stress on a point. When you see the word “wa”, just look to the left (when reading the Japanese in left-to-right format) to see what it is marking as the topic of the sentence. For example, “watashi wa Akiyama desu” (”I am Akiyama), the “wa” is found after “watashi” (”I”) to point out that I am the topic of the sentence.
-desu
This is another word that you’ll see often in Japanese sentences. Desu (pronounced des) is a verb that is the equivalent to the English verb “be”, however desu never changes according to what or who it refers to, so desu can mean “I am”, “you are”, “he/she/it is”, “we are”, “you are”, “they are” etc. The meaning that the word refers to will become clear from the context of the sentence.
Yes/No Questions
Asking yes/no questions in Japanese is very easy, all you have to do is add “ka”. For example, to say “I’m okay.” you’d say “daijōbu desu”. If you wanted to ask someone “Are you okay?” You’d simply just add “ka” to make “daijōbu desu ka”.