AlfaTrion's Domain

Ok I’ve done the majority of my contract work and I’m feeling a little less stressed about preparing for the trip. I decided to take a little break and bust out some Nihon-go styles…

Grammar

Here are some notes that will help you figure out the basic sentence structure in Japanese dialog:

1. Nouns don’t have neither gender nor number. Woo! Take that, French, Spanish and many other languages… :\

2. The verb usually comes at the end of the sentence.

3. Verb conjugation is not affected by gender or number of subjects! There are only two (2) tenses: past and present. All the other tenses can be figured out by the context of the sentence.

Are you seeing why this language rocks yet?

4. Adjectives are… I guess you can say conjugated… to represent past, present, affirmative, negative. It’s ok! It is easy.

5. If English has prepositions, Japanese has postpositions called particles. They “indicate the grammatical function of the nouns”. I don’t know how else to explain that since I was never good at English grammar in the first place. Again, don’t worry. It is easy :)

So ‘wa’ particle tells you the subject (the proceeding word, “kochira”) while the ‘ka’ particle makes the sentence into a question. Think of it as a question mark. So what is left? The end of the sentence has the word “desu” which makes it the verb.

I hope I didn’t scare you away from the language! If I can do it, anyone can.