Vocabulary

• Words ending in -i and -na are i-adjectives and na-adjectives.
• Even though ‘nani ka’ and ‘nani-ka’ look the same in kanji and hiragana, they are not the same thing; ‘nani ka’ (two words) means ‘What’s the matter?’, while ‘nani-ka’ (one word) means ‘something’.
• Japanese teenagers use ‘nanka’, the casual version of ‘nani-ka’, in the same way that American teenagers use ‘like’ [Tae Kim].

Sample sentences

Won’t you eat something?

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Comments

The following comments explain some of the grammar in more detail.

Adjectives

kekkou-na – けっこうな

‘kekkou’ is a na-adjective that means ‘fine’, but the interpretation changes depending on the context:

• for positive contexts it means ‘Yes, it’s fine’, i.e., ‘go ahead’:
  
  

  Is it ok (to pay) in dollars? Yes, it’s fine.

  
  

  doru de i-i desu ka? hai, kekkou desu.

  
  
• For negative contexts it means ‘No, it’s fine (as it is, thank you)’, i.e., ‘No, thank you’:
  
  

  Sake? No, I’m fine. (No, thank you)

  
  

  o-sake? iie, kekkou desu.

  
  

Pronouns

nani – なに, 何

‘nani’ and ‘nan’ are the two basic forms of ‘what’; they have the same kanji, 何, which appears as part of many question words:

‘nan de’ means ‘by what means?’, e.g., ‘by car’, ‘by train’, ‘by foot’, etc. Very often we will find these question words written in hiragana instead of kanji.

By itself, ‘nani’ is the casual form of the most common question there is, i.e., ‘what is it?’

Prefixes and suffixes

-ka – か

-ka is a suffix that we add to a question pronoun to get words that indicate that there is ‘some’ or ‘a little’ of that quantity, e.g.,

And this is why ‘nani-ka’ means ‘something’.

Expressions

sou desu ne… – そうですね…

‘sou desu ne…’ is an expression where ‘ne’ is not playing the role of seeking agreement (ne?) nor providing confirmation (ne!), but instead it is a stalling expression (ne…); we use it to gain time while considering a reply, same as ‘err…’:

Two other common stalling expressions are: