Vocabulary

• Words ending in -i and -na are i-adjectives and na-adjectives, respectively.

Sample sentences

Bad weather, right?
That’s right… the weather is bad.

We add the ‘-na’ particle to the na-adjective whenever we modify a noun, e.g., ‘iya-na tenki’ (nasty weather), but when it works alone we drop it, e.g., ‘iya desu’ (it is nasty). The ‘na-‘ adjectives cannot end a sentence because they don’t work as verbs; only i-adjectives play the role of verbs. Therefore, in the example, we need to use a verb, like ‘desu’, to finish the sentence, e.g., ‘iya desu’.

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Comments

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

Expressions

konnichiwa – こんにちは

This word is a nice example of how kanjis change their sounds at the drop of a hat, to fit a particular situation. The kanji for kon-nichi-wa is 今日は, so let’s see how this came to be.

• The kanji 今 means ‘now’; when by itself, 今 uses it’s kun-yomi (Japanese-based) pronunciation ‘ima’, but when forming part of a compound word the kanji takes the on-yomi (Chinese-based) pronunciation ‘kon’.
• The kanji 日 means ‘day’; when by itself, 日 uses it’s kun-yomi (Japanese-based) pronunciation ‘hi’; the word ‘ni-hon’ (Japan) is 日本, and uses ‘hi’ in spite that ‘hi-hon’ is a compound word; however, most often in compound words 日 takes the on-yomi (Chinese-based) pronunciation ‘nichi’.
• The compound word 今日 means ‘today’; this makes sense because 今日 translates to ‘now-day’; however, 今日 is not pronounced ‘kon-nichi’ but pronounced ‘kyou’
• は is the topic marker particle ‘wa’, that we translate as a question mark ’?’. Thus, 今日は means ‘Today?’, or ‘How about today?’. And indeed, 今日は can be pronounced either as the two words ‘kyou wa?’, meaning ‘How about today?’ (as opposed to some other day), or as the single-word greeting ‘kon-nichi-wa’, meaning ‘How about today?’, which in English we would translate as ‘How are you doing today?’, ‘hello’, ‘or ‘good afternoon’.

We can write ‘kon-nichi-wa’ as 今日は, but we will frequently find it in hiragana:こんにちは.

Adverbs

yoku – よく

nicely; properly; well; skillfully

In the recording it’s not clear the difference between ‘yoku’ and ‘jouzu’ since both are translated as ‘well’. In general, the best translation of ‘yoku’ is ‘well’, while the best translation of ‘jouzu’ is ‘with skill’. Hence. ‘jouzu-ni hanashi-masu’ actually means ‘You speak with skill’.

‘jouzu’ is a na-adjective, so to use it alone we have to be follow it with either ‘desu/da’ or ‘[dewa/ja][ari-masen/nai (desu)]’:

‘yoku’ is an adverb so it modifies a verb, in this case, the verb ‘wakari-masu’ (to understand):

‘yoku’ works like ‘sukoshi’, which is also an adverb:

doumo – どうも

It means ‘very’ or ‘quite’. ‘doumo’ emphasizes a feeling. The feeling can be

• explicit, i.e., ‘doumo arigatou’ (very grateful), or
• implicit, i.e., we just say ‘doumo’ (very) and the context says what it is that we are ‘doumo’ about

As usual, the longer the sentence, the more formal it is, so thanking someone using ‘doumo arigatou’ (thank you) is more formal than using ‘doumo’ (thanks) by itself.

Risa Sensei from JapanesePod101.com warns that ‘doumo’ is actually not very used outside TV shows, and advises to avoid it.

mada – まだ

‘mada’ (まだ) indicates that there hasn’t been any change in the state of something, for either positive or negative states, i.e., if something was good, it is still good, and if something was bad, it is still bad. Hence, ‘mada’ means ‘still’ for positive states, and ‘not yet’ for negative ones:

positive state – still:

negative state – not yet:

Conjunctions

demo/shikashi – でも・しかし

‘Shikashi’ is ‘however’, and ‘demo’ is ‘but’; an even more casual version is ‘tatte’; other than the level of formality, they are interchangeable. Since we use them to make contrasts, we usually follow them with ‘wa’s instead of ‘ga’s:

We most often see them at the beginning of a sentence, or following a comma. On the other hand, if we want to use a ‘but’ at the end of the sentence, like ‘It’s early, though’ instead of ‘But it’s early’, we use ‘keredomo’, ‘keredo’, or ‘kedo’, e.g.,

Yet another way to say ‘however’ or ‘but’ is のに (noni), which means ‘but, sadly,…’. We find it inside or at the end of sentences, with the nuance of regretting the situation. For example, the following two sentences mean the same thing, but the nuance is different:

I went to Tokyo, but I didn’t go to Kyoto

When we use ‘demo’ we are simply saying that “we went to Tokyo but not to Kyoto”, i.e., we are just describing what happened. When we use ‘nanoni’ we imply that we really wanted to go to Kyoto too, but, sadly, we were not able to.

To imply regret at the end of the sentence, we tranform the causal ‘da’ into ‘na’, and then add ‘noni’, i.e., ‘da’ → ‘na noni’. For example:

It is a good movie.

In the first case, we are saying that the movie is good, while in the second case we are saying that there is an unstated reason for which we regret that it is a good movie, e.g., maybe the theather where they are showing it is too far, or maybe we are busy and we cannot see it.