Vocabulary

Sample sentences

Eng: You speak well.

lit: You? You speak with skill.

---

Eng: Do you know where is a good restaurant?

lit: Where? A good restaurant? Do you know?

---

Comments

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

Prefixes and suffixes

na-adjectives -na/-ni

To turn na-adjectives into adverbs, we replace the -na with -ni:

In summary, we use ‘-na’ when we modify a noun, and ‘-ni’ when we modify a verb. Both the na-adjective terminations ‘-na’ and ‘-ni’ mean ‘with’, but in English we most often say ‘skillfully’ instead of ‘with skill’, so we can think of ‘-ni’ as the Japanese version of ‘-ly’:

ko/so/a/do

We use these prefixes to describe the distances among the speaker, the listener, and the subject of the conversation. In English, ‘there’ is a location away from the speaker, but we do not distinguish whether it is close to the listener or not; Japanese makes this distinction: the prefix ‘so-‘ indicates that the location is away from the speaker, but close to the listener, while the prefix ‘a-‘ indicates that the location is away from both the speaker and the listener.

Pronouns

[ko/so/a/do]-ko

‘koko’, ‘soko’, ‘asoko’, and ‘doko’ is a ko/so/a/do family of words that refers to locations.

Other

Yes

Same as in English, there are many ways to say ‘yes’ in Japanese, depending of what we are saying and to whom we are talking to:

In general, ‘Hai’ is the most versatile form and we use it in a lot of situations, e.g., when answering a roll-call, when letting someone know that we understood some instructions, when letting someone know that we will get on top of something right away, and many others. My Japanese teacher says that ‘ee’ is formal, although not as formal as ‘hai’.