Vocabulary

• Words like ‘koura’ (cola), borrowed from other languages, are called ‘gai-rai-go’ (外来語, lit. outside-coming-language). With few exceptions, gai-rai-go words are written in katakana and don’t have kanjis. An example of an exception is ‘ei’ (Britain) whose kanji is 英.

Sample sentences

When are you eating? I’ll eat later.

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Comments

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

Particles

no – の

In English, we can say that something belongs to someone in two ways, e.g., “the car of Hana” and “Hana’s car”; other languages are not so flexible, e.g., in Spanish we can only say “the car of Hana”, while in Japanese we can only say “Hana’s car”. In Japanese, one of the most common roles of the particle の is to play the role of this possessive apostrophe, i.e., of ‘s:

This extends to cases wth possessive pronouns in which we don’t usually use aposthrophes but, logically, we could:

Usually, a particle forms a unit only with the word that it precedes, e.g., ‘to Nara’ is ‘ならへ’, ‘in January’ is ‘一月に’, ‘with Hana’ is ’花と’, etc; we can move these units around in the sentence:

The emphasis changes a bit but, by and large, they mean the same thing. However, the particle の forms a unit with the two nouns that it marks, i.e., between the owner and the owned thing, and we have to move them together. When we chain the possesions, e.g., Hana’s mom’s car, or [[Hanas’s mom]’s car], the whole chain forms a unit that we cannot break, and we have to move it as a unit. Basically, it works the same as in English:

mo – も

‘mo’ (も) means ‘also’, in both positive and negative contexts.

We can translate it as ‘as well’ or ‘too’ in a positive context:

and translate it as ‘neither’ in a negative context:

de – で

‘de’ (で) is ‘at’ when we refer to time:

or ‘at’ a location where an action takes place.

wo – を

‘wo’ (を) marks the direct object of a verb, i.e., the object on which the verb acts. In spite that it is written as ‘wo’, it is often pronounced ‘o’.

When we answer a question, we can replace the ‘question word’ marked with ‘wo’ with our answer. However, when the answer is ‘nanika’, we omit the ‘wo’:

In the example above, ‘nani wo’ is replaced by ‘sushi wo’, because ‘sushi’ is a specific object, but it is replaced by ‘nani-ka’ (‘something’), without the ‘wo’, because ‘nani-ka’ is not a specific object, i.e., there is no ‘object’ for ‘wo’ to mark.

Not every object of a verb is a direct object. For example, ‘sushi’ is the direct object of ‘I eat sushi’, but ‘chopsticks’ is not a direct object in ‘I eat with chopsticks’ (we are not eating the chopsticks), nor ‘resutoran’ is a the direct object of ‘I eat at the restaurant’ (we are not eating the restaurant), so in these cases the verb does not mark the objects with ‘wo’; if we mark them with ‘wo’ we get some strange meanings:

‘wo’ (を) is rarely used to write anything other than the direct object marker. From time to time it appears in an actual word, though. For example, Kawori Miyazono, the character of ‘My lie in April’, spells her name – Kaori (‘scent’), as かをり, instead of using the normal spelling かおり; still, since both お and を are pronounced ‘o’, both spellings sound ‘kaori’:

A common expression where を shows up is 気をつけて (‘ki-wo-tsukete’, ‘take care of yourself’). Here 気 is ‘sprit’ and を is working as the direct object marker of the verb ‘tsukeru’ (‘to attach’), so ‘ki-wo-tsukete’ is a gentle order to ‘attach care to your spirit’, i.e., to ‘take care of yourself’.