Vocabulary

• rice used to be so frequent in the Japanese diet that it became a synonymous for ‘meal’; breakfast, lunch, and dinner are ‘morning-rice’, ‘noon-rice’ and ‘evening-rice’.

Sample sentences

Eng: Are you going to drink beer or sake?

lit: You? Are you going to drink beer or sake?

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Eng: Are you going to drink something?
         What are you going to drink?

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Comments

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

Prefixes and suffixes

san – さん

‘san’ (さん) is an honorific for a person, equivalent to any of Mr., Mrs., Miss, and Ms.

hon – ほん, 本

‘hon’ (本) is the counter for things that are thin and long, e.g., bottles, pencils, straws, cigarettes, arrows, etc.

The counter sometimes changes from ‘hon’ to ‘bon’ or ‘ppon’, but the kanji remains 本:

• We can pronounce 六本 as either ろっぽん (roppon), or ろくほん (roku hon)
• We can pronounce 八本 as either はっぽん (happon), or はちほん (hachi hon)

Particles

ka – か

‘ka’ (か) means ‘or’ for a list of objects, like ‘beer or sake’.

This means that I will only drink beer or sake, nothing else. However, there is the issue of how to offer beer or sake as examples of possible choices:

In the second case, the choice is not given with an ‘or’ but instead we repeat the whole question with each choice:

Or, we can simply add the option explicitly:

to – と

と means ‘with’, or ‘in the company of’:

Although the translation of ‘Tanaka san to hanashi-masu’ is ‘I’m going to converse with Mr. Tanaka’, in English we would normally say ‘I am going to talk to Mr. Tanaka’.

Verbs

suru – する

‘suru’ (to do) is one of the two Japanese irregular verbs; the other one is ‘kuru’ (to go). The non-past conjugations of ‘suru’ are:

For example,

‘suru’ is also the verb used in a very similar and common expression:

‘shi-masu’ is useful to turn nouns into verbs (let’s alternate formal and casual forms):

In the United States some people say ‘Let’s do lunch’ instead of ‘let’s have lunch’; the idea is the same: the examples above are something like ‘do the job’, ‘do tennis’, ‘do cooking’ and ‘do phone’.

We can remove the ‘wo’ particle without changing the meaning of the sentence [livinglanguage]. The following verbs mean exactly the same:

However, while most particles can appear many times in a sentence:

there can only be one ‘wo’ per sentence because there can only be one direct object per sentence. Thus, if our sentence uses a ‘… wo shimasu’ verb and has a direct object, then we have to remove the ‘wo’ from the verb and use instead ‘… shimasu’:

So ‘uchi de ryori suru’ and ‘uchi de ryori wo suru’ mean exactly the same thing, but when we add the direct object ‘sushi’ we can only use ‘uchi de sushi wo ryori suru’, to keep a single ‘wo’ in the sentence.