Vocabulary

Sample sentences

Eng: which is the road to Tokyo?
It’s in that direction.

lit: the road-towards Tokyo? Which is it?
It is over there.

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Eng: And then take a right, please.

lit: From there go towards the right, please.

Comments

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

Particles

from – から

‘kara'(から) means ‘from’; it can be from a point in time, from a location, etc.

In English, instead of saying ‘From the heart’ we say ‘sincerely’.

Pronouns

kore, sore – これ, それ

lesson 4 shows the ‘koko/soko/asoko/doko’ group as an example of a ‘ko-so-a-do’ family that meant ‘here/there/way over there/where?’.

This lesson introduces the ‘kore/sore/are/dore’ group which means ‘this/that/that over there/which?’. We use these words when we want to refer to something without mentioning what this something is, e.g., the context must have already made clear what we are talking about, maybe because it was mentioned before, or because we are pointing to it:

Thus, we can say ‘kore wa taka-i’, but we cannot say ‘kore kuruma wa taka-i’. For the later case, we’d have to use the group ‘kono/sono/ano/dono?’, i.e., we would ask ‘kono kuruma wa taka-i’.

achira – あちら

This lesson also introduces another ‘ko-so-a-do’ family: ‘kochira/sochira/achira/dochira’ which means ‘this way/that way/that way over there/which way?’

Specifically, ‘achira’ has two meanings: ‘in that direction’ and ‘in that location way over there that I cannot point to’; if we can point to the location, we use ‘asoko’ instead.

Expressions

sore-kara – それから

‘sore’ means ‘that’. It is used in many conjunctions; we already saw ‘sore-tomo’ in lesson 9.

The literal translation of ‘sore-kara’ would be ‘From that…’, of ‘From there…’, but in English we would say ‘After that…’, or ‘And then…’.

As a note, ‘sore-dewa’ and ‘sore-ja’ mean the same as ‘dewa’ and ‘ja’, so they are interchangable. Since we can say ‘good-bye’ with

[dewa/ja] mata ne

then we can also say it with

sore-[dewa/ja] mata ne