Vocabulary

• the word for ‘stores’ used in the recordings, ‘o-mise’, is ‘mise’ (store) with the honorific ‘o-‘.
• ‘yo’ is a spoken exclamation mark, i.e., ‘!’; a verbose translation would be ‘I’m sure!’ or ‘that’s for sure!’.
• ‘oso-i’ means both ‘slow’ and ‘late’, in the same way that ‘haya-i’ means both ‘fast’ and ‘early’.
• ‘mitte’ means ‘see’; it can mean ‘to try’, as in ‘see if you can do this’, i.e., ‘try to do this’
• ‘itasu’ is the humble version of ‘suru’, both meaning ‘to do’

Sample sentences

Eng: because it is already late.

lit: already late is because.

---

Eng: try to say it, please (see whether you can say it, please)

lit: say it, see it, please

Comments

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

Adverbs

dou-shite – どうして

The ‘dou’ in ‘dou shite’ means ‘how’; hence, a good English translation of ‘dou shite?’ meaning ‘why?’ would be ‘how come?’. As in the English ‘how come?’, ‘dou shite’ is casual; the formal way to ask ‘why?’ is ‘naze?’.
This is one of the few situations in which a shorter word is actually more formal than the longer one.

There are many ways to ask ‘why?’; in each case, the single word can be followed by ‘desu ka’ to make the request even more polite:

mou – もう

‘mou’ is the other side of the coin of the adverb ‘mada’, introduced in Lesson 3. We are going to repeat some of the material about ‘mada’ here, to make clear how it differs from ‘mou’. japanesemeow.com has a great page about this.

mada

indicates that there has not been any change in the state, for either positive or negative states:

positive state – still:

negative state – not yet:

mou

indicates that there has been a change in the state, for either positive or negative states:

positive state – already:

negative state – no longer:

Using the example of the recordings:

particles

yo – よ

We can think of the particles は and か playing the role of question marks after the topic and after the verb, respectively:

And in the same way, we can think of the particles が and よ as playing the role of exclamation marks after the topic and after the verb, respectively.

They are not interchangeable, though. は and が apply to the topic, while か and よ apply to the verb. We can have が after the verb; however, it would not be playing the role of an exclamation mark but, instead, it would have a softening role:

Sometimes females would add わ (wa) to the よ particle, or combine them with ね, e.g., all of the following mean ‘The wine is delicious!’: