Vocabulary

Sample sentences

‘nani-ka’ does not need the ‘wo’ particle but ‘nani-ka nomi-mono’ does.

Eng: I bought something.
I bought something to drink.

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Eng: I want to spend a week.
I want to stay a week.

Comments

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

Verbs

masu (past neg.)

The complete conjugation of the formal -masu form is

and the casual version is:

For example,

Adjectives

suki (すき)

‘suki’ is probably the one adjective that will show up in every movie and anime, because it can be used to mean ‘I love you’. Japanese has a direct translation of ‘I love you’, i.e., ‘ai shiteru’, but it is very formal so it is usually used only in special occasions. Instead, we declare our love toward people telling them that ‘we like them’ instead of ‘we love them’.

In Japanese, though, there is no verb that means ‘to like’. We cannot use ‘hoshi-i’ because this translates more to ‘want-able’. Instead, we use the adjective ‘suki-na’ that means ‘to be likable’. Thus, to tell a person that we like him or her, we tell them that they are ‘likeable’. The kanji for ‘suki’ is 好き; the left side of 好 is 女 (onna), which means ‘woman’, while the right side is 子 (ko), which means ‘child’. Hence, 好 describes the fondness of a woman for her child.

Since ‘suki’ means ‘to like’, then ‘dai suki’, means ‘to like a lot’, i.e., ‘to love’. The opposite of ‘suki’ is ‘kirai’, which is ‘to dislike’; hence, ‘dai kirai’ means ‘to dislike a lot’, i.e., ‘to hate’. The direct object of both ‘suki’ and ‘kirai’ is marked with ‘ga’, unless we are doing a comparison, in which case we use ‘wa’.

‘koto’ means ‘thing’, but unlike ‘mono’, which refers to something material (like ‘nomi-mono’ meaning ‘beverages’), ‘koto’ refers to something intangible, like an essence. Thus ‘anata no koto’ would translate as ‘your essence’, or ‘the thing that makes you you’, or ‘you, yourself’.