Vocabulary

• The name of 4 is ‘yon’ (よん) but, to facilitate the pronunciation when combined with certain sounds, it’s sometimes shortened to ‘yo’ (よ). Thus, 4:00 is ‘yo-ji’ (よじ), not ‘yon-ji’.
• Kanjis in red are correct but usually the word is written in kana.

Sample sentences

Eng: But, won’t you join me later for lunch?

lit: But, later with me won’t you eat lunch?

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Comments

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

Expressions

kudasai/kure – ください・くれ

kudasai can be written in kanji as 下さい, but it is usually written in hiragana: ください. ‘kudasai’ is a polite request that means ‘Please, give me …’:

The casual form of ‘kudasai’ is ‘kure’, which means ‘give me … ‘, without any politeness, i.e., it’s less of a request and more of a demand:

Verbs

-te kudasai/kure

In Lesson 10, the narrator uses the ‘-te kudasai’ form to introduce the dialog:

The ‘-te kudasai’ is a polite request. ‘kudasai” comes from the verb ‘kudasaru’; when we precede it with a verb in ‘-te’ form, ‘-te kudasai’ means “give x to me / do x for me, please”. We can replace the formal ‘kudasai’ for the casual ‘kure’ to remove the politeness, changing the request into an order:

We can be even more casual removing even the ‘kure’.

We’ll find an explanation of the -te form in the summary.

-tai form – たい

The -tai form plays the same role as the English auxiliary verb “want”; however, it only applies to what we want or do not want, not to what other people want or do not want.

We are converting the verb into an i-adjective and then conjugating it as an i-adjective, using ‘desu’ as a decorator only. For example:

We can mark the direct object of a -tai form with ‘ga’, because the -tai form turns the verb into an adjective, or with a ‘wo’, because the -tai form verb is still a verb; the meaning is the same whether we mark the object with ‘ga’ or ‘wo’:

We’ll find an explanation of the -tai form in the summary but, in essence, it is very simple: the -masu and -tai form change the verb in the same way; we change the verb to a pre-masu form and then, instead of following the stem with ‘masu’, we follow it with ‘tai’:

Easy, right?

Prefixes and suffixes

ji – じ,時

‘ji’ (時) is the counter for hours of the clock. Unlike ‘hon’, the counter for long thin things introduced in lesson 8, ‘ji’ doesn’t change with different numbers, i.e., it is always ‘ji’. However, some numbers change:

• ‘4:00 o’clock’ is ‘yo-ji’, not ‘yon-ji’,
• ‘7:00 o’clock’ is ‘shichi-ji’, not ‘nana-ji’, and
• ‘9:00 o’clock’ is ‘ku-ji’, not ‘kyu-ji’

If we want to refer to intervals measured in hours, we add ‘kan’ (space, interval), to the counter, e.g., ‘san-ji-kan’ is ‘3 hours’, and ‘nan-ji-kan?’ is ‘how many hours?’.

Adverbs

chotto – ちょっと, 一寸

Both ‘sukoshi’ and ‘chotto’ mean ‘a little bit’, but ‘sukoshi’ is formal, while ‘chotto’ is casual. The kanji for ‘chotto’ is 一寸, but it is usually written using hiragana alone:

Figuratively, we can use ‘chotto’ to mean ‘a little bit (difficult)’, i.e., a casual and indirect way to say ‘no’; we can also use ‘sukoshi’ but since we are being more formal, ‘sukoshi’ is usually followed by an explanation: