Vocabulary

• The potential form, e.g., ‘kai-masu → kae-masu’, plays the role of the English auxiliary verb ‘can’, e.g., ‘buy → can buy’.

Sample sentences

Eng: how many are two and two?
lit: two with two, how much is it?

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Eng: Now you are talking to your friend Yoko.
lit: Now you are conversing with your friend Yoko.

This is the same ‘with’ (to) that we would use in ‘eating with me’ (watashi to tabe-masu):

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Comments

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

Particles

he – へ

Although this particle is written as ‘he’, it is pronounced ‘e’. It indicates a direction of motion, so we can translate it as ‘to’, ‘towards’ or ‘in the direction of’:

to – と

‘to’ means ‘and’ in an exhaustive list:

Above, a waiter might be telling us that all they have left is ‘beer, sake, and cola’, so s/he’d separate the items with ‘to’, but if s/he is just giving examples of what they have, then s/he’d separate them with ‘ya’.

ni/niwa/nimo – に・には・にも

In this lesson ‘ni’ works as ‘for’:

Verbs

kuru – くる, 来る

We saw ‘suru’ (to do), one of the two Japanese irregular verbs, in lesson 8; the other irregular verb is ‘kuru’ (to come):

For example:

potential

The potential form plays the role of the English auxiliary verb ‘can’, to say things like ‘I can eat’. There is a description of how to derive the potential form from the dictionary form in the summary.

The potential form of every verb is a -ru verb, i.e., a group 2 verb. Thus, we can find the -masu form of any potential form treating it as a -ru verb.

Many people drop the ‘ra’ in the -rare-ru/-rare-masu terminations.

For example:

Potential forms do not have a direct object, so they do not take the を particle; instead they take が, or は when we need contrast:

Expressions

itte ki-masu – いってきます

We say ‘itte ki-masu’ when we are leaving and have the intention of coming back. This expression is formed by two separate complete sentences: ‘itte’ and ‘ki-masu’. The first sentence, ‘itte’, is the -te form of the verb ‘iku’ (to go); the second sentence, ‘ki-masu’, is the -masu form of the verb ‘kuru’ (to come).

As we pointed out in Lesson 10, the -te form is used to join sentences. The verb of each of the joined sentences must be in -te form, which then changes to the form of the verb in the final sentence:

In the first sentence we joined ‘nomi-masu, tabe-masu, kiki-masu, and hanashi-masu’, while in the second one, we joined ‘nomi-mashita, tabe-mashita, kiki-mashita, and hanashi-mashita’.

Now, back to ‘itte ki-masu’. This is as if we were joining ‘iki-masu and ki-masu’, i.e., ‘I’m going and I’m coming’, meaning ‘I’m leaving but I’ll be back’.

The correct response to ‘itte ki-masu’ is ‘itte rasshai’ (いってらっしゃい), which translates to ‘go and come’, but it’s understood to mean ‘have a good day’, or ‘take care’.

A very casual form of ‘itte ki-masu’ would be ‘itte kuru ne!’, which essentially means ‘ok, I’m off!’.