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One of the biggest reasons for this is thatthe usual way of learning Japanese
involves remembering random phrases and sentence patterns in isolation, without
actually being taught why those sentences work the way they do. This is ne in the
beginning when youre just trying to learn a few basic phrases, but it makes it very
hard to take the next step.
The truth is, Japanese sentence structure is actually incredibly logical, and a solid
understanding of it will save you a huge amount of time trying to make sense of
Japanese grammar.
In this guide, I break it all down and show you exactly how Japanese sentences
work. Every aspect of Japanese grammar ts within the structure outlined below.
Contents
Basic sentences
How particles work
De ning di erent roles
Expanding individual elements
Basic sentences
Lets start by looking at basic sentences that use the special verb
(pronounced dess), which is e ectively equivalent to the English verb be (am,
are, is).
Check or uncheck the boxes below to show or hide each version of the Japanese sentences:
Romaji
Kana
Kanji
Furigana
I am a person.
This is a car.
The particle tells us that the word or phrase before it is the topic of
that sentence.
The topic is basically the thing that is being talked about in that sentence, and
usually appears near the beginning. In our examples above, the things that are
being talked about are I, this, and the car, respectively, so the topics of these
sentences in Japanese are , and .
The topic of a Japanese sentence is very similar to what other languages refer to as
the subject. The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that does the action
described by the main verb in thesentence. These are, in fact, slightly di erent
concepts, but for now, we will treat them as being the sameso as to keep things
simple.
Particles like do not exist in English, but they are the backbone of
Japanese grammar. Well look at particles in more detail soon.
These sentences also show us another important rule that applies to all Japanese
sentences:
In all of the above examples, that verb is , which takes the form of is or
am in the English translations. However, this rule also applies for other verbs,
which we will look at shortly.
First, lets take another look at the rst two sentences above. Text with the same
formatting has the same meaning.
I am a person.
This is a car.
First of all, we can see that has no English equivalent. This is because its
entirepurpose is to show that or is the topic of these sentences.
That is, de nes these words as the topic. In English, there is no need for a
particle like because the subject of a sentence can be determined based on
the word order. Well look at this more closely in the next section.
Secondly, since means person and means car, we can see that
thereis no Japanese equivalent of a.
What this means is that the sentences, This is a car, and, This is the car, would
both be, . There is no di erentiation.
This makes things simpler in some ways, but can be hard to get used if youve
spent your entire life speaking English or similar languages, as not having these
words can sometimes make a sentence feel incomplete. Without them, it can be
hard to know ifsomeone is referring to a speci c car, or just any car. There are
other ways to specify which car is being talked about, but in many cases, this is
implied purely by context. This is something you will get used to over time.
We now know three very important rules relating to Japanese sentence structure:
As stated earlier:
Particles are like markers that tell us the role each word plays in a
sentence.
In any language, a combination of words only makes sense if the role of each word
is clear. The biggest di erence between Japanese and English (and many other
languages) is how these roles are de ned.
First, lets understand what is meant by the role each word plays in a sentence.
In English, for the main elements in a sentence, this role is determined by word
order. Heres a very basic example:
This sentence has three words: Taro, saw and Noriko. The central word in any
sentence, in both English and Japanese, is the main verb, which in this case is
saw. The other words in a sentence always relate to the main verb, either directly
or indirectly, so every sentence must have a main verb.
To gure out what the role of each of the other words is, we look at the word
order:
Taro comes before saw, which tells us that Taro is the one that saw
something.
Noriko comes after saw, which tells us that Noriko is the thing that was
seen.
If we change the order and put Noriko rst, we end up with the sentence:
This has an entirely di erent meaning because changing the word order changes
the role that each word plays, which in turn, changes the overall meaning of the
sentence.
de nes the topic of a sentence, which is usually the person or thing that
performed the main action being described
Importantly, particles de ne the role of the word that comes before them. In the
above example:
These two sentences both mean Taro saw Noriko. The word order doesnt a ect
the fundamental meaning because the particles tell us what each word in the
sentence does.
That said, we wouldnt normally use sentence two above because, as our sentence
structure model shows, the topic is usually near the beginning of the sentence.
This is not a hard rule, but it is unnatural in most situations for the topic to be
placed after other key elements in the same clause.
These, together with the verb, are the three most important pieces of information
in a sentence. They tell us:
Of course, there are many more pieces of information that can be added to a
sentence.
Lets start by considering some basic information that relates directly to the action
itself, such as:
Before we look at how this is done in Japanese, lets consider how the role of
additional information is de ned in English.
For example, we cant just say Taro saw Noriko the library. We need a preposition
to tell us how the library relates to everything else. The preposition we use
depends on what role we want to attribute to the library.
The diagram below shows some examples of how prepositions are used to de ne
the relationship between di erent pieces of information and the action described
by the main verb.
We can usually just add this additional information together with the appropriate
preposition to the end of the sentence after the object. For example, to de ne
the location where Taro saw Noriko, we could use the preposition at and insert it
after Noriko (the object of the verb saw):
The rst major di erence, as weve already discussed, is that the topic and the
object, like everything else, are determined by particles, not word order as they are
in English.
Each of the elements including the topic and object need to be included in a
sentence with the appropriate particle after them. There are a few exceptions to
this (such as time words, where is only required in some cases), but in
general, particles are required.
Note that, as mentioned, the topic is only placed at the beginning of the sentence
because that is its natural location in most situations. It is not, however, a
requirement.
We know that Taro is the topic, and the verb is saw (mimashita). The other
information is:
The other information can go in basically any order, so we just need to insert it
together with the appropriate particles:
To say that the order doesnt matter is oversimplifying things a little, as it does
make a subtle di erence to where the emphasis lies, and certain orderings are
generally more natural than others. However, this is far less important than using
the right particles, as using the wrong ones would change the meaning entirely. If
we swap wo and de, for example, we get:
Taro saw the library at Noriko.
Although is actually a very common particle that you need to know, I have
purposely left it out of this discussion, as the di erence between the particles
and is one of the most confusing concepts you are likely to face
learning Japanese. You can read more about that here, but for now, gaining a solid
understanding of sentence structure is far more important.
Now lets add another elementand try building the following sentence in Japanese:
Using our three basic rules, we can then create our sentence to be any of the
following:
There are other possible combinations too, and as long as all the pieces of
information are followed by the correct particles, they are grammatically correct
and have the same fundamental meaning.
Again, some orderings are more natural than others. For example, time phrases
usually appear near the beginning of the sentence, so in most cases, the third
option above is less preferable. Time phrases are also unique in that they often
appear even before the topic, like so:
The actual di erence between this and the other orderings above is negligible. Its
like the di erence between the following:
As you can see, the word order doesnt really a ect the meaning.
Taro went with Noriko from the train station to the library by car.
Heres the diagram for this:
Taro went with Noriko from the train station to the library by car
Note that Norikos role has changed from object to co-participant, hence the
particle after her name has changed too. The same is true for .
Again, these are all correct and have essentially the same meaning, with just a
slight di erence in emphasis.
Now letslook at another way that we can add more information to a sentence.
We can, however, add other information that doesnt relate directly to the verb.
Instead it relates speci cally to one of the individual elements in the sentence.
(Note that in English, by changes to in, but the meaning is essentially the same).
This has no impact on the other parts of the sentence, so it ts into the diagram
di erently:
Taro went to the library in a blue car
Expanding on a single noun like this creates what is called a noun phrase. A noun
phrase is essentially a phrase that, as a whole, represents a single thing.
Technically, car by itself is a noun phrase, but so are all of the following:
a car
a blue car
my car
my blue car
the blue car thats always parked in the street next to the mailbox
All of these represent a single thing a car and can be substituted into sentences
in the same way, like so:
He is driving a car.
He is driving the blue car thats always parked in the street next to the mailbox.
Noun phrases are just as common in Japanese as they are in English, and serve the
same fundamental purpose to add more information about a speci c noun.
There are many di erent ways that noun phrases can be formed, in both English
and Japanese. Another very common example is:
Here, weve taken the noun car and expanded on it to indicate that it belongs to
me. The result is the noun phrase, my car, which in Japanese is:
my car
E ectively, converts I, you, he, she and they into my, your, his,
her and their, respectively. For other things like peoples names, animals, places
and objects, it has the same e ect as adding s (apostrophe s).
can be used to connect just about any two things, where one of the two
things belongs to the other in some way, such as the back of the door, the color
of your eyes or even the rain of yesterday.
Now that we know this, lets substitute into our example sentence. First,
heres the diagram:
If we want to change the word order, we can, but we need to move the whole noun
phrase , and the associated particle , together as a single block.
Heres one way we could do this:
This is true for any noun in any sentence. That is, any noun can be expanded into a
more detailed noun phrase. The resulting noun phrase can then be used in the
same way as the original noun, no matter what role that noun has in the sentence.
It just has to be kept together as a single block.
For example, the destination could be changed from the library to the university
library:
Taro went to the university library by car.
My car is red.
Any noun, no matter where it is used, can be expanded as long as the resulting
phrase is a valid noun phrase.
In Japanese, noun phrases are used in a lot of di erent ways, from simple
examples like the ones above, to more complex expressions like:
The various ways of building di erent noun phrases and using them in sentences
are covered in detail in 80/20 Japanese.
Each noun in a sentence can be expanded into a more detailed noun phrase
It is usually more natural to put the topic and time phrases near the beginning
of the sentence
The result is that basic sentences usually look like this, withthe other information
appearing optionally and in any order:
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