日本語のレッスン二 (Japanese Lesson Two)

日本語のレッスン二

Sentence Structure

The Japanese language or Nihongo (日本語) has a sentence structure that is a little different from what English speakers are accustomed to. In English we structure our sentences in the order of Subject, Verb, and then Object, e.g. Tanaka eats bread. In that sentence the subject is the person “Tanaka”, the action Tanaka does is that he “eats”, and the object that Tanaka eats is “bread”.

In Japanese the sentence structure goes Subject, Object, and then Verb, e.g. Tanaka-san wa pan o taberu (田中さんはパンを食べる). In this case the literal translation would be “Tanaka bread eats”, or “As for Tanaka, bread (is what he) eats”. The only real rule though on this sentence structure is that the verb must come at the end of the sentence. This is due to the parts of a sentence being marked with particles that denote what the elements grammatical function is.

Particles

These particles are little words attached to other sentence elements. In the case of our previous sentence the wa (は, looks like ha but in this case pronounced wa) and o (を, looks like wo but in this case pronounced o) are particles. The wa is identifying the topic of the sentence and o identifies the object. In this sentence the topic is also the subject, but this is not always the case such as seen in the sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai (象は鼻が長い), literally “As for elephant(s), (the) nose(s) (is/are) long". In that sentence the topic would be Zō (elephant) and the subject would be hana (nose).

Dropping Words

In Japanese the subject and object can be left out of the sentence if it is obvious from context. Pronouns are often left out on the basis that it is inferred from the previous sentence. Using the previous example, hana-ga nagai would be "[their] noses are long," while nagai by itself would be "[they] are long." It is even possible for a verb to be a complete sentence as seen in the commonly used phrase Yatta! (やった！) "[I / we / they / etc] did [it]!”.

I could go on, but I’ll leave that for another time. You can also read more on the Japanese language on Wikipedia and the sources provided there. Japanese can really spin your head some times, but that is half the fun. So until next week…

じゃね。