Lesson 1: Grammar Notes

Grammar

X wa Y desu.

“It is 12:30.” “I am a student.” “My major is the Japanese language.”.

These sentences are all translated into Japanese using an appropriate noun and the word desu.

~desu: It is..

Jyuuniji han desu: (It) is half past twelve.

Gakusei desu: (I) am a student.

Nihongo desu: (My major) is the Japanese language.

Note that none of these sentences has a “subject”, like the “it”, “I”, and “my major”, found in their English counterparts. Sentences without subjects are very common in Japanese language speakers actually tend to omit subjects whenever they think it is clear to the listener what or who they are referring to.

What are we to do, then, when it is not clear what is being talked about? To make examples what we are talking about, we can say:

____ wa nihongo desu. : ______ is the Japanese language

Where ______ stands for the thing that is talked about, or the “topic”, which is later in the sentence identified as nihongo. For example,

Senkou wa nihongo desu. (My) major is the Japanese language.

Similarly, one can use the pattern X wa Y desk to identify a person or a thing X as item Y.

X wa Y desu.

X is Y. As for X, it is Y.

Watashi wa Sue Kim desu. : I am Sue Kim.

Yamashita san wa sensei desu: Ms. Yamashita is a teacher.

Mary san wa America jin desu: Mary is an American.

Wa is a member of the class of words called “particles.” So is the word no, which we will turn to later in this lesson. Particles attach themselves to phrases and indicate how the phrases relate to the rest of the sentence.

Note also that nouns like gakusee and sense in the above examples stand alone, unlike their English translation “student” and “teacher,” which are preceded by “a”. In Japanese, there is no item that corresponds to “a,” nor is there any item that corresponds to the plural “~s” at the end of a noun. Without background situations, a sentence like gakusee desu is therefore ambiguous between the singular and the plural interpretation: It may seem “We are/you are/they are students.” as well as “I am/you are/she is a student.”

2 Question Sentence

It is very easy to form questions in Japanese. Basically, all you need to do is to add ka at the end of a statement.

Ryuugakusei desu. (I am) an international student

Ryuugakusei desuka.

(Are you) an international student?

The above sentence, Ryuugakusei desu ka, is a “yes/no” question. Question sentences may also contain a “question word” like nan (what). In this lesson, we learn how to ask, and answer,, questions using the following question words: kanji (what time), nansai (how old), nannensee (what year in school).

Senkou wa nan desuka. What is your major?

(Senkou wa) eigo desu: (My major) is English.

ima nanji desuka.: What time is it now?

(ima) kuji desu.

It is nine o’clock.

Mary san wa nansai desuka?: How old are you, Mary?

Ninensei desu. : I am a sophomore

Denwa bangou wa nan desuka.: What is your telephone number?

3. Noun, の　Noun

No is a particle that connects two nouns. The phrase sakura daigaku no gakusei means “a student at Sakura University.” The second noun gakusee provides the main idea (being a student) and the first one Sakura daigaku makes it more specific (not a high school, but a college student). No is very versatile. In the first example below, it acts like the possessive (“X’s”) in English, but that is not the only role no can play. See how it connects two nouns in the following examples.

たけしさんの　でんわばんごう　: Takeshi’s phone number

Takeshi san no denwa bangou : Takeshi’s phone number

だいがくの　せんせい：a college professor

Daigaku no sensei: a college professor

にほんごの　がくせい: a student of the Japanese language.

Nihongo no gakusei: a student of the Japanese language.

にほんの　だいがく：A college in Japan.

Nihon no daigaku: A college in Japan.

Observe that in the first two examples, the English and Japanese words are arranged in the same order, while in the last two, they are in the opposite order. Japanese seems to be more consistent in arranging ideas here; the main idea always comes at the end, with any further description placed before it.

Noun の Noun

A phrase of the form “noun no noun” acts more or less like one big noun. You can put it wherever you can put a noun, as in the following example.

たけしさんの　おかあさんは　こうこうの　せんせい　です。：Takeshi san no okaasan wa koukou no sensei desu.

Takeshi’s mother is a high school teacher.